The Scandal-Proof Producer

Guilt was a ghost, and Jin's opulent dorm room had become a haunted house. He sat in the dark, the city lights of Seoul a distant, mocking glitter outside his window. In his hand, the new burner phone felt as heavy as a tombstone. He was haunted by the face of Lee Jin-woo, the young, eager A&R manager who had been sacrificed to the wolves in his stead. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the boy's ashen, terrified expression as security escorted him from the Top Tier building, his career and future erased in an instant.

Jin had told himself that silence was survival. He had cut off contact with Yoo-jin to protect them both, a cold, tactical decision. But the silence had a price, and an innocent had paid it. The weight of that knowledge was a physical pressure in his chest, a crushing, unbearable thing. He couldn't live with it.

His fingers, trembling slightly, moved across the phone's screen. He opened the encrypted app, found the contact for "Producer," and made a decision. He wasn't just going to break his silence. He was going to shatter it. For the first time, he typed a message that was not cold, calculated intelligence. It was a confession.

Mockingbird: They took someone. An innocent manager from A&R. Lee Jin-woo. They fed him to the wolves to end the witch hunt. His career is over. They're blacklisting him.

He paused, then typed the line that was a direct violation of every rule Yoo-jin had set.

This was my fault.

He hit send, a feeling of reckless, desperate release washing over him.

Miles away, Han Yoo-jin was reviewing the preliminary budget for the Starlight Festival stage, a dizzying spreadsheet of expenses that made his head ache. A notification chimed on his secure laptop. It was Mockingbird. He had been expecting silence for at least a week. A surge of alarm shot through him. Early contact meant something had gone wrong.

He opened the message, and his alarm curdled into frustration. He saw the name. He saw the raw, undisguised emotion. My fault.

This was bad. An emotional spy was a compromised spy. A guilty spy was a liability who was one bad day away from a disastrous confession. He needed to shut this down, to force Jin back into the cold, tactical mindset their survival depended on.

He typed a curt reply, his words intentionally blunt, stripping the humanity from the situation.

Producer: Casualties are a part of any war. His sacrifice ended the company-wide audit and has made you safer. The immediate threat to you has been neutralized. The mission continues. Stick to the protocol. No emotion.

He sent the message, hoping the cold logic would shock Jin back into line. It was a calculated risk.

In his dorm room, Jin read Yoo-jin's reply. He felt a fresh wave of sickness wash over him. Casualties. Mission. The words were so cold, so detached. It sounded exactly like something Chairman Choi would say. Was this what he had traded one master for? Another man who saw people as nothing more than pieces on a chessboard?

The thought that he had enabled an innocent man's destruction just to make a more ruthless version of his old captor safer was unbearable. It pushed him over the edge. All the fear, the paranoia, the guilt that had been simmering inside him for weeks boiled over. Logic wasn't enough. He needed to hear a human voice. He needed to know there was a person on the other end of this cold, digital connection, not just another monster.

In a moment of pure, reckless desperation, he did the one thing he knew he should never do. He pressed the small phone icon at the top of the chat window. He initiated a voice call through the encrypted app.

The ringing sound that erupted from Yoo-jin's laptop speakers was so unexpected, so alien, that he physically flinched, nearly knocking over his coffee. No one ever used the voice function. It was too risky, a live connection that could potentially be traced, no matter how well encrypted.

His first instinct was to reject the call. But he knew, with a sinking certainty, that if he did, he might lose his asset completely. Jin was clearly on the edge.

He slapped on his headset, his heart hammering against his ribs, and answered the call. "What are you doing?!" he hissed, his voice a furious whisper. "This is a breach of protocol! Hang up now!"

Jin's voice came through the headphones, tinny and strained, trembling with a barely controlled emotion. "I'm not a soldier, Producer. And this isn't just a 'mission' for me." The use of the codename was a bitter mockery. "I need you to understand. A man's life was ruined today. His actual life. Because I was too afraid to speak. I need to know… I need to know that what we are doing is worth that price. I need to know that you're not just another version of the Chairman, moving pieces around a board for your own gain."

The raw desperation in his voice was a tangible thing. It was the sound of a man on the verge of breaking completely. Yoo-jin was frozen. All his carefully laid plans, his strategic calculations, they were all meaningless in the face of this raw, human agony. He had to manage this not as a spymaster, but as… something else. A confidante. A leader.

As he struggled to find the right words, something new and deeply unsettling happened. His vision shimmered at the edges. The familiar interface of his ability flickered into existence in his mind's eye, unbidden.

[Live Audio Feed Detected. Subject: Mockingbird (Kim Tae-woo)]

[Emotional State: Acute Guilt (85%), Claustrophobic Paranoia (70%), Moral Despair (60%)]

And then, the line he now dreaded.

[Synchronization Rate with Subject... 10%... 20%...]

He hadn't even tried. The connection was being forged automatically, drawn in by the sheer magnetic force of Jin's powerful emotions bleeding through the encrypted audio stream. A phantom wave of another man's guilt washed over Yoo-jin. It was a nauseating sensation, a feeling of culpability for a crime he didn't commit. He felt a ghost of Jin's claustrophobic paranoia, the feeling of the walls of his dorm room closing in.

The experience was deeply unpleasant, disorienting. And it changed everything.

He could feel the truth of Jin's agony. It wasn't a tactic. It wasn't weakness. It was real. And in the face of that shared, phantom emotion, Yoo-jin's tactical coldness melted away, replaced by a weary, reluctant empathy.

"It's not a game," Yoo-jin said, and his own voice was now strained, heavy with the secondhand weight of Jin's despair. "And what we're doing… it is worth the price. I promise you." He took a shaky breath, fighting the disorienting feelings. "But this… this call… this is a risk we can never take again. You need to hold it together. For your own sake. For both our sakes. Please."

His plea was no longer the command of a handler. It was the request of a fellow human being.

"Go dark again," Yoo-jin finished, his voice firming up, regaining a sliver of control. "Destroy the hardware. Now. I'll wait."

He heard a shaky breath on the other end, then a quiet, "Okay."

The call ended. Yoo-jin ripped the headset off as if it were on fire, slumping back in his chair. He was shaken to his core. His alliance was more fragile, more dangerously human, than he had ever imagined. And his ability… his gift had become a parasite, an emotional vampire that could trigger without his consent, forcing him to bear the crushing weight of his own conspiracy. The ghost in the machine was no longer just his. It was theirs.