JEJU HEAT: Chapter 19
ACT V: The Breaking Tide
Flickering Flames
A chilly morning. A warm afternoon. A fiery night.
word count: ~22k Characters: Male Reader (OC: Minho) x ITZY ensemble
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A/N: Happy Valentines Day! And also ITZY's 3rd World Tour kickoff day! This is a puppy love fluff chapter with angst undercurrents (or Han/Jeong as known in Korean culture.) It's structured as a sitcom slice-of-life dramedy with the entire group experienced through multiple POVs.
[MINHO]
The pool looked different at dawn. Wrong, somehow. I couldn't figure out why at first.
The sky had gone grey overnight, clouds sitting low enough that the sun never broke through, and without light hitting them directly the white stone walls had turned grey too, cold grey like concrete, like the architecture had forgotten it was supposed to be luxury and remembered it was just expensive stone arranged in shapes. The water reflected grey back at the clouds. No wind to move it. Just flat dark surface with the filter running underneath, dull mechanical sounds that droned and droned forever.
Why this song, here: ‘Never Enough’ isn't about greed here - it's about a guy who can't metabolize being enough as he is. Yeji has chosen him for five years, and none of it has ever landed as enough to deserve. So when Yuna reached, when Ryujin pushed, when Karina opened, he couldn't refuse - not because he wanted more, but because he never trusted he'd earned what he already had. The song plays like the inside of his head at the pool's edge: you set off a dream in me is the nightmare he's still soaked from, the shine of a thousand spotlights is every girl who turned toward him this trip, the stars we steal from the night sky are the idols he took anyway - towers of gold (the villa), still too little, and no hand that will ever accept what's already his even if they held the world (Karina’s tits jk).
I stood at the edge in whatever clothes I'd grabbed off the floor, and the space felt too big. That was the wrong part. The villa was the same size it had been yesterday, same walls, same tile, but standing here alone made all that openness feel like absence instead of room to breathe. Like the architecture had been designed for groups and I was the error, one person in a space calibrated for ten, the scale all wrong.
The tile was cold under my feet even through socks. Stone that doesn't warm without direct sun and holds temperature the way it holds memory - precisely and without forgiveness. Every surface was hard lines meeting at right angles, pool edge a perfect rectangle, walls cutting corners so clean they looked sharp enough to draw blood. Glass and stone and geometry with no softness anywhere. I'd thought it was elegant yesterday - but yesterday was a lifetime ago. Now it looked like what it actually was: hard surfaces arranged by someone who understood that beauty and comfort were different currencies, and had chosen beauty.
My brain kept trying to make the water black. Not the nightmare black, just regular shadow and reflected grey, but my peripheral vision kept insisting otherwise, kept waiting for it to start rising like it had when I was asleep. I'd look directly and it would be normal pool water, look away and the wrongness would creep back in. The dawn was grey, the reflection was grey, everything about the pool said regular water on an overcast morning, but my peripheral vision wouldn't accept the update. It kept sliding the image sideways, kept overlaying something from the night before - the dream's version, the tribunal's version, water that rose and swallowed and didn't care whether you deserved the drowning. I'd look directly and it would reset to grey water, normal pool, but looking away let the wrongness creep back in at the edges, patient, persistent, like a stain the filter couldn't reach.
The nightmare hadn't dissolved with waking. It had just gone quieter. Cold water at my ankles, rising. Yeji's eyes across the pool - empty, not blinking, waiting for an answer I couldn't give because the answer would end everything. Faces arranged in a circle. The verdict, delivered in the voice that sounded most like mine: your silence is an answer.
I couldn't sleep next to her after that. Especially not after she'd pressed her lips to my collarbone, still half-dreaming, and murmured saranghae like it was the easiest word in the world. First time in five years. The shape of it barely formed, slipping out of her unconscious mouth the way it never would from her waking one. And I'd opened mine to say it back and nothing came. Throat sealed. Words turning to ash before they could become sound.
That was why I was out here. Lying beside Yeji while she trusted me with her unconscious body, while her breath landed on my neck in slow, warm intervals that said safe, safe, safe - it was like holding glass you'd already dropped once. Your hands shaking worse now because you knew the sound it made when it broke, knew the pitch of that impact, and your fingers kept rehearsing the fumble even while they gripped tighter. The bedroom had shrunk to the dimensions of a vocal booth - the tiny soundproofed box where you're alone with your own voice and there's no mix to hide behind. The whole villa was too full of people who trusted me while I carried the evidence of what I'd done with their trust. At least out here the emptiness was honest about being empty.
This was the same pool - same water, same tile, same lounge chair where I'd fucked Yuna into the cushions while Yeji was at pilates with Karina. The architecture hadn't changed. The water had cycled through filters a hundred times since then, chlorine eating every molecule of evidence with chemical efficiency, but I kept seeing it anyway - kept feeling the morning mapped onto the space, the ghost of Yuna's voice, the ghost of my own, the particular angle of sun that had made everything look like a decision I was making in real time rather than a mistake I was falling into. Some things the filter can't reach.
And after Yuna came Ryujin - on this same deck, the sun hammering down on both of us while she rode me into the stone hard enough to bruise, Yuna watching from the shower doorway. Then both of them at once - Ryujin's nails in my chest, Yuna's mouth where Ryujin told her to put it, my body split between two girls who'd each decided I was a territory worth claiming while Yeji was somewhere doing pilates with yet another woman I'd be inside by nightfall. Somewhere above us was a window I hadn't thought to check - Lia's room, where I'd later learn that everything we did on this deck had been watched and recorded by the one member whose silence was louder than anyone else's voice. My hands remembered all of it - every position, every surface, the lounge chair, the pool edge, the deck where Ryujin pinned me flat. This whole outdoor space was a crime scene the chlorine couldn't bleach and my memory couldn't redact, and I was standing in the middle of it at dawn like a man returning to the scene because he didn't know where else to go.
I looked up. All that space above, grey and infinite, offering nothing useful. The sky doesn't do forgiveness - it just hangs there, vast and indifferent, the same sky that watched me wake up next to Yeji yesterday morning and will watch whatever comes next with the same monumental lack of interest.
The pool was still. The villa stood around me the way expensive architecture does - beautiful and permanent and completely unconcerned with the people inside it. Whether they loved each other. Whether they'd ruined it. Whether they deserved to feel this small.
I was still standing there when the door opened behind me.
***
"Why'd you get up without me?"
Her voice came sleepy and confused, the words running together at the edges, and I didn't turn around immediately because I needed a second to rearrange my face into something that didn't look like a man who'd been prosecuting himself for the last forty minutes.
When I did turn, Yeji was standing in the doorway in my shirt. The navy dress shirt I'd worn straight off the plane two nights ago - still wrinkled from the flight, never properly hung up because she'd pulled me through the side door before I'd finished setting my bag down. It hit her mid-thigh and the collar hung off one shoulder and her hair was a disaster, slept-on and tangled on the left side where she'd pressed her face into the pillow, and she was squinting against the grey morning light like it had personally inconvenienced her.
"Couldn't sleep," I said. "Didn't want to wake you."
She studied me. Not suspicious, not yet - more the way you study weather when you're deciding whether to bring an umbrella. Reading conditions. Her head tilted and her eyes narrowed slightly and the question forming behind them, the one that would require a real answer, the one I wasn't ready for -
And then she let it go. Whatever she saw in my face, she decided the morning was too new to interrogate. She yawned instead, covering it with the back of her hand, and padded across the tile toward me in bare feet, the cold stone making her steps quick and delicate.
"The pool looked nice at dawn," I offered. It hadn't - it looked like an empty practice room with the lights off - but Yeji glanced at the water, accepted the premise the way she'd accepted my excuse, generously, without pressing, and slid her hand around my arm.
"Come inside," she said. "I'm cold."
She wasn't asking. Her fingers curled into the fabric of my sleeve and she tugged, once, the casual authority of someone who expected compliance.
I went. Of course I went. Her hand on my arm, warm through the shirt, and the grey pool behind us and the grey sky above and her pulling me toward the only warmth in this whole cold-tiled production of a morning, and I went because going was easier than explaining, and because what I actually wanted was simpler than what I deserved. To be wherever she was. Even when her warmth made the cold I was carrying ache worse.
Her hip pressed into mine as we walked, steering toward the kitchen instead of the bedroom. Coffee, morning - the ordinary version of the plan she'd had before she woke up to cold sheets where a warm body was supposed to be. She curled into my arm and walked.
***
The kitchen was bright - too bright, aggressive morning sunlight that felt like a correction, the villa deciding the grey hour at the pool didn't count and starting the day over without me. Someone had opened the windows before we got there, and the overcast had moved on while I'd been building a prosecution at the pool, the clouds breaking apart in that Jeju way where the sky goes from grey to brilliant blue in the space of twenty minutes. Morning sun came through the east-facing glass in clean slanted columns that turned the white countertops warm and made the copper pans on the wall rack glow. One of them caught the light wrong and flashed - just a flicker, just the sun hitting curved metal - but for a quarter-second the reflection was water, dark water, before it was just a pan again.
Yeji released my arm long enough to open the fridge and assess its contents with her usual leader focus.
"I'm making breakfast."
The words settled into the kitchen with the weight of a comeback announcement nobody had been briefed on.
Hwang Yeji's relationship with cooking is adversarial - catastrophically, historically, MEME-LEVEL bad. She has burned instant ramyeon and made rice that was somehow both crunchy and soggy. Ryujin once described watching Yeji attempt a fried egg as "a war crime against poultry." And she was in here anyway, phone propped against the toaster displaying a recipe she'd already deviated from by step two, tongue between her teeth, holding a spatula held like she'd confused it with a weapon. She'd cracked eggs into a bowl as if she'd seen other people do this successfully and assumed proximity to competence was transferable. It wasn't.
"You don't have to -" I started.
"I want to." She didn't look up. Concentration furrowed between her eyebrows, the same crease she gets during difficult choreography, the same intensity she brings to everything she cares about. She was treating scrambled eggs like a dance break. Every movement was deliberate, studied, slightly wrong.
I watched Yeji pour oil into a pan that was already too hot. The oil spat and she flinched and recovered immediately, jaw set, refusing to acknowledge the burn. Then she dumped the eggs in and the sizzle was violent - too much heat, too fast, the whites going opaque and rigid before she'd even picked up the spatula again.
For about ninety seconds I let her try. Then self-preservation kicked in. I stepped in beside her - close, so our shoulders touched - and took the spatula from her hand, having watched enough eggs die for one morning. My other hand found the dial and turned the heat down, scraped the surviving eggs to one side, and cracked three fresh ones into the cooler zone of the pan.
Yeji watched my hands for a moment. Then her mouth softened. The crease between her eyebrows dissolved and her whole face opened up - not gratitude exactly, something less performable than that. Her lower lip caught between her teeth for half a second and her eyes went warm in a way she couldn't have faked if she'd tried.
She wrapped both arms around my left bicep and leaned her head against my shoulder and didn't let go. Her skin was warm. Solid. Present in a way that pushed back against the residue of the dream, where every body I'd reached for had been cold.
"You're not helping," I said.
"I'm supervising."
"You're clinging."
"Supervising involves close observation."
She was warm and still in my shirt, her skin sun-deprived and slightly cool where it pressed against my arm, warming in real time. The Bluetooth speaker she'd connected to her phone was playing something soft - a playlist I didn't recognise, something Korean and mellow with acoustic guitars, music that was building a memory out of the morning before I'd finished living in it. She hummed along quietly, under her breath, not performing for anyone, just letting sound leak out of her the way it does when she's genuinely content. Yeji controlled her sound the way she controlled everything - deliberately, strategically, with acute awareness of who was listening. I was the only audience, and today, she wasn't controlling anything.
I flipped the eggs. She tightened her grip on my arm.
The pool was visible through the kitchen window behind us. Just a rectangle of blue, innocent in the morning light - nothing like the grey void I'd been standing at twenty minutes ago. But my eyes caught it without permission and for a fraction of a second the water went dark, went flat, went wrong -
"These smell good," Yeji said against my shoulder.
The flash broke. Regular pool. Morning light. Her voice as a reset button, pulling me back into the kitchen where eggs were cooking and her playlist was playing and her body was pressed against mine like she'd decided this was where she lived now.
"They're just eggs," I said.
"You rescued my eggs. That's sweet."
"That's BASIC FOOD SAFETY."
She laughed - open, throaty, her head tilting back on my shoulder so I could see the line of her jaw and the way her eyes crinkled at the corners. Something inside my chest cracked and rearranged - the way foundations settle when a building decides to stay.
The kitchen filled up in waves - Chaeryeong first, already dressed and suspiciously alert. She took one look at Yeji attached to my arm at the stove and stopped in the doorway, her whole body seizing. One hand flew to Lia's arm - Lia, who had materialised behind her through what I can only assume was teleportation. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, and she said "Good morning!" in a voice approximately two octaves too bright.
Yuna next, in a crop top and shorts she'd clearly slept in, hair wrapped in a towel, phone in hand but - and this was the part that snagged - she wasn't on it. She clocked the stove, clocked Yeji on my arm, and her thumb hovered over the camera button for a fraction of a second before she pocketed the phone entirely. "Can I help with anything?" Polite, offered with both hands visible and her posture open and her voice pitched at a register I'd never heard from her - accommodating, almost formal, like she was interviewing for a position she'd held her entire life. Shin Yuna, who had probably never once in recorded history asked permission to participate in a kitchen she considered her content studio, was asking to help.
Yeji blinked. "Since when do you help with breakfast?"
"I help! I ALWAYS help. I'm literally so helpful. I'm like - I'm ASSISTANCE. I'm a helper." She was already moving toward the cabinets, pulling plates down with unnecessary enthusiasm. "How many? Eight? I'll get eight. And chopsticks. And napkins. Do we have napkins? I'LL FIND NAPKINS."
Nobody had asked for napkins. I watched her set the table with care that was almost uncanny - plates equidistant, chopsticks parallel, napkins folded into triangles she'd clearly never attempted before and would never attempt again. The whole performance had that frantic quality, as if trying to be good hard enough could undo something she couldn't name.
"Oh my GOSH, wait -" She'd spotted the pan. The overcorrection cracked just long enough for default Yuna to surface. "Are those eggs? Those look literally edible? Unnie, did you actually -"
"He made them," Chaeryeong supplied.
"Of COURSE he did. I literally knew it." She was already retreating back toward the table, straightening a napkin that didn't need straightening.
"The ones before were GREY," Chaeryeong whispered to Lia, still clutching her arm. "Unnie. GREY."
Lia settled into the corner of the counter like a cat who'd been there the whole time, silently watching the scene unfold over the rim of her cup.
Sunwoo came in rubbing his eyes and asking innocently about coffee, too sleepy to read the room. Chaeryeong intercepted him, redirecting him toward the coffee maker while simultaneously shooting a look back at the stove.
Minjun entered last. He leaned against the door frame and surveyed the kitchen, his eyes moving from Yeji on my arm to the eggs in the pan to Lia in the corner to Yuna's phone - each glance held a fraction too long, each transition too deliberate. Our eyes met. One corner of his mouth lifted. He'd already understood something and was choosing to be entertained by it.
***
[CHAERYEONG'S POV - THIRD PERSON]
The humming - that was the thing Chaeryeong couldn't get past. She'd been in this kitchen for twelve minutes (she'd checked her phone twice so she knew the EXACT duration) and for all twelve of those minutes Hwang Yeji had been humming against a boy's shoulder while wearing said boy's shirt, which hit mid-thigh and hung off one shoulder in a way that would have been scandalous if the kitchen weren't already a crime scene of domestic tenderness. This was the morning-after glow scene, the episode where the female lead finally lets her guard down and the camera holds on her face for three seconds longer than it needs to and the OST swells and every viewer at home grabs a pillow and SCREAMS. Except it was real, happening in a kitchen that smelled like burnt eggs and coffee, and Chaeryeong was losing her mind.
Yeji-unnie doesn't hum in front of people. Chaeryeong had studied that girl for five years - like you study someone you desperately want to understand but who refuses to give you the clues. She'd shared dressing rooms, practice studios, hotel suites, the back of vans at 4 AM after music shows when everyone was too tired to maintain their public frequencies. She'd heard Yeji hum maybe three times, all of them accidental, all of them silenced the instant Yeji noticed someone was listening. Chaeryeong remembered those three instances. She remembered the songs. She remembered the exact moment Yeji caught herself and stopped, the way her mouth closed and her posture shifted and the melody died like it had never existed. And now she was just leaking melody - eyes half-closed, fingers curled in Minho-oppa's shirt, swaying to her own playlist like the kitchen had emptied of everyone except the two of them.
Lia had stationed herself in the corner approximately thirty seconds after arriving, extracting her arm from Chaeryeong's grip with the resigned efficiency of someone who'd been through this before. She held her coffee with an expression that said I am not involved in this surveillance operation. Her eyes said the opposite. Chaeryeong and Lia had a system - looks, nudges, single-emoji texts that condensed entire analyses into one character. The system was running at full capacity and had been since the first note left Yeji's mouth.
Everyone else had filtered in around them. Sunwoo arriving with sleep still in his eyes, asking about coffee with that genuine sweetness that made Chaeryeong's chest do the thing it always did when he was soft without trying - she filed that away for later, she was BUSY right now. Minjun quiet by the door, watching with eyes that lingered two seconds too long to be casual.
And then there was Yuna. Chaeryeong's drama-brain had a separate file for Yuna, indexed by deviation from baseline, and today the file was flagging anomalies. Yuna helping at breakfast without being asked. Yuna pocketing her phone instead of filming. Yuna folding napkins into triangles like she'd Googled "how to be a good dongsaeng" at 6 AM and was speedrunning the tutorial. The girl who turned every room into content was suddenly playing supporting cast, and playing it with desperate commitment.
Yesterday at lunch she'd been drunk and loud and sloppy - Chaeryeong had written that off as vacation energy and too much soju on an empty stomach. But today's Yuna was sober and equally off, just in the opposite direction. Yesterday she'd overcompensated by being more. Today she was overcompensating by being... good? Both versions had the same frantic energy underneath, the same too-fast rhythm of someone running from something they couldn't outpace.
Chaeryeong didn't know what it meant yet, but the evidence was growing.
And then Ryujin arrived last, which was a statement in itself. Ryujin always arrived with a statement - the crossed arms, the hip against the doorframe, the single glance that covered the entire room before committing to being in it. Chaeryeong had seen this entrance a thousand times in practice rooms, van doors, hotel lobbies across years of shared space. The stance that said I'm here now, you're welcome. Her eyes swept the kitchen and landed on the stove, on Yeji, on Minho, on the whole scene - the arm-clinging and the humming and the eggs and the playlist and Hwang Yeji behaving like a person who had never once in her life worried about being perceived.
Something moved across Ryujin face. It was gone before it could settle into anything Chaeryeong could name, replaced immediately by the familiar half-smile that meant something sharp was about to follow. Chaeryeong recognized the pattern - she'd been observing Ryujin's expressions since they'd been trainees, the way other girls collected photo cards. Ryujin did this whenever she was competitive, whenever someone was doing something in the kitchen she could have done better and faster and with three hundred percent less drama. And that was fair, because Ryujin-unnie's eggs WERE legendary. She made them golden and fluffy because she'd cooked for the group a hundred mornings running. Watching Yeji's grey disaster get rescued by a boy she was now draped across like a human accessory had to rankle. Being the group's chef and then watching the job get handed to someone's arm candy was Ryujin-unnie's version of watching a featuring artist get the center position in your own group's stage. Chaeryeong made a mental note to check on unnie later. That flicker deserved a follow-up episode.
"I could have made that in a minute," Ryujin said - exactly, the cooking flex. Chaeryeong loved her to death but the girl could not let a pan go uncontested. Yeji didn't respond, didn't seem to hear it, or heard it and decided Minho's shoulder outranked defending her kitchen honour. The Yeji of two days ago would have fired back without hesitation. This Yeji was still humming.
Lia caught Ryujin's eye from the corner and gave her a tiny shake of her head. Chaeryeong caught it too and understood instantly - don't start a cooking thing right now, just let her have this. Ryujin's eggs WERE better. Everyone in this kitchen knew it, but better wasn't the point right now.
Ryujin mouthed something back. Exaggerated, theatrical, the words shaped large enough to lip-read from across the room. She's not even PRETENDING to help anymore.
Lia closed her eyes. Mouthed back with matching drama. I KNOW.
Chaeryeong bit the inside of her cheek. A laugh escaped anyway - strangled and compressed, disguised as a cough that wasn't very convincing. Lia's gaze flicked to her with a look that could have flash-frozen the rescued eggs.
The morning moved to the table. Eight people navigating furniture designed for six, chairs materializing from other rooms, elbows negotiating territory. Minho plated the eggs and Yeji detached from his arm long enough to carry her plate, then resettled on his other side within three seconds. Chaeryeong counted. Chaeryeong was counting EVERYTHING. In dramas this was the part where the camera panned across the breakfast table and the background music went warm and acoustic and you knew - you just KNEW - something devastating was coming later because nobody got to be this happy without paying for it. She pushed that thought away. Not now. She was on theory duty right now.
Across the table, Yeji's shoulder tilted toward Minho - her entire left side bending along his entire right side with a consistency that looked gravitational. Chaeryeong couldn't see under the table but the angle of Yeji elbow told her everything. She had her hand on his thigh. Guaranteed. Immediately after sitting. That was the possessive touch - the one where the female lead claims territory without conscious thought, where her body decides before her brain catches up. Chaeryeong had seen this exact beat in a million different dramas. She'd seen Yeji-unnie do it once in real life - Busan, six months ago, the iron grip on his bicep that had sent all four of them into a yacht bathroom for an emergency summit. But that had been territorial, defensive - the "touch him and I'll end you" grab. This was different, soft. A hand on a thigh under a breakfast table because her body couldn't not be touching him, and the difference between those two touches was the distance between guarding something and belonging to it.
Chaeryeong picked up her phone beneath the table, found her chat with Lia and sent a single emoji: 🔥.
Lia's phone buzzed and she glanced down. She kept the poker face, but the very corner of her mouth shifted ever so slightly - which for Lia was equivalent to screaming.
Breakfast happened around them. Yuna was doing something on her phone that required her entire torso to express an opinion about. Sunwoo passed the banchan to Chaeryeong without being asked, his fingers brushing hers on the dish, and her heart did a whole percussion section over a condiment handoff - she noticed and noted it alongside the forty-something other quiet gestures he'd made this trip that she was absolutely not keeping a running tally of. (She was keeping a running tally. The tally had subheadings.) Ryujin finished first. Clean and efficient, dishes to the sink, out of the kitchen before anyone else had cleared their plate.
That was normal. Ryujin was always first done. Always moving, always ahead, always leaving before anyone could ask her to stay.
Chaeryeong catalogued it under unnie things and returned her attention to the real data. But she stored that exit separately too. The speed of it. The way Ryujin-unnie's back looked as she left - rigid, purposeful, like she'd decided the kitchen had nothing left for her. Chaeryeong's drama-brain pinged. That wasn't a normal exit. That was a before the storm exit. She made another mental note. The file on Ryujin-unnie was getting thick.
After breakfast, Chaeryeong waited until the kitchen cleared - Yuna pulling people toward the beach, Minjun to his room, Minho-oppa and Yeji-unnie still orbiting each other in a bubble Chaeryeong lacked the emotional cruelty to burst - before cornering Lia in the living room.
"Unnie."
Lia didn't look up from her phone. "No."
"I haven't SAID anything."
"You're going to tell me about the kitchen."
"She started COOKING." She whispered, though it was more like a muffled shout. Chaeryeong leaned forward, both hands gripping the cushion between them, her whole body turned toward toward Lia. "Voluntarily. Nobody asked her. Nobody DARED. She opened that fridge and said 'I'm making breakfast' like this is a thing she does, like she's ever ONCE successfully completed a meal in her entire adult life, and then she cracked eggs into a bowl and they were -" She paused, letting the silence gather weight. "Unnie. They were GREY."
"I saw."
"GREY. Like cement. Like something that had given up on ever being food. And then he just stepped in and -" She made a gesture meant to convey the seamless transfer of the spatula. It ended up looking more like interpretive dance about emotional rescue. "Without a word. He just did it. And she LET him. She watched his hands and her whole face changed - unnie, you should have seen her face, I thought she was going to CRY - and she grabbed onto his arm and didn't let go for the ENTIRE rest of the time, and she was HUMMING, she was humming in front of EVERYONE -"
"I heard."
"She doesn't DO that."
Lia lowered her phone and met Chaeryeong's eyes properly. "I know she doesn't."
The confirmation hung between them. Chaeryeong sat back into the cushion, vindicated, her mind already three episodes ahead. What this meant tomorrow. What it meant for the rest of the trip. Whether she was allowed to tell Sunwoo, because he needed to UNDERSTAND the magnitude of what they'd witnessed this morning - the sun through the windows and the grey eggs and the rescued eggs and the playlist and the humming and Yeji-unnie's face when she let go of something she'd been gripping for years. This was the sort of morning you wrote about in your phone notes at 2 AM and couldn't articulate properly, the kind where you KNEW something had shifted but the ending wasn't clear just yet.
"The eggs were grey," Chaeryeong said again. Softer now, like she was narrating the previously-on segment and the audience needed to feel it. "And then they weren't. And she just held onto him."
Lia looked toward the kitchen. The sun had shifted since breakfast. The copper pans on the wall rack had gone matte, but the countertops were still bright, still holding the shape of the morning in their surface.
"While holding onto him," Lia said quietly, "like she'd physically collapse without him."
They both stared at the kitchen doorway. As if the morning might still be living in there - the playlist and the humming and whatever trace a person leaves behind when they're genuinely happy and haven't figured out how to say it yet. Chaeryeong's throat felt tight. She wanted to cry, which was ridiculous, because nothing had happened. Eggs had happened. A boy had rescued eggs. A girl had leaned against him. That was the whole story. But Chaeryeong had been watching Hwang Yeji build walls for five years, and this morning she'd watched one of them come down without any construction noise at all, and that was the kind of thing that made you cry on a couch at 10 AM if you were the kind of person who felt stories in your body.
She was that kind of person.
Chaeryeong grabbed Yeji's Instax from the shelf behind the couch. She'd spotted it last night, filed it under useful tools for documentation purposes - because every good detective needs a camera, and every good K-drama needs a visual motif, and Chaeryeong was nothing if not thorough about both. A white camera with a small floral sticker pressed to the corner - Yuna's contribution, obviously. Everything within Yuna's reach ended up decorated.
She checked the film. Eight shots.
Minho-oppa and Yeji-unnie were still at the table. His hand resting near her knee. Her fingers curled loosely around his wrist. Both of them in the middle of something that made Yeji-unnie's nose scrunch when she laughed - that scrunch, the involuntary one, the crinkle she'd trained out of her public face years ago but kept forgetting to suppress around him.
Chaeryeong lifted the camera, framed the shot through the kitchen doorway so the morning sun caught them from behind, and pressed the shutter.
The flash popped. Neither of them noticed.
The film ejected with its quiet mechanical click. Chaeryeong caught it between two fingers and shook it - you weren't supposed to shake Instax, she KNEW that, Ryujin-unnie had told her literally a hundred times, but the gesture was involuntary, the same way her foot tapped before comeback stages and her hands conducted conversations she got too invested in. She set the photo on the cushion beside her and watched it develop.
The image came in slowly. Milky white resolving into colour at the edges. The kitchen first - bright counters, warm light, the copper pans soft in the background. Then the two figures at the table. Yeji-unnie's profile, chin tilted slightly down. Minho-oppa's shoulder, turned toward her. Her fingers on his wrist. Both of them caught mid-laugh, mid-sentence, mid-something that had no performance in it at all. Two people at a table who'd forgotten anyone was watching.
This was the shot. The one dramas spent sixteen episodes building toward, the one where the colour grading goes warm and the background blurs into bokeh and every viewer screenshots it for their lock screen. Except this wasn't a drama. This was Yeji-unnie in a boy's shirt, laughing at something he said about eggs.
Chaeryeong picked it up by the edges. Still warm from the chemicals. A simple photo. A kitchen. Morning light. A girl and a boy. Nothing you'd frame or post or even show someone unless they already knew the context. The kind of photo you'd stick on a fridge with a magnet and forget about by next week.
Chaeryeong wouldn't forget. She held the warm square of film and thought about grey eggs and humming and the way Yeji-unnie's entire face had opened when Minho-oppa took the spatula from her hand, and she knew she was looking at what happiness looks like when it lands before the person feeling it has found the word.
She'd been studying Hwang Yeji for five years. This was the first time she'd seen resolution.
She slid the photo into her phone case as evidence. For later.
For always.
***
[MINHO - FIRST PERSON]
The beach was Yuna's fault.
"Beach. NOW. I'm not wasting Jeju on this couch. Everyone up. Towels, sunscreen, NOW." She finished the sentence standing by the archway in a pale pink, frilly bikini with a sheer micro-skirt tied high on her thigh - a replacement, I couldn't help but notice, for the black-and-gold one that had perished during yesterday's wreckage - adjusting the ruffled cups to push her cleavage up before she turned to face the room.
The morning's overcast had burned off completely - that Jeju trick where the sky goes from prison-grey to absurd blue in the space of breath, as if the weather system had simply decided to stop being dramatic and commit to beauty. The villa sat close enough to the water that waves were audible from the bedrooms, close enough that "going to the beach" meant walking down a stone path and through a wooden gate and then you were on sand.
The group assembled in stages. Chaeryeong in a floral one-piece that Sunwoo kept glancing at with the helpless fascination of a boy who'd been with this girl long enough to think he was used to her and kept discovering he was wrong. Lia in a dark green bikini and linen cover-up, already carrying a book, making it clear she intended to spend the next three hours reading and judging everyone from behind her oversized sunglasses. Ryujin in a black Calvin Klein sports bra and denim shorts, hair shoved up in a messy bun, stretched across a towel like she'd been booked for a shoot nobody had told her about.
And then Yeji came through the gate.
I should've been ready. I'd seen her body in all kind of contexts - asleep, awake, beneath me, above me, arching off a mattress, relaxing into a bath, flinching at cold water, softening under warm hands. I'd mapped her in the dark, traced her in the light.
I was not ready.
She was wearing a brown bikini. A muted chocolate brown, matte fabric with a faint texture to it, that disappeared into her skin tone and made it almost impossible to tell the edges between the fabric and her skin. The top was a high-neck cut, sleeveless, fitted close against her chest without padding or underwire, following the natural shape of her breasts with an of honest simplicity that made push-up bras feel like fraud. It covered more than a triangle cut would have, and somehow that was worse - the high neckline drawing a clean line across her collarbones while leaving her shoulders and arms completely bare, her dancer's deltoids catching the light, the architecture of muscle she'd built through years of choreography just sitting there on full display without trying. The fabric clung to her ribs. Her every breath was visible and every inhale pressed the material taut across her chest before releasing.
The bottom was a wrap cut, brown fabric crossing low over her hip bones in a way that mimicked a sarong but covered nothing a sarong would, the wrap detail creating a diagonal line from her left hip down to her right thigh that my eyes followed involuntarily, helplessly, the way you trace the edge of a cliff. It sat exactly where my hands went when I pulled her against me. The strip of bare stomach between the high-neck top and the low-slung wrap bottom was a full handspan of toned midriff, the subtle definition of her abs visible when she breathed, the faint line running down from her navel that I'd traced with my tongue in the dark but never properly seen in daylight. The mole on her left hip sat just above the fabric line, barely covered, barely hidden, like the bikini had been designed by someone who knew exactly what I'd be looking for and decided to make me suffer for it. The whole thing amounted to an amount of Yeji I'd never seen in daylight, outdoors, surrounded by other people, in a context that had nothing to do with fucking.
The same look that had made Yuna feel chosen, that had made Ryujin feel seen, was aimed at Yeji right now with the full force of broad daylight and a brown bikini and zero ability to look away. She was walking to the beach, fighting with Yuna about sunscreen.
"SPF 30 is FINE, Yuna -"
"It is NOT fine, unnie! You need FIFTY at MINIMUM. Do you want to be a RAISIN?"
"I'm not going to be a -"
"A RAISIN, unnie. A PRUNE. A dried FRUIT."
"Yuna -"
"If I can see your pores from here, the UV index can DEFINITELY see them."
Yuna was already applying it. Not to herself though, but to Yeji, with her hands on Yeji's shoulders, rubbing sunscreen into her skin with more attention than the job required, smoothing it down her arms, circling back to spots she'd already covered. The gesture was tender and excessive and had the quality of an offering - a maknae taking care of her unnie with theatrical devotion, as if the right amount of SPF 50 could settle a debt Yeji didn't know existed.
"Yuna, you've done that shoulder three times -"
"UV damage is CUMULATIVE, unnie."
She moved to Yeji's back. Her hands slowed. Something flickered across her face - brief, private, gone before it settled. She was touching the body of the girl whose trust she'd broken, and her hands were gentle the way hands are gentle when they're trying to undo something through tenderness alone.
Yeji let her. She'd always said Yuna was touchy, had always been touchy, the maknae who hugged and braided and climbed into laps without invitation. The devotion was invisible because it looked exactly like love. Which it was. Complicated now, but love.
Yeji looked at me over Yuna's ministrations. The look said help. I held up both hands. Some battles are between sisters.
And beneath the bickering and the sunscreen, her body did what it always did, carrying the memory of every formation she'd ever held.
I noticed the shade of her skin against the brown. The way the morning light caught the fine hairs on her arms. The tension in her calves when she shifted weight on uneven sand. The mole on her left hip that I'd kissed in the dark but never seen properly in full sun, sitting just above the bikini line.
I was staring. I knew I was staring. In my defence, there are limits to what self-control can reasonably accomplish when Hwang Yeji is walking toward the ocean in a brown bikini while being sunscreened by a guilty maknae, and I'd exceeded those limits roughly when she came through the gate.
She dropped her towel next to mine without asking and sat close enough that our knees touched. "You're staring," she said.
"You're worth staring at."
She rolled her eyes. But the corner of her mouth twitched and she didn't move her knee away.
Lia was under the umbrella nearest the path, already reading, legs crossed, turning pages with one hand while the other held her sunglasses in place against the wind. She didn't look up when Sunwoo jogged past chasing Chaeryeong with a spray bottle.
"Lia-unnie, you have to come in the water -"
"I'm moisturised and educated. I don't need the ocean."
We ended up in the water eventually. Standing in the shallows, shoulders touching, waves at our waists. She reached for my hand under the surface. My fingers hesitated - a quarter-second, barely perceptible, because I wasn't sure I'd earned the right to hold what was being offered. But then I took it anyway. The refraction made our fingers look distorted and tangled, like our connection was impossible to undo. The water felt nice and warm, Jeju's latitude giving it extra degrees, or maybe that was just her.
She splashed me. I retaliated. She shrieked - a sound I'd never heard from her, high and unguarded and absolutely unlike any noise Hwang Yeji was supposed to make - and grabbed onto me, arms around my neck, laughing into my shoulder, and what started as play became something quieter. She held on with her face tucked against my neck. Arms locked. The waves pushed and pulled gently at our waists and she swayed with them, adjusting her grip on me like she was afraid the current might take me away.
In front of everyone. Broad daylight. The whole group within eyeline.
Ryujin was visible from here. She was on a towel twenty metres away, sunglasses on, posture deliberately relaxed, and I couldn't tell whether she was watching or not because her lenses were dark and her expression was the same careful nothing she'd been wearing since the kitchen. Yuna bounded up to her with a phone, gesturing wildly - "TikTok, come ON, just ONE" - and Ryujin refused three times with increasing theatrical disgust before nailing the choreography on the first take.
"How are you good at EVERYTHING?" Yuna demanded.
"Talent."
"It's literally just being hot."
"Also talent."
Minjun was in the shade near the path, watching the group with the anthropological patience of someone observing a social structure he was still decoding. Sunwoo was throwing a ball to nobody - just tossing it in the air and catching it, pure unfilterable joy in physical form - until Chaeryeong wandered over and they started a game that was two-thirds flirting and one-third actual throwing.
Yeji's arms tightened around my neck. Her breath was warm on my collarbone. Behind her, past the beach, the villa's pool glinted on the deck where I'd been standing an hour ago, and for one half-second the glint went dark - not the pool I was looking at but the pool from the dream, the one with black water and empty eyes and -
"The water's so warm," Yeji murmured against my neck.
Her voice. The wave at my waist. I was here.
I wrapped my arms around her properly for the first time that day and pulled her in. Her body pressed against mine in the salt water, all warm skin and cold current and the closeness of a girl who'd decided to stop pretending she didn't need this.
From the beach, someone held up the Instax. The flash was barely visible in the sun.
***
Nobody changed when we came back. Swimwear and cover-ups and sandy feet tracked across the villa tile - the dress code of people with nowhere to be.
The living room hit critical mass almost immediately. Chaeryeong chose the movie - something Korean and romantic with subtitles, a pick so predictably Chaeryeong that Ryujin groaned before the title card finished. Sunwoo claimed the corner of the couch with the enthusiasm of a man who'd been granted access to premium seating; Chaeryeong folded into him within thirty seconds, using his thigh as a pillow, one hand still holding her phone above her face at the angle that meant she was rewatching something.
Yuna sprawled on the floor in front of the TV with her legs in the air, fully invested in whatever she was doing on her phone. Nobody was watching the movie, but Chaeryeong fervently defended it anyway.
Lia had produced a book from somewhere - possibly from thin air - and claimed the far end of the couch. She was here physically, but had spiritually relocated to whatever literary world demanded more from its characters.
Ryujin spread across two cushions, annexing the entire sofa through sheer breadth of posture with one arm over her eyes, the other scrolling.
Minjun sat in the armchair with his phone. Every time Yeji's hand found my knee, his gaze flicked up from his screen, then back down.
And Yeji was on me, adjacent so that, for her, now meant touching. My arm along the back of the couch, her shoulder against my ribs, her feet tucked under my thigh for warmth. She was actually watching the movie, or at least watching it more than anyone else - and her hand was on my knee, resting, like she'd put it there an hour ago and forgotten.
Yeji didn't look up from my chest. "We watched that already."
Nobody pointed out the we. But Ryujin's arm shifted over her eyes.
"He's hot OR just tall?" Ryujin asked the room, gesturing at the male lead with her phone.
"Those are the same thing!" Yuna said from the floor.
"They are absolutely not the same thing."
"You're both wrong," Ryujin said. "Height is not a personality."
"Neither is being loud," Lia murmured from behind her book.
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing."
Chaeryeong giggled into Sunwoo's thigh. The movie played on. I'd been smiling for an hour, maybe longer, wearing an expression that didn't belong to me and I kept forgetting to give back. Shoes piled by the couch - flip-flops, trainers, Yeji's sandals wedged under the coffee table next to Chaeryeong's bag - mess that meant everyone was staying, temporary as the tide line on the sand we'd tracked in.
On the floor near the TV, Yuna and Ryujin had settled into a competitive scrolling session - phones side by side, insults flying between them with the rhythm of a variety show rap battle.
"Move your legs, group whore."
"Make me, little slut."
Yeji shot them a look from the couch - the "I'm the leader and this is technically my jurisdiction but I'm too comfortable to move" look. They ignored it. Her hand found mine on the couch for the fourth time. Yuna's eyes flicked to our fingers and back to her screen. Her next joke - something about the male lead's jawline - came a half-beat too fast, the same half-beat I'd been running on all day.
At some point during the afternoon Yeji looked at Yuna's hair - mid-sentence, not even tracking the decision, her hand going out the way a mother's hand goes out at a crosswalk - and pulled Yuna down between her knees on the floor. Yuna went still. I'd watched her perform all day - the napkins, the sunscreen, the "can I help" in that polite stranger's voice - Shin Yuna running an apology tour for a crime the victim didn't know had been committed, and I got to sit here and observe it like a nature documentary because I was the other half of the crime and my coping mechanism was apparently nightmares and scrambled eggs.
And now Yeji's fingers were in her hair - sectioning, pulling, the firm gentle rhythm of someone who'd braided this girl a hundred times before - and the performance couldn't survive the tenderness. Her eyes dropped to the floor. Her mouth - always moving, always broadcasting - closed. Yeji's fingers paused mid-section. "You're so tense. What's wrong with you today?"
"Nothing. I'm fine. I'm SO fine."
"You've been -" Yeji tugged a strand, gentle but deliberate. "Weird. Since this morning. You and the napkins and the helping and the -" She gestured vaguely with the hand not holding Yuna's hair. "It's freaking me out."
"I'm ALWAYS helpful -"
"You folded them into triangles, Yuna-ya."
Silence.
"We're on vacation." Softer now. The leader voice dropping into something private, something that only worked on the girl sitting between her knees. Her fingers resumed, pulling through a tangle with practiced authority. "Loosen up. Stop being so good. It's creepy."
Yuna's laugh came out waterlogged. Half a sound, barely formed. She didn't say anything back.
"Hey." Yeji tugged the section she was holding just enough to tilt Yuna's head back so she was looking up at her upside-down. "You know you don't have to earn being here, right? You're our baby. That's permanent." Something behind Yuna's face collapsed - not visibly, nothing anyone across the room would catch, but I was close enough to see her throat work around a swallow, to see the exact moment her jaw released, to watch her eyes go bright for a half-second before she blinked it back.
Her shoulders dropped. Her jaw unclenched. She tilted her head back into Yeji's fingers and went completely boneless, the tension draining out of her. Whatever performance she'd been running all day - the napkins, the sunscreen, the helping, the whole good-maknae choreography - it ended under Yeji's hands the way it couldn't end under anything else.
I watched it happen from three metres away and thought: that's what absolution looks like when the person giving it doesn't know she's giving it. Yeji's fingers in Yuna's hair, gentle and automatic and completely unaware she was forgiving someone who hadn't confessed yet. And I couldn't look away because I needed the same thing from those same hands and I'd done the same thing to earn needing it, and my punishment was sitting here watching grace get dispensed to someone else and knowing I didn't get to feel relieved by proxy.
Yeji worked in silence, sectioning and twisting and pinning, humming faintly under her breath. When she finished, she pulled the braid gently to test it, appraised her work, and said, "Photo." Yuna preened, cheeks flushed, eyes bright and wet for half a second before she blinked it away - the maknae being told she was worth documenting by the unnie she least deserved it from. Yeji held up the Instax and fixed Yuna's braid one more time, a micro-adjustment she didn't seem to register doing. Click. The flash. A square of film developing in the afternoon light.
***
The nap happened without anyone deciding it should.
The afternoon had gone heavy with sun and warmth and the drowsiness that comes from being horizontal in good company for too long. Chaeryeong was asleep on Sunwoo. Yuna had migrated to the floor cushion and curled up with her phone still playing something at minimum volume. Lia was reading or had transcended reading into a meditative state - hard to tell. Ryujin hadn't moved from her couch claim, arm still over her eyes.
Yeji put her head on my chest.
She turned into me almost instinctively, her cheek settling over my heart. One hand curled into the fabric of my shirt, fingers hooking into the collar.
Her cover-up had slipped off one shoulder. The high-neck bikini top sat close against her chest, the brown fabric warm against her skin, and where my hand rested on her bare back the warmth radiated through her - stored heat from the beach, from hours of sun soaking into muscle. Up close her face was softer than it had any right to be. Her lashes fanned against her cheekbones. There was a faint crease between her brows even in sleep.
Her breathing slowed, each exhale landing warm against my collarbone in intervals that got longer and longer.
Her heartbeat pulsed through my shirt. Her grip on my collar held on in her sleep just like they did when she was awake, fingers curling tighter when she shifted, pulling herself closer without waking.
I barely breathed. Her body was a warm weight on my chest and the heaviness of a sleeping person pressed against you - the total absence of guard, of performance, of any awareness that six other people could see her - settled over me.
From across the room, Ryujin's arm was draped over her eyes. She might have been sleeping.
Lia's voice drifted from somewhere near Chaeryeong, barely audible. "She touched his back three times in the last hour."
From the corner of my eye, I watched Chaeryeong's eyes go wide, and she grabbed Lia's arm, utterly enthused by this supply-and-addict energy.
***
[RYUJIN'S POV - THIRD PERSON]
Ryujin lay still, arm draped over her eyes, because looking at them hurt more than the darkness.
She could hear Yeji breathing against his chest - slow, even, the rhythm of someone who'd found exactly where she belonged and had stopped fighting it. The sound drowned out everything else - the movie dialogue, Chaeryeong's soft snoring, the distant ocean. Just Yeji's breathing and Ryujin's own pulse, too fast, too loud, hammering against her wrist where her fingers pressed into her own forearm.
I fucked him.
A thought she'd been avoiding all day, something that had been sitting beneath every smile and every joke and every moment she'd watched Yeji hum on his shoulder like yesterday hadn't happened. I came on his cock while she was doing pilates with Karina. I rode him on that pool deck until my thighs cramped and Yuna's mouth was on him and I forgot Yeji existed. Completely erased her from my mind. And now she's here wearing his shirt and humming and I'm the one who doesn't exist.
The guilt came tangled with something meaner - the fact that Yeji had won something Ryujin only realized was a competition after she'd already lost, that the version of Yeji draped across his chest was softer and happier than any version that had ever chosen Ryujin's chaos. The girl who used to match her energy, who used to meet her intensity punch for punch, had become someone else entirely. And Ryujin had helped kill the old version by fucking the person who'd made Yeji want to change.
***
The afternoon bled into early evening and someone mentioned food. Minho said something about missing homemade Korean food - just a passing comment - and Ryujin watched Yeji's face do the thing it always did when she was about to agree to something, except this time Yeji's eyes were already on Minho for confirmation instead of Ryujin.
"We should cook," Yeji said, her gaze soft on him, already mentally cataloguing what they had in the kitchen. Then, as an afterthought, she turned to Ryujin. "You're amazing at jjigae, right? Let's make that."
The phrasing made it clear this was an assignment, a role Yeji needed filled while she went back to orbiting the person who mattered. Ryujin felt the shift in her chest - tectonic, irreversible. For five years, dinner decisions had been a negotiation between them - Ryujin suggested, Yeji agreed or countered, they built the plan together. Now Yeji was decorating her decision with Ryujin's skills like Ryujin was staff, like their entire dynamic had been demoted to task delegation.
"Sure," Ryujin said, her voice flat enough that it should have registered as wrong, but Yeji was already back to talking to Minho, her hand finding his arm, and Ryujin stood up and walked to the kitchen because staying in that room meant watching Yeji choose him for the hundredth time today and Ryujin was done being the person who witnessed her own obsolescence.
***
Ryujin took charge of dinner because someone had to and because the kitchen was the one place today where she could make her hands do something useful without them shaking. She'd started prep two hours ago - protein marinating from a recipe she'd known since fourteen and never needed to look up since, mise en place lined up on the counter with the spatial precision of someone who understood that cooking, like choreography, was sequencing - every element in position, every step earned. She assigned stations. Chaeryeong fell in as sous chef with genuine enthusiasm. Lia got salad duty. The hierarchy was natural and correct, and Ryujin's dinner would have been incredible if anyone in this villa had cooperated for more than forty-five seconds.
The first problem was Yuna. She'd been given vegetable prep - reasonable, she CAN cook, she's done Cookbangs, she's made pizza from scratch - but tonight she was somewhere else. Phone propped against the cutting board, scrolling between chops, the rhythm of her knife entirely hostage to whatever was on screen. The cuts were uneven, aggressively uneven, cubes the size of dice next to slabs the size of playing cards.
Ryujin glanced over. "Yuna, those are supposed to be the same SIZE -"
Yuna didn't look up. "They're rustic."
"Yuna-ya." Firmer. "Focus."
"I AM focused -" But her eyes were already sliding back to her phone, her thumb scrolling, her knife resuming its chaotic rhythm. She apologized without looking up - "Sorry, unnie, I'm sorry" - but the vegetables stayed abstract sculpture and her attention stayed hostage to whatever guilt spiral was loading on her screen.
Ryujin's jaw tightened, but it wasn't the vegetables. It was the fact that Yuna was HERE, in the kitchen, chopping, volunteering for vegetable prep without being asked, without being bribed, without Yeji deploying the leader voice. She'd walked in and said "what can I do" with the earnest energy of someone atoning through acts of domestic service, the same energy she'd been running all day - the sunscreen application, the table-setting at breakfast, the conspicuous helpfulness that had replaced yesterday's conspicuous recklessness.
Ryujin recognised it because she was running a version of it herself. Kitchen as penance. Cooking for the group because it was the one thing her hands could do today that didn't feel like a betrayal. She and Yuna were running the same choreography - different formations, same count. Ryujin's guilt cooked. Yuna's guilt helped.
Neither of them could look at Yeji for longer than three seconds.
But Yuna's guilt was louder than Ryujin's instructions, and the vegetables suffered for it.
The second problem was worse. Yeji had reinserted herself into the kitchen - not to cook (Yeji near a functioning stove was a national emergency regardless of intent) but because Minho was near the stove, and wherever Minho stood, Yeji now orbited with the committed inevitability of something gravitational. She was "helping" by stirring something Ryujin had specifically told her not to touch, leaning into his arm with the full weight of someone whose priorities were transparent and unashamed.
"Yeji-yah. Step AWAY from the pan."
"I'm just stirring."
"You're BURNING."
Yeji looked down. She was, in fact, burning.
Ryujin turned back to her station and breathed through it. The real burn was in her peripheral vision - Yeji's shoulder against his arm, her fingers curled in the hem of his shirt the way they'd been curled in it all day, and the humming. Yeji was STILL humming, the same playlist from this morning when she'd clung to him at the stove like the rest of them weren't right there watching, and Ryujin's hands knew this recipe by memory but her brain kept snagging on the sound, on how new it was. Yeji didn't hum. Yeji controlled her sound the way she controlled everything. Until today.
The third problem was Chaeryeong. Her phone buzzed mid-prep - Sunwoo's name lighting up the screen, visible from across the kitchen - and Chaeryeong's whole face softened. "Sorry, unnie, one second -" She stepped away without waiting for permission, already answering, her voice dropping into that particular frequency she saved for him, the one that turned her into someone else's person. She didn't come back for six minutes. Ryujin counted. The glaze needed constant stirring and it burned while Chaeryeong giggled somewhere out of sight and Ryujin scraped the stuck bits off the bottom of the pan alone.
The fourth problem was cucumbers. Lia discovered them in the salad - full stop, conversation over, emergency protocols engaged. Twenty-five years of this vendetta was sacred at this point - the surgical extraction from every shared meal, the full-body revulsion, the absolute refusal to accept that a fruit this offensive had been permitted to exist alongside foods she respected. Lia picked them out with the precision of a coordi-unnie removing a wardrobe-malfunction pin thirty seconds before the camera goes live, piling them on Minjun's plate without asking, shorthand that only develops between people who've been negotiating the same argument since trainee days.
"Unnie, just skip the salad -" Chaeryeong started.
"It's not about the SALAD, Chaeryeong." Lia's voice carried the weight of someone who'd been having this argument since Chaeryeong was competing on Sixteen and TWICE-sunbaenim weren't even a thing yet. "It's about PRINCIPLE. These are in the dressing. They've CONTAMINATED the entire -"
Minjun didn't even look up from across the kitchen. "Just eat around them."
The look Lia gave him could have stripped the finish off the countertops. He smiled. He lived for this.
"Twenty-five years," Ryujin muttered.
Lia's head snapped around. "Don't start."
Ryujin watched her dinner come apart. Every station in active rebellion. Yuna's vegetables were abstract sculpture. Yeji was burning things with a smile on her face because his arm mattered more than Ryujin's food. Lia had declared biological warfare on the salad. Chaeryeong was the only functional operator in this kitchen and she'd started photographing the cucumber extraction for Sunwoo.
She put the spatula down. "We're ordering chimaek." She said it flat, final - the face of someone who'd HAD this, had the plan, the skill, the patience - and watched it disintegrate because everyone around her had decided their thing mattered more than hers. Yuna's guilt louder than Ryujin's instructions. Chaeryeong disappearing for Sunwoo's texts. Yeji burning things because Minho's arm was more important than the food Ryujin had been making for this group since they were trainees. Even Lia - steady, dependable Lia - waging biological warfare on a salad instead of helping. Every station in active rebellion. Every person choosing their thing over hers.
Ryujin wasn't angry. She was obsolete.
Yuna cheered. Actually cheered - fist in the air, full commitment. Chaeryeong's shoulders dropped with visible relief. Sunwoo's whole face opened up because chimaek was the only language he needed.
Ryujin ordered without asking what anyone wanted. She already knew.
The delivery arrived twenty minutes later - chicken boxes and maekju spread across the coffee table, everyone on the floor, eating with their hands. Chaeryeong dipped everything in cheese sauce with the methodical thoroughness of someone who believed condiments were a love language. Yuna stole off everyone's plates - Ryujin's first, always Ryujin's first, then cycling through the others with the equitable entitlement of a youngest sister. Sunwoo ate like food was an event, sweet and uncomplicated, Chaeryeong brushing crumbs from his shirt without looking.
Sunwoo dropped a drumstick on the floor. Looked at it. Looked at Chaeryeong. Looked back at the drumstick.
"Don't," Chaeryeong said.
He picked it up and ate it.
"Sunwoo -"
"Five second rule."
"It was SIX seconds."
"I rounded down."
Then Yeji fed him a piece of chicken. She did it without thinking - held it up to Minho's mouth mid-sentence, talking to Lia about some schedule thing, her voice on leader-autopilot - and offered the piece with the casual confidence of a girl who'd been feeding this boy for years. He took it. She didn't pause her sentence. Seamless. Unconscious.
Across the circle, Chaeryeong's eyes went wide. Ryujin's didn't. She'd been watching all day. She'd already seen this version of Yeji. The one who hummed and clung and fed boys chicken without performing any of it.
Yuna's hand froze mid-reach over Ryujin's plate - her usual theft suspended, fingers hovering, eyes locked on Yeji's hand at Minho's mouth. The moment stretched for two full seconds before Yuna's gaze dropped to her own lap, her jaw working around nothing, chewing air because her mouth needed something to do that wasn't speaking. Ryujin recognised the flinch because she was carrying a version of it lodged in her own chest - two girls at a dinner watching the same gesture land and carrying the weight of what it meant to watch it and say nothing.
The movie was still on in the other room. The male lead was on his fourth confession. The female lead was on her third rejection. The fourth was loading. Chaeryeong kept glancing back at the screen with genuine concern for fictional characters, and Ryujin envied her for it. Fictional people couldn't hurt you back.
The scene was domestic chaos at its warmest. Bare feet and bikinis and board shorts, chimaek spread across the coffee table, everyone talking over each other with their mouths full because nobody wanted to be anywhere else. The kind of night that would become a memory people reached for when they needed proof they'd been happy once.
Ryujin ate her chicken in small, even bites, back straight and face smooth, chewing with the clockwork regularity of someone counting each motion because counting was something her brain could do instead of the other thing.
"Girls' night!" Yuna launched upright from the circle with the decisive energy of someone who'd been waiting for exactly this moment. "We haven't had one since - wait, have we EVER? On a trip? Like a real one?" She turned to the boys. "Boys, get out."
"Get out of... the room?" Sunwoo asked.
"Get out of the VICINITY. Go bond. Do boy things. Throw a ball at each other. I don't care. GIRLS. NIGHT."
Nobody argued. Minjun was already standing, wearing the expression of a man who understood when a territory had been claimed. Sunwoo looked to Chaeryeong for confirmation - she kissed him on the cheek and shooed him toward the door. Yeji's hand slid out of Minho's, her fingers trailing from the hold she'd maintained all evening, and Ryujin watched it happen with the unwanted precision of someone who'd been cataloguing every touch since breakfast. The way Yeji's hand lingered. The way she didn't look away from him until the door closed. The way her fingers curled into her own palm afterward, holding the shape of what she'd just let go. The boys left. The room exhaled.
The soju wasn't going to fix anything but Ryujin was going to drink it anyway. Eight hours - that's how long she'd been sitting on this, something heavy, lodged in her chest like a stone she'd swallowed at breakfast. The kitchen this morning, Yeji humming on his fucking arm. The beach, arms around his neck, in front of everyone. The nap, his chest, her hand in his shirt, the sound she made settling. All of it stacked behind her eyes now. Dinner had just been the final coat. She was so fucked. The crack and hiss of a soju bottle brought the room back into focus - green glass, Yuna's fingers, the present tense.
The movie was still playing on the TV behind them. Nobody had turned it off. Hours now.
"Okay." Yuna settled cross-legged on the floor with the organisational energy of someone convening a summit. Soju bottles materialised from somewhere - Lia's procurement, probably. Chaeryeong was already flushed. The girl went pink at the first sip, a biological inevitability that became the comedic accelerant of every night she drank. One drink and her cheeks were rosy. Two and she was a fire truck. By the third she'd be confessing things nobody had asked about.
Ryujin took the bottle Lia passed her, poured, knocked it back. Cold. Sharp. The burn spread through her chest and she leaned back on her hands.
"We are not talking about Sunwoo for more than five minutes," Ryujin announced.
"That's not fair -" Chaeryeong started.
"Five minutes. A timer. I am setting a timer."
"You can't just -"
"Too late. Timer's running. Go."
Chaeryeong went. Wide-eyed, flushed, both hands wrapped around her soju glass like it was a microphone. She talked about Sunwoo the way people talk about natural phenomena - with awe, and a slight suspicion that the universe had made an administrative error in her favour. He made playlists for her. He remembered her coffee order. He'd learned her mother's birthday, unprompted, and sent flowers. "When he held me after, I felt so safe," she said, and the sincerity in her voice was so pure it should have come with a PSA.
Yuna took notes. Literal notes, phone in hand, thumbs working. "So edging equals better orgasms, got it."
Chaeryeong's face achieved a new shade of red. "That's NOT what I said -"
"You said 'held me after.' After WHAT, Chaeryeong?"
"After we - after he - that's not the POINT, the point is emotional INTIMACY -"
"Emotional intimacy that involves being held afterward. I'm not hearing a denial."
Ryujin poured herself another shot. Across the circle, Yeji was listening to Chaeryeong with her chin on her knees and a smile that had nothing competitive in it. Ryujin noticed the smile the way she noticed exits.
On the TV behind them, the male lead was confessing again. Yuna glanced at the screen. "Even Hyun-woo oppa would've left by now, and he waited in a COMA."
"Don't SPOIL it -" Chaeryeong started.
"He's been in a coma for FORTY MINUTES, Chaeryeong-unnie, that's not a spoiler, that's a medical emergency."
Chaeryeong's five minutes stretched to fifteen. Nobody was counting. The talk spiralled from Sunwoo's playlists to first dates to terrible hookups when Yuna derailed everything with verbal confetti and zero shame.
"Oh my GOSH, this one time a guy accidentally hooked my IUD string -"
And they were off. "So he's like PULLING and I'm like 'that's not what you think it is' and he goes WHITE, like, hospital-white, and I had to explain the ENTIRE female reproductive system to a GROWN MAN while he's still inside me -"
"YUNA -"
"- and then he starts GOOGLING it, WHILE STILL -"
"STOP."
Ryujin choked on her soju. It went up her nose, burned through her sinuses, came out in a cough that doubled her over. Chaeryeong's hands flew to her face.
"Did you go to the HOSPITAL?"
"No, I made him buy me bubble tea and we tried again the next day."
"HOW ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?"
Yuna was cheerful about it. "God protects sluts and idiots, and I'm both!"
The laughter pulled Ryujin under. She couldn't stop it - the story was genuinely deranged, the delivery was perfect, and Yuna's total lack of shame was a force of nature. For a few seconds she was just a girl on a carpet with her girls and nothing hurt. Then Yeji laughed too - that new laugh, the open one, warm and unguarded - and the stone resettled.
Yuna rode the momentum without pausing. "Okay but SPEAKING of training my body - my notes app has a rating system."
Lia repeated it quietly from the corner. "A rating system."
"A SPREADSHEET. Colour-coded. Green, yellow, red. Notes column." She was already scrolling with the pride of someone revealing a masterpiece. "This one says 'cried after.' HE cried. Not me. I was fine." More scrolling. "This one says 'brought me chicken McNuggets unprompted after.' A twenty-piece is basically a marriage proposal." More scrolling. "This one says 'fell asleep during and I finished by myself.' Red. Obviously. And THIS one -" She paused, grinning. "I literally Pavlov'd myself by accident? Like there was this fan sign, right, and I'm sitting there smiling and signing albums and being PROFESSIONAL, and my phone vibrated in my pocket and my body just - RESPONDED. Because I'd trained it. Therapy is so expensive and orgasms are free."
"Your methodology has no weighting for consistency," Lia said, already skimming the screen. "One good round doesn't offset three mediocre ones. You need a normalised average."
"My BODY reported a NINETY-TWO percent satisfaction rate."
"Self-reported data. Unreliable."
"Okay but deadass, I think I'm demisexual but only for people who are mean to me."
Chaeryeong had transcended embarrassment and arrived at pure anthropological fascination. "That's not demisexuality, that's a degradation kink -"
"WAIT. IS THAT WHAT THAT IS? I THOUGHT I JUST HAD DADDY ISSUES!"
She was still wiping her eyes when Yuna swung toward Yeji. "Okay but ENOUGH about me being a disaster - unnie you literally HUMMED today. At breakfast. In front of EVERYONE. And then you fed him chicken like a married person without even THINKING about it. I'm genuinely obsessed - what is he DOING because it's clearly working."
The chaos engine was still running - Chaeryeong catching her breath, Lia refilling glasses - but the question cut through the noise with the precision of a tuning fork, and Ryujin heard it land in the silence beneath.
Yeji should have deflected. Should have made it a bit. Matched the room's energy with something sharp. The old Yeji had a hundred versions of the parry.
She didn't parry.
She smiled. Soft. Private. She didn't need to compete because what she had wasn't a game.
"He's different."
Two words. Ryujin poured another shot and drank it before the sentence finished landing. Yeji didn't say shit like that about anyone, not out loud, and she'd just dropped it into the room like a weather report.
Yuna filled the silence immediately - she always did, nature and Yuna both abhorring a vacuum - and Chaeryeong giggled and Lia made a dry comment and the evening kept moving. But Ryujin could still hear those two words sitting in the air like something that had always been there and she'd only just let herself notice.
She matched the room's confessional energy before she could think about why. "He was a backup dancer for some HYBE thing. Hands like he'd read the manual. VERY thorough."
"How thorough?" Yuna leaned forward.
"Put it this way - I had to text him the next day to ask if he wanted his belt back."
Chaeryeong screamed. Yuna fell backward. The room combusted appropriately. Ryujin leaned back on her hands, face arranged in the performance of someone who'd had a great time, a fun story, nothing complicated.
Yuna was drunk and warm and stripped of her own filters, not that she really had any to begin with. "You guys are like, my favourite people in the world."
Chaeryeong hugged her immediately. "We love you too, you disaster."
"I'm sorry I'm like this."
"Like what?"
"Horny and stupid and weird."
Ryujin heard it. The real sentence hiding inside the self-deprecation - I'm sorry I touched what was yours. I'm sorry I wanted him. I'm sorry I'm the kind of person who does that and then sits here letting you braid my hair. Yuna wasn't describing her personality. She was confessing in a language only Ryujin could translate, because Ryujin was carrying the same confession in a different dialect.
"You're not stupid." Ryujin's voice surprised her - the tenderness in it, undisguised, reflexive. She corrected immediately. "You're a LITTLE stupid."
"No but wait I'm being serious for like two seconds -"
Yuna paused. Her eyes went wide - not wet, just suddenly wider, like something behind them had shifted forward. She blinked twice. Fast.
"I really love you guys."
"Yeah, we love you too," Yeji said quietly.
Yuna's face tightened for a fraction of a second - guilt, plain and obvious, the face of a girl who'd done more than think about it - before she covered it.
She covered it immediately. Of course she did.
"I'm horny again."
"THAT'S NOT VULNERABLE, THAT'S JUST TUESDAY," Ryujin said.
"No but LOOK -" Yuna was already reaching for her phone, the chunky puppy case catching lamplight as she unlocked it with her thumb. "Okay so yesterday before the beach I took this mirror selfie - the black bikini with the gold chains? - and I just found it in my Evidence I'm Hot folder and it's giving editorial. It's giving campaign. It's giving future-me-will-thank-present-me -"
She was scrolling. Fast, thumb flicking through her camera roll with the practiced speed of someone who documented her own life like a full-time job.
"And I did this WHOLE routine, right? Hair, body, moisturiser, the WORKS, and I walked down to the beach looking like a campaign and the only person there was this guy who started talking to me about CRYPTOCURRENCY. At EIGHT IN THE MORNING. He said the word 'blockchain' like it was a pickup line. I literally wanted to walk into the ocean and drown. So I walked back to the villa and -"
She stopped.
Her mouth stayed open. The sentence hung there, half-finished, the next word visible behind her teeth. Her eyes flickered - fast, involuntary, a micro-correction that rerouted whatever she'd been about to say.
"- and took a NAP," she finished. "Because crypto is EXHAUSTING. Anyway the PHOTO -"
Nobody caught it. Chaeryeong was already laughing about the crypto guy. Lia was shaking her head. Yeji's mouth twitched.
Ryujin caught it.
The stutter. The redirect. The way "walked back to the villa and -" had been heading somewhere before Yuna's survival instincts kicked in. Ryujin knew what was at the other end of that sentence because she'd walked in on the evidence of it - Yuna wrapped around him in the shower, cum already leaking down her thigh, the lounge chair still damp from whatever had happened before Ryujin arrived. Yuna had walked back to the villa and found Minho. And whatever happened next was the reason she'd spent today folding napkins into triangles.
Yuna was scrolling again, the moment already buried under momentum. Ryujin caught flashes of content as they flew past - Yuna in various states of posed perfection, food, more Yuna, a sunset, Yuna again.
"Lia-unnie, get closer, you need the full screen for this -"
"Yuna." Lia's voice. Quiet. The kind of quiet that stops a room.
Yuna's thumb kept moving. "Hold on, it's right -"
"Yuna-ya." Softer now. Almost gentle, which was worse. "Is that Minho-oppa?"
The thumb stopped.
"Oh my GOD -" Chaeryeong was already leaning over Yuna's shoulder, fingers clamping onto her arm. "Scroll back. SCROLL BACK."
Yuna didn't scroll back. Yuna didn't move at all. Her whole body locked - thumb hovering over the glass, face angled away from the screen like it might detonate. The phone sat open in her palm, bright enough to light the bottom of her chin, displaying what was unmistakably a cropped and zoomed screenshot of Minho from a group photo. Minho leaning against a doorframe, forearms bare, sleeves pushed up, jaw angled slightly down. Isolated from the rest of the frame with the kind of careful precision that suggested someone had spent real time on the crop.
Chaeryeong swiped up. Another one. Minho's hands around a coffee cup - different clothes, different season, autumn light through a café window. Zoomed until the veins on the backs of his hands were sharper than the background. She kept swiping. Minho's back in a parking garage, shoulders filling out a black t-shirt, taken from behind a pillar at a distance that said the photographer hadn't wanted to be caught - and just visible at the edge of the crop, a sleeve in Yeji's favourite grey hoodie, the rest of her cut out of the frame so cleanly only someone who knew that hoodie would notice. More. Minho's jaw in profile outside what had to be a JYP building, the line of it caught in late afternoon light, zoomed until you could see the muscle flex where his jaw met his ear. Minho at the Busan yacht party six months ago, forearms on a railing, sleeves pushed to the elbow, shot from across the deck with the compression artifacts of someone who'd maxed out their zoom and prayed. And then the Jeju ones - Minho in the kitchen this morning, back turned, shoulders caught mid-stretch, the hem of his shirt riding up to show a strip of lower back. Minho at yesterday's lunch, stolen between bites when nobody was looking, the focus pulled tight on his mouth. Scattered through Yuna's camera roll between selfies and food photos and outfit checks spanning months. A curated gallery of forearms and jawlines and hands and the exact way shirts sat on his shoulders, predating the trip by seasons.
Yuna's face went nuclear. Ryujin watched it happen in real time. Ears flushing hot pink at the tips and spreading down. Neck blotching red in uneven patches above her collar. Chest blooming the same mortified shade above her sleep shirt, full-body betrayal radiating from her scalp to her fingertips. Her own skin testifying against her.
The room held its breath for two full seconds.
Then Yuna unfroze.
"Those are for AESTHETICS." Her voice cracked on the second syllable. "I photograph EVERYONE. I have a whole SYSTEM. It's content curation, it's not - I'm documenting the TRIP -"
"This trip." Chaeryeong, still scrolling, still staring. "Yuna. This one's from the Busan party. Six months ago." She kept swiping. "This one's from winter. He's wearing a COAT." Her thumb kept moving. "These are all the same person. For MONTHS."
"He's PHOTOGENIC. He has good BONE STRUCTURE. It would be a CRIME against visual media not to -"
Yeji sat up. The loose, wine-warm softness in her posture vanished in a single motion. "You WHAT."
Yuna's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Nothing came out. Her phone was still glowing in her hand and her eyes were enormous and she looked exactly like a girl who'd realized the lightest version of what she'd done was already too much to explain.
Ryujin bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper. The terror on Yuna's face wasn't about a fucking crush. It was about adjacency - someone pulling a thread and finding what dangled from the other end. This was why she'd been performing the good maknae all day. The napkins at breakfast. The sunscreen on Yeji's shoulders. The vegetable prep she'd volunteered for. The braiding she'd gone boneless under. All of it had been building a wall between Yeji and the truth, and the phone had just detonated the foundation.
Yuna's camera roll was the safest version of a much less safe truth. Ryujin knew. Yuna knew Ryujin knew. Neither of them breathed.
Then Yeji's face changed.
The possessiveness flickered. Held. And softened into something Ryujin had never seen on Hwang Yeji before. Her jaw loosened. The corners of her mouth lifted. Her whole expression settled into quiet certainty - the face of an idol who'd already seen the chart numbers before the live reveal and had zero interest in performing surprise.
"His bone structure IS good," Yeji said mildly.
Yuna stared. "You're not -"
"Very photogenic." Yeji picked up her glass and sipped.
Chaeryeong looked between them with the expression of someone watching a nature documentary that had taken an unexpected turn toward interspecies cooperation. Yuna was still frozen in her nuclear state, braced for an explosion that wasn't coming, waiting for punishment that had been quietly replaced by something worse and better - grace.
From the quiet corner, Lia caught Yeji's eye. One look - seen - and Lia's hand touched Yeji's arm briefly, a gesture so small it vanished before anyone could name it.
The relief detonated Chaeryeong and Yuna simultaneously.
"She wasn't even MAD." Chaeryeong's whisper was already climbing. Her hands were in motion, conducting the revelation like she was directing traffic at an intersection of feelings. "Yuna. She wasn't even mad. Do you understand what that MEANS?"
"It means she's WON." Yuna grabbed Chaeryeong's arm with both hands. "She literally KNOWS she's won. She's so secure she can see her man on another girl's phone and just - just SIP HER DRINK -"
"That's episode fourteen energy. That's the part where the female lead already knows and she's just letting everyone else catch up -"
"No, no, no, it's BEYOND that - like, okay, you don't look at zoomed photos of your boyfriend on someone else's phone and just say 'very photogenic' unless the sex is INSANE -"
"YUNA -"
"I'm just SAYING. That level of security? That's not emotional maturity, that's being dicked down so good you transcend jealousy -"
"Oh my GOSH -" Chaeryeong's face was scarlet but she was laughing too hard to be genuinely scandalized. She grabbed Yuna's shoulders. "Okay but WAIT. What if - what if she already knows they're endgame? Like, what if they've had the CONVERSATION? The 'where is this going' conversation? Because that face, that was the face of a girl who KNOWS -"
"A girl who knows because she's getting her back blown out on the REGULAR -"
"STOP making it about sex, this is about LOVE -"
"It's about BOTH, Chaeryeong-unnie, love AND sex, that's literally the whole point, she's in love and she's getting railed and she's HAPPY about it -"
They were both on their knees now, facing each other, volume escalating with each exchange. Yuna's hands sculpted theories in the air. Chaeryeong's grabbed at Yuna's wrists every time she said something that required physical contact to process. Ryujin watched from the floor with her soju. They were screaming about Yeji getting railed into emotional transcendence three metres from Yeji's actual face, and Yeji was just sitting there with her glass in hand, letting them.
"Do you think he's told her he loves her?"
"Oh, one HUNDRED percent. Have you SEEN the way he looks at her? Like, literally the way he -"
"But has SHE said it back? Because Yeji-unnie doesn't say things like that, she never says things like that, and if SHE said it -"
"If she said it that's basically a PROPOSAL -"
"A VERBAL PROPOSAL -"
The glass door to the pool deck slid open. Sunwoo stepped inside with the bone-deep resignation of a man who'd heard this exact frequency through walls before and knew from experience that it only went in one direction.
"Baby."
Chaeryeong didn't look at him. She was gripping Yuna's forearm with both hands and her mouth was still moving. "- and the HUMMING this morning, Yuna, I'm telling you, humming is involuntary serotonin -"
"Chaeryeong-ah." He crossed the room. Gentle hands on her waist. The practised motion of a boy who had performed this extraction before - at 2 AM dorm rooms, at afterparty hotel suites, at every location where Chaeryeong and Yuna had ever achieved critical gossip mass. He started steering her toward the door. "It's late. Come on."
She went. Her legs moved. Her mouth did not stop.
"Involuntary serotonin, Yuna!" she called over Sunwoo's shoulder, her body halfway through the doorway, her head craned back at a forty-five degree angle. "That means the body is responding to sustained emotional fulfillment on a NEUROCHEMICAL level -"
"It's her CERVIX responding, Chaeryeong-unnie, oh my GOSH -"
"It's BOTH, it can be BOTH -"
"Sunwoo-ya." Yeji's voice. Warm. Settled. The same quiet certainty she'd worn all night. "It's girls' night. Give her back."
Sunwoo looked at Yeji. Looked at Chaeryeong still talking in his arms. Looked at Yuna already reaching for Chaeryeong. His mouth opened, reconsidered, closed. He released his girlfriend with the careful resignation of a man surrendering to forces larger than himself.
Chaeryeong resettled on the floor in one motion, cross-legged, already reaching for Yuna's hands. "Okay so SEROTONIN -"
Lia's voice floated from the corner. "Oxytocin."
Both of them turned. "What?"
"The bonding hormone is oxytocin. Serotonin is mood regulation." A sip. "If you're going to build a theory, at least get the chemistry right."
"OXYTOCIN," Chaeryeong corrected, pivoting without losing a beat of momentum. "Involuntary OXYTOCIN -"
Ryujin watched Yeji through the whole thing. The way she'd let them spiral. The way she'd called Sunwoo off without raising her voice. The way she sat with her glass and let two girls scream theories about her happiness and never once flinched or deflected or shut it down. It was the most generous thing Ryujin had seen her do in five years. Yeji was so full she could afford to let it spill.
The night wound down warm. Chaeryeong hugged Yuna for the fifth time. Yeji tucked a strand of hair behind Yuna's ear without thinking about it. Lia poured one more round and raised her glass. "To surviving another year of Yuna."
Ryujin's glass was empty again. She refilled it without looking, the movement automatic, her hand steady while the rest of her tracked Yeji across the room - the laugh, the softness, the new shape of an old face. Her throat was tight and it wasn't the soju. The room was still laughing when she got up to refill the soju.
[MINHO - FIRST PERSON]
The pool deck at night was a different country from the one I'd visited at dawn.
The overcast had vanished entirely and the sky had gone wide and dark and packed with stars in the way it does when you're far enough from the city for the light pollution to stop lying about how many there are. The pool was lit from underneath - blue-white light that turned the water into something between mirror and stage, throwing wavering patterns onto the stone walls. Warmer. Less punishing. The brutalist angles softened by darkness, the geometry hidden.
Through the glass doors, faintly, the movie was still playing. Nobody had turned it off. The male lead's voice, tinny and distant, confessing something for what had to be the fifth time.
Sunwoo handed me a maekju before I'd finished sitting down, already open and cold - the gesture of a guy whose first instinct with any new person was feed them.
Minjun nodded from his deck chair without standing up, phone face-down on the armrest, legs crossed. He didn't offer anything - just watched me settle in with the patience of a cat who'd already decided whether you were interesting.
"First time in Jeju?" Sunwoo asked.
"Yeah. You?"
"Third. Chaeryeong's family comes down often. She knows every restaurant."
"We have it easy," Minjun said. He'd been quiet since we sat down, letting Sunwoo fill the social space with his reflexive warmth. "Chaeryeong and Lia - they communicate. They tell you what they want. They tell you when you've messed up." He paused, looked at me. "No games."
The word games sat between us with the pointedness of a Dispatch article timed to midnight. The pool filter hummed beneath us - the same mechanical breath I'd been listening to at dawn, when the water wouldn't stay the right colour. I took a long pull from my maekju.
"Yeji's..." Sunwoo shook his head. "Completely different beast. My cousin was in the trainee programme at the same time - he said she scared the instructors."
"She doesn't scare me," I said.
Minjun's eyebrow moved exactly one millimetre. I'd never seen a single millimetre convey so much scepticism.
"She cooked for you this morning?" Sunwoo said.
"She tried. I took over."
"Hwang Yeji. Cooked for you. The girl who once set rice on fire." Sunwoo was grinning. "You know that's not - she doesn't do that. For anyone. Ever."
"She was terrible at it," I said.
"That's exactly the point." Minjun was still sitting in the same arrangement of limbs that suggested comfort and was actually surveillance. "The fact that she was terrible and did it anyway. For you. In front of everyone."
The implication settled. Heavier than he'd intended, or perhaps exactly as heavy as he'd intended. With Minjun it was hard to tell where observation ended and strategy began.
"Hwang Yeji doesn't do relationships," Sunwoo said, like he was reporting a natural law. "Everyone knows that. It's like an industry fact. My cousin was a trainee at JYP - he said the running joke was that Yeji-noona's walls had walls."
"Lia says it's the intensity," Minjun added. "Too much leader energy. Too controlled. Nobody gets through. They either get intimidated or she decides they're not worth the vulnerability." He was looking at me when he said it.
"Takes some kind of guy to handle all of that," Minjun said.
I drank my beer. Sunwoo was nodding along. Minjun was not nodding. The phrase all of that was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence and he knew exactly how much.
"She seems happy, though," Sunwoo said. "Like, actually happy. The way she was at dinner... I've never seen an idol that relaxed."
"She is," I said. And it was true.
"You stayed," Sunwoo said, like the thought had just occurred to him. "The trainee programme. Most guys would've left after the third month. It's brutal." He made it sound like hardship was fascinating rather than, you know, hard.
"I liked the work," I said.
"He stayed because of her," Minjun said. Not to Sunwoo, but to me. "Right?"
The pool light threw patterns across the stone. I watched them move for longer than the silence warranted.
"I stayed because I wanted to be good at something," I said. "Meeting Yeji was a problem nobody asked for."
Sunwoo laughed. Minjun smiled. Two very different smiles.
Sunwoo leaned back and cracked another maekju. "Okay, but you want to hear about persistence? I asked Chaeryeong out FOUR TIMES before she said yes."
"Four times," I repeated.
"Four. The first time she said she was busy. Which - fair. The second time she said she'd think about it. Which meant no. The third time she said she was 'focusing on herself.' Which ALSO meant no."
"And the fourth?"
"The fourth time I brought her favourite tteokbokki from that place in Gangnam, the one with the two-hour wait, and I sat outside her practice room for three hours." Sunwoo's face had gone soft with the memory. "She came out and said 'you're still here' and I said 'I'll keep being here' and she said -" He grinned. "She said she was testing my persistence. I told her I was testing my will to live."
I'll keep being here. The words landed clean and I let them. Sunwoo could say that and mean only the beautiful part. The part where showing up was everything, where persistence was proof of love rather than proof of how much damage you could accumulate by not leaving when you should have.
Minjun shook his head. "He cried on the phone to Lia after the third rejection."
"I did NOT -"
"Lia showed me the texts."
"Those were PRIVATE -"
"He sent fourteen messages. One of them was just the word 'help' in capitals."
I laughed. Genuinely. Sunwoo's face was the red of a man whose heroic narrative had just been fact-checked.
"Lia told him to try one more time," Minjun said. "She said Chaeryeong had been talking about him for weeks."
"She KNEW?" Sunwoo turned to Minjun. "Lia KNEW and she let me suffer?"
"She said watching you panic was the most entertainment she'd had all year."
The night carried on. The beer was cold and the stars were dense like they only could on islands, and Sunwoo told trainee stories breathless enthusiasm, making the experience wonderful rather than traumatic. Minjun offered industry observations that cut clean. And I laughed at the right times and asked the right questions and the performance was so smooth I almost forgot it was a performance, except the pool light kept catching my peripheral vision and every time it did the blue went black for a frame before correcting itself.
***
[RYUJIN'S POV - THIRD PERSON]
The soju was in her bloodstream now. Not enough to blur - Ryujin could drink most men she'd met under the table - but enough to dissolve the membrane between what she was thinking and what she was willing to feel. The intellectual distance she'd maintained all day, the careful inventory, the naming of observations without naming the emotions underneath - the soju ate through that layer.
The chimaek was gone but the memory of dinner wasn't. Her kitchen, her plan, her stations. All of it dismantled by love stories she wasn't part of - Lia's cucumber rebellion, Chaeryeong drifting toward Sunwoo, Yuna's rustic cubes, and Yeji burning two pans because Minho's arm was more important than anything Ryujin could have made.
She poured another shot. The burn was welcome.
"You know," Ryujin said, "dinner would have been incredible if ANYONE had stayed at their station for more than thirty seconds."
Chaeryeong giggled guiltily, knowing she'd contributed to the collapse. Yuna shrugged. "My cuts were rustic." But Ryujin was looking at Yeji.
"Especially you, unnie. You burned TWO pans because you couldn't let go of his arm long enough to stir."
She was grinning. It WAS funny, to be fair. The delivery was comedic, the timing perfect, the callback specific enough to land as a bit. Yeji laughed it off, recognising the joke and accepted the roast with the generosity because her happiness right now was too big to be dented by kitchen banter.
"The chicken was good though," Yeji said.
Ryujin's grip tightened on the bottle. She poured another shot but ended up staring at the glass.
Chaeryeong leaned forward, eyes bright with soju and real curiosity. "Unnie." Her voice crossed the line from tipsy into confessional. "Can I ask you something?"
Yeji looked at her, patient, open.
"Are you..." Chaeryeong glanced at the others, then back. "Are you in love with him?"
The question was so direct and unambiguous, that old-Yeji would have immediately deflected with a joke or a subject change or deployed the leader voice .
This Yeji just smiled softly, and send nothing. She didn't need to, because the smile said everything.
Ryujin drank the shot and poured another.
"Oh my GOD," Yuna breathed. "That smile is a YES, unnie, that smile is literally a PROPOSAL -"
"I've never seen you like this," Chaeryeong said, and her voice had gone soft with wonder. "It's so -"
Ryujin drank the second shot. The burn didn't help.
She'd sat here for twenty minutes watching Yeji be openly, unapologetically happy about him. Watched her friends scream about oxytocin and dicked-down security and emotional transcendence and Yeji just sitting there letting them, her face doing that soft settled thing that meant she'd already won and didn't need to compete anymore. Twenty minutes of witnessing Yeji's happiness built on the person Ryujin had fucked yesterday, and the guilt and the abandonment were the same weight in her chest and she couldn't tell which one was crushing her harder.
She pivoted. Grinned. Summoned the old energy one more time.
"So Yeji-yah," she said, her voice bright, selling the bit. "Remember when we used to rate guys after? You used to be ruthless. 'Great stamina, terrible pacing' - that was YOUR line. Come on, give us the Minho review. Scale of one to ten."
She was performing the old dynamic. The banter that used to sync like choreography - Ryujin leads, Yeji matches, they escalate together until someone else in the room has to beg them to stop. This was the Yeji she knew. The Yeji she'd loved for years. The version that would parry with something filthy and sharp and perfectly timed.
Yeji laughed softly, warm, without competition. "I don't think about it like that anymore."
Anymore.
Ryujin drank. The soju hit the back of her throat and she swallowed hard, her jaw tight.
Two rejections. Kitchen, now this. Both times Yeji chose the settled version over matching Ryujin's energy.
Ryujin pushed harder, got louder.
"Okay but the WORST hookup I ever had - and I mean worst in the best way - was this idol. Not naming names. But his stage name has three syllables and he cannot find the clit with a MAP and a FLASHLIGHT."
"WHO," Yuna screamed.
"I said NOT naming names -"
"Three syllables, that's like HALF of SM -"
Chaeryeong was choking on her drink. "I'm going to DIE, I'm going to actually DIE -"
Ryujin leaned in, riding the energy. "He kept asking 'is this good?' and I kept saying 'slightly to the left' and he kept going RIGHT, and at some point I just took his hand and MOVED it and he went 'oh, THERE?' like he'd discovered a NEW CONTINENT -"
The room detonated. Yuna was on her back. Chaeryeong had tears streaming down her face.
Yeji laughed, fond and settled. From just outside the whirlwind. She was enjoying Ryujin's energy the way you enjoy a memory of who you used to be.
The frustration curdled. Something meaner rose to replace it.
"He's like a golden retriever, Yeji-yah." Ryujin's voice had changed. Still light, still selling the delivery of a joke, but the temperature beneath it had dropped fifteen degrees. "You say sit, he sits."
The room shifted. Not a gasp - something quieter, a barometric pressure change that everyone's body registered before their minds caught up. Lia's eyes lifted from her phone. Chaeryeong stopped mid-sip.
Ryujin knew what she was doing. PET without saying pet. His devotion reframed as servility. The way he reads her reframed as a man with no spine.
Yeji stopped smiling.
The warmth vanished. Someone had hit a switch behind Yeji's face and flipped it to something cold. The practice room. The drill sergeant.
"Don't."
One word. The register that made rooms reorganise themselves.
The room obeyed. Chaeryeong went still. Yuna's eyes fell to her glass. Lia's face went very quiet - the quiet of someone recognising a pattern she'd predicted and finding no satisfaction in being right.
Ryujin didn't flinch. Hierarchy had never touched Ryujin. She didn't hear "Don't" from a leader. She heard it from Yeji. From her person. The girl who used to rate boys with her and match her chaos beat for beat.
Yeji was pulling rank. To protect Minho. Against her.
Ryujin's eyes didn't drop. She held the look. Two girls in swimwear on the floor of a rented villa, soju between them, the room taut with the silence that follows when someone says a word that can't be taken back and someone else refuses to accept the authority behind it.
***
[MINHO - FIRST PERSON]
Sunwoo had gone inside for another round of maekju. The moment the sliding door closed, the pool deck's atmosphere changed the way rooms change when the only two people left in them are the one with questions and the one with answers.
Minjun didn't move, didn't change his posture. The silence expanded between us and the pool filter hummed and the underwater light threw slow patterns across the stone and I couldn't find a single place to rest my eyes that didn't feel like an admission of something.
I was the one who broke it. Of course I was.
"She cooked for me."
"You mentioned."
"No, I mean -" I stopped. Started again. "She's terrible at it. She KNOWS she's terrible at it. She got up early to burn eggs for someone who already knows she can't cook, and when I took over she didn't leave the kitchen. She stayed. Attached to my arm. Getting in the way. Smiling."
The words came out with a breathlessness that surprised me. I'd been sitting on that observation all day and it surfaced with the urgency of something that had been underwater too long.
Minjun's chin tilted. He let the silence do the rest.
The pool light threw patterns across the stone. Wavering, blue-white, hypnotic if you let them be. I didn't let them be. I looked at my hands.
"I fucked up."
"Yeah." No follow-up. No question about what, specifically, or when, or with whom. Minjun didn't ask, and that was worse.
"She deserves better than what I've given her."
"Probably." He shifted in the chair - the first time he'd moved since Sunwoo left. "But that's for her to decide, isn't it?"
"You're not the guy I thought you were when we got here," he said after a moment. "I thought - Yeji's friend. Idol arm candy. A man who shows up for vacation and leaves when it stops being easy."
"And now?"
"Now I think you're someone who stands at a pool at seven in the morning because he can't sleep." He looked at me, level and unhurried. "And whatever's keeping you awake - it's not the mattress."
I wanted to make a joke. Something about the mattress being perfectly adequate, actually - we'd tested it at multiple angles and force distributions yesterday morning, and the engineering held. Nothing came.
"Either way." He leaned forward - first time he'd moved toward me all night. "The in-between is what's killing you. The standing-at-pools thing, the flinching when she looks at you - she can see it. They all can."
Every word landing on target. My hands tightened on the beer bottle. The glass was slick with condensation and I gripped it harder than the moment warranted because looking at Minjun right now was like being x-rayed by someone who'd already read the results.
"How long have you known?" The question surfaced before I could stop it.
"Known what?"
"About -" I gestured vaguely. Everything was too big. The real thing was too dangerous. "Whatever you think you know."
Minjun's expression didn't change. "I pay attention."
Which was not an answer but was absolutely an answer.
Sunwoo's footsteps on the stairs. The moment closed. Minjun's face rearranged itself into the pleasant blankness of a man who'd been making small talk, and by the time Sunwoo slid the door open with two maekju and a grin, nothing about the pool deck suggested that anything had happened at all.
But his eyes. One last look before Sunwoo broke the frame.
You did this to yourself.
I took the beer and drank. The cold felt deserved.
***
[RYUJIN'S POV - THIRD PERSON]
The stare broke when Ryujin spoke.
"You pulled RANK on me."
Her voice was steady. Quiet. Worse than shouting, because it meant she'd moved past performing her anger and arrived at the real thing underneath.
"You used the LEADER VOICE on me," Ryujin said. "To protect your boyfriend. Against ME."
Yeji stood up. She couldn't have this conversation from the floor.
"Ryujin-ah -"
"I'm not one of your trainees. I'm not Yuna. I'm not Chaeryeong. You don't get to shut me down with that voice and expect me to just -"
"He's not my BOYFRIEND, he's -"
"He IS. That's exactly what he is, and you WON'T say it because saying it would mean admitting you're in a relationship and Hwang Yeji doesn't DO relationships, remember? Except you DO now. You DO, and everyone in this house can see it, and you're too busy playing house to notice that you're not the same person anymore."
Lia drew her knees up on the sofa.
"You've CHANGED." Ryujin's voice cracked on the word. "All day. Every time I tried - kitchen, beach, dinner - you picked HIM. Every time. You don't rate guys with me anymore. You don't GO anywhere with me. You just -" Her hand gestured sharply toward the villa interior, toward where Minho sat outside. "You just ORBIT."
Chaeryeong's knuckles went white around her glass.
Yeji's hands were at her sides, fingers working against each other. Counting responses. Suppressing the first seven. Choosing the eighth.
"Maybe I NEEDED to!" Yeji's voice hit a register Ryujin had never heard from her - raw, unmasked, the leader voice stripped away entirely, leaving something younger and more frightened underneath. "Maybe I needed to change because the person I was before wasn't - wasn't WORKING, Ryujin-ah, maybe I was exhausted and lonely and pretending I was fine and he was the first person who -"
"Who WHAT?" Ryujin stepped forward. "Who made you soft? Who made you boring? Who made you forget that you and I used to be -"
"Used to be WHAT? Say it."
"THE SAME." Ryujin's voice cracked. "We used to be the SAME and now you look at me like I'm something you outgrew -"
"That's not -"
The words were right there. Right behind her teeth. The detonation sequence already loading, the one that would rewrite everything, the one that would prove Yeji's precious not-boyfriend wasn't special, wasn't different, wasn't HERS in any way that mattered. I fucked him too. On that deck. Same pool. Same man. What's so special about someone who came inside both of us before lunch?
Her mouth opened.
The syllables formed.
And Yeji was looking at her with those eyes - hurt, yes, furious, yes, but beneath both of those, beneath the argument and the accusations and the five years of unspoken things piled between them like furniture in a room too small to hold it all: trust. Yeji was looking at Ryujin the way you look at someone who has the power to destroy you and you're waiting to see if they will.
Ryujin's throat closed.
She thought of Yeji's fingers in Yuna's hair this afternoon. The braid. The tenderness. The way she'd said you're my baby, that's permanent. The way permanence sounded in Yeji's mouth - like a fact, like something that existed whether you acknowledged it or not.
She'd fucked a hundred people and this was the only one who'd ever made her feel like keeping a secret was an act of love.
"- who made you stop seeing me," Ryujin finished. Different sentence. Different shape. The bomb was back in her pocket and her hand was shaking from not pressing it. "What does he have that I don't? Why is HE enough and five years of me isn't?"
The question landed softer than the bomb would have. Worse, in some ways - because the bomb would have ended the conversation, and this kept it alive. This was Ryujin asking to be told why she'd been replaced, and the answer was going to hurt no matter what shape it took.
Yuna's phone screen was dark, forgotten.
The accusation landed and Yeji flinched - small, involuntary - Ryujin was right enough for the truth to cut.
"I see you," Yeji said, her voice quieter now. "Ryuddaeng, I see you every -"
"You SAW me." Past tense, wielded with sharpness. "You saw me today the way you see a memory. Like something nice you used to have. Like -" She was struggling now. The words weren't landing the way she needed them to, weren't carrying the weight of what she felt, and the frustration of being unable to articulate the exact shape of her loss made her louder. "Like I'm something you've outgrew."
Silence.
Yeji's throat moved.
"That's not fair." Yeji's voice had gone quiet. Controlled. The control visible in her jaw, in the deliberate pace of her breathing. "I didn't outgrow you."
The sentence stopped there. Not because she'd finished. Because the next word - the real word, the word that had been pressing against the backs of her teeth all night - was too big for this room and too dangerous for this fight and too honest to give to the person it would hurt the most.
Her mouth opened, closed - the visible effort of swallowing something back down.
Ryujin saw it. The almost-word. The flinch of restraint. And the absence of what Yeji wouldn't say landed harder than any confession, because a confession could be argued with, challenged, taken apart and examined. Silence was a locked door.
"You won't even say it." Ryujin's voice had gone quiet too. The fury stripped to something worse - something young and bewildered and hurt in a way anger couldn't reach. "You won't even tell me what he is to you."
Yeji's chin came up. Her eyes were bright. Her mouth was a line.
"I'm not sorry for changing."
The words landed in the space where the other word should have been. And everyone in the room heard both - what she said, and what she couldn't.
Ryujin looked at her for a long time. A look that held entire conversations, entire histories, years of friendship compressed into a single sustained gaze. And then the fight went out of her. Something in Ryujin's face collapsed into the look of someone who'd arrived at the accident scene to discover the damage was old, and there was nothing left to save.
She stood up.
"I need air."
The door opened, then closed, then the sound of barefoot steps on tile getting quieter until there was nothing.
***
Yuna hadn't moved. Her face had gone white - genuinely, visibly white, the colour draining like someone had pulled a plug beneath the skin. Her phone was dark and forgotten. Her mouth slightly open. A girl who'd heard the fight that her secret had helped cause, sitting in the wreckage of it with nowhere to perform.
Her hands were shaking. She looked at them with genuine surprise, as though they belonged to someone else.
Chaeryeong reached over and took one of those hands, held it without speaking, anchored.
Lia was already standing, moving toward the kitchen. She paused in the doorway, looked back at Yeji, held the look longer than Lia ever held anything, then she was gone.
***
[MINHO - FIRST PERSON]
We heard voices through the walls again. At first I didn't move - an hour ago Sunwoo had come back from retrieving Chaeryeong with the resigned expression of a hostage negotiator whose jurisdiction had been overruled, and the screaming after that had been loud enough to rattle the sliding door. We'd learned to ignore it. This was girls' night volume, tuned out as background noise.
But this sounded different. The pitch was wrong. One voice going high. The other going cold. Then both climbing. Not the giddy frequency of theories and hormones and K-drama logic anymore - something rawer underneath, something with edges.
Sunwoo heard it first. His beer stopped halfway to his mouth.
The word CHANGED punched through the walls with enough force to reach the pool deck where the three of us sat in the sudden taut silence of men who'd heard something they couldn't unhear. "Maybe I NEEDED to!" Yeji's voice - the one she saved for when the stakes were real. Then the door, pulled shut with deliberate force - louder than slamming because it meant control. Ryujin. I knew it without looking.
Sunwoo was on his feet. "Should we -"
"Don't." Minjun hadn't moved. "Let it breathe."
Sunwoo looked at me. Open, worried, the uncomplicated concern of someone whose emotional life operated at one speed and that speed was all in. "You coming inside?"
"You go. I'll stay out here."
He hesitated, then nodded and went.
Minjun stayed, his eyes finding mine across the pool deck - his face said it all - then he unfolded from the chair with the unhurried grace of someone whose night was proceeding exactly as he'd anticipated. "Right. Catch you later." His footsteps on the tile, the sliding door, then silence.
I ended up at the pool edge again - didn't plan it, didn't decide, just found myself standing at the same spot I'd occupied twelve hours ago. The villa didn't care about human problems, hadn't at dawn, didn't now. Night was different. The overcast had burned off while nobody was watching and the sky had opened into something vast and dark and honest about how many stars it had been hiding. The pool glowed from below - blue-white, the underwater lights turning the water luminous, casting wavering patterns up the stone walls that made the whole space feel submerged. The hard edges that had pressed in at dawn had retreated into shadow, the minimalism less aggressive in the dark. Same pool, softer prosecution.
The filter was still running underneath - same mechanical hum I'd heard at dawn, patient and methodical, cleaning water that didn't need cleaning anymore. The sound hadn't changed. Twelve hours and it was still doing its job, still circulating, still trying to process whatever the pool had absorbed. At dawn I'd thought it sounded relentless. Now it just sounded steady. Present. Still here.
The water didn't flash black this time - it just showed my own face looking back up at me from the depths, and that was harder. Water going dark in my peripheral vision was a malfunction I could override. My own reflection asking questions was something else entirely. I'd heard her fight for it through the walls, through the glass, her voice carrying the pitch of someone defending something she wouldn't name. She hadn't said the word. She'd fought for what we were without once calling it what it was.
I looked up. The sky didn't offer forgiveness this time either - but at least it was honest now, vast and dark and packed with stars that had been there all along, just hidden behind grey. This morning I'd looked up and seen nothing useful. Tonight the sky gave me the same answer but clearer: you're small, this is bigger than you, and neither of those facts change what you have to do.
The weight in my chest had changed shape since morning. All day I'd watched her body say what her mouth couldn't - kitchen, beach, the nap, dinner - and all day I'd received it knowing I didn't deserve it. Ryujin's mouth finding mine in the dark. That was the image that wouldn't leave. The one that made everything Yeji had just fought for into something I'd already made a lie.
This morning I'd stood here thinking of the pool as a crime scene, evidence the chlorine couldn't reach, water that knew what I'd done even if the filter couldn't process it. But the water tonight was just water. Same chemical composition, same rectangular container, but it had stopped being a courtroom. The pool wasn't prosecuting me anymore. I was prosecuting myself, and that was worse, because at least architecture could be escaped. At least a pool could be walked away from. This followed.
The stone was cold under my feet - not the punishing cold from dawn, but the same temperature stone always was at night, indifferent, didn't care what I'd done or who I loved or whether I deserved either. Twelve hours ago I'd stood here measuring myself against guilt and finding nothing worth keeping. Now I was measuring against something bigger - not good enough for her, but walking away would be worse. Staying meant she'd find out eventually. Leaving meant she'd never know what he'd fought for was real.
This morning the pool had felt like a vocal booth - small and contained and designed for isolation. Now it felt like a stage. Not because the space had changed but because someone was about to walk onto it, and I had a choice about whether I'd still be standing here when she arrived.
I walked back through the villa toward the pool. Three windows.
Through the first I saw Ryujin - outside, on the side terrace, arms wrapped around herself, silhouetted against the landscape lighting. The tension had gone from her shoulders in a way that looked more like collapse than relaxation. I kept walking. Through the second window, Yuna - inside, on the floor where the girls' night had been, cross-legged, still, her phone dark in her lap. Her face was doing nothing, and that was the part that stopped me - Yuna's face ALWAYS did something, always performed, always projected, and the blankness was so foreign to her features that she looked like a different person. I recognised it because I'd been wearing a version of it since dawn - the same guilt, the same pool. She looked young, younger than she was, a girl who'd heard a fight about the bomb she'd helped build and couldn't find anyone to tell.
Through the third window, Lia - in the kitchen, alone, sitting at the counter with her phone face-down in front of her, both hands flat on the surface, completely still. The set of her jaw. The deliberate placement of her hands. The phone between her palms like something she was deciding about. Her knuckles were white. I didn't know what was on her phone. I kept walking. The pool again. Of course the pool. The water reflected the stars and my face and nothing I could use - same stone, same cold. My shadow fell long across the tile from the underwater lights, distorted by the angle, stretching toward the villa like it was trying to reach something I couldn't see.
But something had shifted. This morning the smallness had been its own comfort - a punishment with the dignity of being self-imposed. Now the smallness was an obstacle, something standing between me and the thing I needed to do, which was to show up. I didn't know how. But I was done standing here. I was done letting the pool decide.
***
[YEJI'S POV - THIRD PERSON]
The room was empty - the glasses were still there, the soju bottles, Chaeryeong's abandoned cushion, the circle they'd made on the floor, but the people were gone and the room still smelled like soju and perfume and something that might have been tears. Yeji was sitting where she'd been sitting when Ryujin left, hadn't moved, her hands in her lap and her fingers working against each other, thumb pressing into palm, the repetitive motion of a body processing something the mind hadn't caught up to yet.
I almost said it. The thought arrived without permission - not constructed, not chosen, just there, surfacing in the silence the way the word itself had almost surfaced ten minutes ago, pressing against her teeth before she'd swallowed it back down. The word. I almost said the word. To Ryujin. In front of everyone.
The sting behind her eyes was chemical, involuntary, the body's response to emotional pressure that exceeded what the throat could contain. She blinked once, twice. The moisture didn't fall but collected along her lash line and sat there, a meniscus of feeling too full to spill and too present to ignore. The sting wasn't about Minho - it was about Ryujin's face, the exact frame where fury collapsed into something unrecognisable. That look. Yeji had caused that look. Saying the word would have made it worse. Not saying it hadn't made it better.
She said I've changed. Yeji's throat moved, the swallow loud in the empty room. She's right. I have. I changed and I didn't warn her. I changed and I didn't ask permission. I changed because Minho saw me - the version nobody else bothered to look for, the version underneath the leader voice and the perfect smile and the controlled everything - and I let him see me and it turned out the real version was softer than the performance and the softness felt better than the discipline ever had. And Ryujin was the discipline.
She could see it now - fifteen years old in the practice room, the first time she'd matched Ryujin's energy instead of reaching for something softer. How easy it had been, how safe. The competitiveness humming between them, a voltage that kept the real feelings from ever touching the wire.
But he'd had made her want to feel.
The wanting itself was new. Quiet, steady, sitting in her chest without the old panic wrapped around it, and for once she didn't flinch from it.
Him. I want him. I want -
The sentence wouldn't finish. The feeling was too big for the word she kept almost reaching and her mind kept flinching away from it the way a hand flinches from a hot surface - not because of pain, but because of how much it would change once she touched it.
I want him and I couldn't say it and I'm not sorry for either.
The guilt was about Ryujin. About the cost, about that face. But she wouldn't apologise for the feeling itself. The girl who apologised for that was the girl Ryujin wanted her to still be, and that girl was gone.
The window was a dark rectangle across the room. She stood and crossed to it without deciding to, her body carrying her the way it always carried her - instinct first, thought second, the kitten-brain that had been running her decisions since before she'd learned to name it. He was at the pool. Of course he was.
Minho was standing at the edge, alone, shoulders carrying the weight of a man who'd spent the whole day faking fine and had run out of fake. Head tilted slightly back, looking up at stars he probably wasn't seeing. The underwater light catching his features from below, throwing shadows upward, turning him into something between sculpture and grief. She watched him for three breaths, four, five. He looked like that this morning too.
The thought surfaced with the pointedness of something she'd been avoiding all day. 7 AM, cold sheets on his side of the bed. She'd found him at this same pool, standing in the same posture, and his face when he turned around had been the face of someone who'd been somewhere terrible and hadn't finished coming back. She'd pulled him inside and wrapped herself around him and told herself it was the hour - that anyone looked haunted at seven in the morning, that the body played tricks before coffee.
But he'd flinched in the kitchen. She'd reached for his hand and his fingers had hesitated a quarter-second before closing around hers, and a quarter-second was nothing to anyone who wasn't Hwang Yeji, and Hwang Yeji had been reading Minho's micro-responses for five years. The delay had registered in her body before her mind caught up. At the beach his arms had found her in the water but the reaching had been hers first, every time. The nap, his heartbeat under her ear, too fast for someone resting, his chest rigid before it softened, and she'd pressed closer because pressing closer was the only language she had for tell me what's wrong.
He's been carrying something since before today. Since before any of this.
She didn't know what and didn't know why. The theories overlapped faster than she could sort them: he heard the fight, he thinks he's the reason Ryujin's outside on a terrace alone, he thinks he's the wedge splitting her friendships and the worst part is he's partially right and she can't tell him otherwise without lying about how much tonight cost.
Or this was bigger than tonight. Five years of being hidden, five years of existing only in stolen hours and locked doors, and then she'd dragged him into a house full of idols and spent the day claiming him in front of everyone - the arm, the beach, the nap, the feeding - a girl making up for lost time, and maybe lost time doesn't work that way. Maybe he'd looked at the full scope of her world and realised what belonging to it actually required.
Or maybe he's been pulling away since he got here and I've been clinging too hard to feel it.
The thought landed with a slap. She tested it against the evidence and the evidence was damning. Every touch today had been hers first. Every hold, every lean, every closing of distance. She'd spent the whole day orbiting him with increasing gravity and he'd received it, held it, but the initiating had come from her body every single time. The more he'd pulled inward the harder she'd pressed against him, a reflex she hadn't recognised until right now - the desperation of someone trying to close a gap that kept widening by cracks she couldn't name.
What if this is the thing I do? What if I cling until the shape of my clinging is the reason they leave?
Her hand was on the window frame and her fingers were pressing against the glass and the distance between them was the length of a hallway and a flight of stairs and a sliding door, and it was also the length of being seen - truly, completely, without the posture she'd held since she was fifteen.
I should give him space. The thought arrived and she meant it this time - space was the responsible thing, space was what you give someone who looked like that, someone carrying weight you couldn't identify, someone whose body had been giving you quarter-second warnings all day that you'd overridden with your own need to be close. But she was already moving - down the stairs, through the hallway, past the kitchen where Lia had been sitting, now empty, phone gone. The tile was cold under her feet. The villa was holding its breath. The sliding door. The night air. She walked toward him, barefoot, still in the cover-up she'd worn since the beach, across the cold tile, past the pool light that caught her ankles and made them glow blue-white, across the same stone she'd crossed that morning to pull him inside. The same distance, same direction, totally different mood.
He hadn't turned around. Her hand came up at her side, fingers curling closed around nothing - around the shape of his hand, the memory of his hand, her body rehearsing the hold before it arrived. She didn't notice she was doing it, and kept walking.
***
[RYUJIN'S POV - THIRD PERSON]
The tile was cold under her bare feet and Ryujin didn't care. She'd been on the side terrace long enough for the fight sweat to cool on her skin, long enough for the landscape lights to start looking like interrogation lamps. Her arms were locked around her own body, fingers dug into her elbows, and she wasn't crying, which felt wrong somehow, worse than wrong. She should be shaking. She should be doing something that matched the size of what had just detonated inside that room. She was standing in Jeju staring at garden hedges like they owed her money.
The fight played on loop - her own voice, too loud, too certain: You've CHANGED - like change was a crime, like Yeji owed her permanence, like staying the same was something you could demand of a person who was busy becoming someone Ryujin didn't recognise anymore. Fuck the word she'd almost heard in Yeji's voice. Fuck the way Yeji had said Don't - one syllable, nothing behind it but something that sounded a lot like pity - and it had landed harder than everything Ryujin had thrown because Yeji hadn't been fighting back. She'd been asking her to stop.
Ryujin hadn't stopped. Of course she hadn't, stopping wasn't in her wiring. Stopping was what people did when they read the room, and Ryujin had never met a room she didn't torch on the way out. So she'd kept going, kept swinging, kept proving Yeji right about every fucking thing she'd been too kind to say.
The anger ran out before she was ready for what was underneath it - something quieter, something that felt like being left and being outgrown and being the last person still standing in a version of them that Yeji had already walked away from, and Ryujin couldn't tell which one it was because they all lived in the same place in her chest. Her hand found her pocket before her brain caught up - AirPods. The case was warm from her body heat and she jammed them in with the practised efficiency of someone who'd been using music as a wall since she was fifteen. Shuffle. Play.
The first bar hit and her chest caved.
She'd sung that line a hundred thousand times and never once heard what it actually meant. Until now.
Guess who loves you? Do I show you? No, not I.
The synth dropped - MAFIA. Their song. Dark, predatory, the beat that had soundtracked the best year of their lives. She should skip it. Her thumb was right there, one tap and it would be gone, replaced by something that didn't feel like swallowing broken glass. But she didn't.
The beat built and the terrace dissolved and the memory rose through her uninvited, fully formed, merciless in the way only good memories know how to be. A penthouse suite. Full MAFIA leather. Champagne on someone's hands. The room roaring with half of JYP Nation - TWICE, Stray Kids, producers whose names opened doors, idols whose faces moved markets. And Yeji - catching her eye across the chaos with a grin that was hungry and reckless and nothing like the girl who'd just whispered Don't on the other side of a closed door. A grin that said We own this city and meant it. A grin that said Nothing can touch us. Nothing ever had.
Ryujin closed her eyes and let the song take her back.
Intro | Masterlist | Series Index Previous Chapter | Interlude (Chapter 19.5) | Next Chapter
Who Needs Therapy the Most After This Chapter?
Minho (self-prosecution at dawn)
Ryujin (obsolete. discarded. trying to cook through it.)
Yuna (trying to earn forgiveness nobody asked for)
Yeji (accidentally healing everyone but herself)
Chaeryeong (detective mode melting her own heart)
Me, because I took emotional collateral damage from people who aren’t real
Anyone who said “it’s just fluff” before reading the chapter
――――――――――――――――――
Author's Note
This is the second chapter with no smut (after Chapter 12), and honestly writing pure ensemble fluff might be harder than writing smut because at least with smut there's a clear structural framework and you know when you've landed a scene, whereas with fluff you're just hoping the vibes are enough to carry thousands of words of people cooking badly and arguing about sunscreen. I don't know if I'm any good at it, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway, because I genuinely loved writing these idiots being a family for a day before everything caught fire. And this fic isn't about Minho either, really. He's the catalyst, but both Yuna and Ryujin were complicit in the betrayal because they were using him to fight their own demons, and the weight of that doesn't vanish because he's the one having nightmares. This chapter, and this Act at large, is about ITZY as sisterhood - how they love each other, how they see each other, and what's left of the group when the center cracks.
Because it does catch fire, and the reason it catches fire is Ryeji, which I want to give some context on for anyone less familiar with ITZY. Ryujin and Yeji - "Ryeji" or "Ddaeng Ddong" as they named themselves - are one of the most iconic pairings in K-pop, and their dynamic is built almost entirely on chaos. Bickering, one-upping, matching each other's energy at frequencies that make everyone else in the room back up slowly. Ryujin once pitched their Studio Choom collaboration around Terminal, a movie about twin assassins, because that's genuinely how she sees them: a coordinated unit, not just friends. Their emotional vocabulary runs through competition and teasing - that IS the intimacy. It's the only language they share fluently. And Ryujin has admitted in interviews that she gets "swept up in emotions she doesn't even know" and relies on members, especially Yeji, to ground her when her internal world gets too big.
So when Yeji says "I don't think about it like that anymore" in this fic and declines to match Ryujin's chaos, she's not just turning down a bit. She's telling Ryujin their entire communication system is obsolete, and Ryujin - who has no backup language for "I miss you" or "please still be the person I recognise" - does the only thing she knows how to do: gets louder, gets sharper, gets meaner, because at least cruelty is a frequency Yeji used to match. The fight isn't about Minho. It's about two girls who built their bond on chaos discovering that one of them outgrew it.
For craft notes I'll leave those aside for now, but the dawn grey pool opening is inspired by yet more film language - if you're curious, drop a comment or send an ask and I'll happily ramble about it.
Something I'd love to hear from you though: have you ever been Ryujin in this situation - watching someone you love become happier in a way that doesn't include you anymore? Or have you been Yeji - changing without realizing what it cost someone?
