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moonrabbit ⠂⋆ ･ ksj p1

pairing - kim seokjin x reader contents - you are a streamer on twitch with a decent enough following for three maknaes from bts to know who you are. jin is none the wiser, but finds himself pulled your way after the arirang tour ends and jungkook introduces him to your streams. word count- 21k+ warnings - extreeeeemeeee slowburn, borderline yandere jin but his intentions are good i promise, cussing, drinking, no beta for this so tread carefully

Jungkook’s house was quieter than it had any right to be. Not silent, because well, it was never silent… not with four of them in one room, but it was quieter around the edges by exhaustion, alcohol and emptiness that filled the room after months of touring.

The Arirang tour was over. No call time would wake Jin up in the morning, no stadium was waiting for him to perform, no manager was hovering at the edge of every plan with a schedule already open for Jin to fill. Just food spread across the coffee table, glasses in various states of abandonment, and Taehyung insisting that he had not cheated during the last round of cards.

“You looked directly at mine,” Jimin said.

“I looked in your direction,” Taehyung corrected, lips pinched tight to keep from smiling.

“My cards were in that direction.”

“That isn’t my fault.”

Jungkook snorted into his drink. Jin sat at the end of the couch with one ankle resting over his knee, watching the argument with the distant satisfaction of someone who had zero intention of helping. “You should both be embarrassed,” he said.

Jimin turned toward him. “He cheated.”

“And you still lost.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“That sounds exactly like the point, unless I’m completely mistaken?”

Taehyung reached across the floor and stole a piece of chicken from Jungkook’s plate. Jungkook slapped his hand away without looking. “You have your own.”

“Yours looked better.”

“It’s from the same box?”

“Different energy. Not mine, so I want it more.” Tae shrugged.

Jin closed his eyes briefly, he had missed this. Not that he would say that out loud. Saying sincere things in rooms like this was typically dangerous. One of them would make it absolutely unbearable within seconds. So he drank from his cup instead.

Three notifications went off almost at once. Jimin looked down at his phone, Taehyung stopped halfway through stealing another piece of chicken, and Jungkook had already unlocked his screen. “Oh,” he said, tongue poking his lip ring.

Jimin sat up more, “she’s live.”

“What’s she playing?” Taehyung asked.

Jungkook glanced at his notification again. “Phasmophobia.”

That was enough to send all three of them into motion. Jungkook reached for the remote, Jimin shifted towards the center of the couch, and Taehyung abandoned his hoarded cards completely. Jin watched them, eyes narrowed in confusion. “Who?”

No one answered at first, the television lit up as Jungkook navigated towards the streaming app. “Who is live?” Jin repeated.

“GremlinHours,” Jimin replied.

The name meant nothing to Jin. “Is that supposed to explain it…?”

“YN?” Taehyung offered. “You don’t know her?”

“No.”

“She streams,” Jungkook said.

“I gathered that much, Jungkook.”

“She plays everything,” Jimin added. “Horror games, shooters, Skyrim, Zelda. Whatever she feels like.”

“And she’s funny,” Taehyung said.

Jin looked at the three of them, unimpressed by their sudden collective attention. “You all receive alerts for this?”

Jungkook shrugged. “She streams at weird times.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

The stream loaded before anyone could try. The screen filled with the dark interior of a farmhouse, washed in the green tint of night vision. Several voices overlapped through proximity chat, arguing about equipment and whether someone had already used the cursed object. A smaller camera window sat in the corner. Jin looked at it. Then Jin looked at it again.

A woman sat beneath the cool light of her monitors, headset on, eyes moving between the game and the flood of chat beside it. She was talking over one of her teammates, trying and failing not to laugh while she did it.

Pretty, he thought. The assessment came easily and without much weight. Then she made a face at something in chat, half offended and half amused, and his attention lingered a second longer than intended. Jin reached for his glass without knowing why his attention had lingered.

There were beautiful women everywhere in his life. Younger women, mostly. Women close to the age she appeared to be, though he could not tell exactly how old she was from a small camera window and did not particularly want to guess. The thought itself made him feel foolish. He was only watching a stream because Jungkook had put it on. Nothing more.

“She always goes back inside alone,” Jimin said.

“Because everyone else dies,” Jungkook replied.

“They’re already splitting up,” Taehyung said, deeply disappointed. “They never learn.”

Jin glanced at the game.

Her character stood near the front entrance while the others disappeared into separate rooms. “That seems stupid,” he said.

Jungkook nodded. “It is.”

“Then why are they doing it?”

“They’re bad at communicating.”

“They have microphones.”

“That doesn’t help them.”

Onscreen, she said something to her team that made Taehyung laugh hard enough to fold forward. Jin smiled despite himself. Small and automatic, and not noticed by anyone else. His gaze returned to her face in the corner. There was an ease to her on camera that he found unexpectedly appealing. Not polished and not careless, either. She seemed aware of the thousands watching without adjusting herself for them every second.

That was unusual. He wondered how much of it was real. The question came from habit more than any suspicion. Jin knew better than most that cameras created versions of people. Sometimes kinder versions, sometimes louder, and sometimes simpler.

She laughed again, and leaned towards her screen to read a message. Jin looked away, he was being ridiculous. She was a stranger. A younger stranger, most likely, and one he had been watching for a whopping total of two minutes. Attraction did not have to mean anything, in fact, it often meant nothing at all.

He settled deeper into the couch and listened while Jungkook tried to explain the game. The lights inside the farmhouse began to flicker.

Jimin’s entire posture changed. “It’s hunting.”

Her teammates started shouting over one another as her character turned towards the garage.

Taehyung pointed at the screen. “Locker.”

“She won’t make it,” Jungkook said.

“She will,” Jimin insisted.

Jin said nothing, but his eyes moved back to her. Not the game. Her. She looked focused now, amusement tightening into concentration as the footsteps grew louder through the dark. Something about the expression caught him again. Not enough to call interest, just enough to make him wonder why he was still looking.

“How is this thing already fucking hunting?” She hissed into her mic, forcing her character to run towards the only visible locker in the garage. “Every single time with you guys! ‘Come play with us, YN! We’ll help you level up, you won’t have to do anything!’ My ass! You guys suuuuuck!”

“She’s already blaming them,” Jungkook chuckled.

“They deserve it,” Jimin said. “Look! None of them are even near her.”

Onscreen, her teammates dissolved into overlapping excuses through proximity chat.

“I was getting evidence!”

“I thought you had a crucifix.”

“Why would I have a crucifix?”

“Because you said you did?”

“I said somebody should have it!”

Taehyung shook his head in disappointment. “A team with no leadership.”

“You would be worse,” Jungkook smiled.

“I would try to establish rules,” Taehyung argued.

“You’d wander off because you heard a piano.”

“A ghost playing a piano is important evidence, one could argue.”

Jin let their argument wash over him while his attention stayed on the stream. YN had wedged her character into the locker, the narrow metal slats cutting the garage into strips of darkness. The ghost’s footsteps thudded somewhere nearby, slow and heavy. She glanced toward chat again.

“Yes,” she sighed. “I could go back to the van, SewerGhoul32, but I still need to find out what kind of cyptid we’re dealing with.”

“SewerGhoul32,” Jin repeated under his breath.

Jimin heard him and lauighed. “Her chat has the worst names.”

“The best names,” Taehyung corrected.

Jin’s mouth twitched. YN had said cryptid with complete seriousness despite playing a game in which the list of possible entities was plainly labeled. He hadn’t seen Bigfoot or Moth Man on the list… He could not tell whether she genuinely used the wrong word or simply enjoyed irritating the people who knew better.

Probably the latter.

He found that more charming than he should have.

The locker door rattled, and Jimin gripped Jungkook’s arm. Jungkook proceeded to shove Jimin off while leaning forward himself. Jin watched the small camera window in the corner of the screen. YN had gone still, lips pressed together as though the ghost might somehow hear her through the monitor. The expression changed her face. Not prettier, exactly, but she looked more focused and real. He caught himself studying her and deliberately shifted his gaze back to the gameplay. There was no point wondering about her.

YN was likely much younger than him. Not impossibly young– she was clearly an adult, with an established career and the confident exhaustion of someone who had dealt with the internet for years– but young enough that the distinction still registered in his brain. He had no business attaching meaning to a passing attraction anyway. Pretty woman, funny voice. That was all.

The ghost’s footsteps stopped outside the locker. The room went silent with the stream, and YN’s teammates had finally stopped talking. The handle jerked once, then twice. Jungkook whispered, “Don’t open it.”

“Why are you telling her?” Jin asked.

“She can feel it.”

“She cannot feel you through your television.”

“You don’t know that, though.”

The handle moved again. YN’s character stayed hidden. Then, slowly, the footsteps receded. Everyone in the room exhaled at once. Jin noticed and almost laughed. Four grown men, sitting in a bright living room, holding their breath over a digital locker.

YN pushed the door open cautiously. The moment she stepped into the garage, one of her teammates spoke. “You should go back to the van.”

Jin frowned. “She just said she needs the ghost type.”

Jimin looked at him with raised brows. “You’re listening.”

“It’s difficult not to. She’s shouting.”

The answer was casual enough. Jimin accepted it without interest and turned back to the television. Jin did, too. YN’s character had moved toward the hallway, flashlight beam trembling over walls. Her teammates began arguing again about evidence they may or may not have gathered. Jin took another drink. He still couldn’t tell what had caught him. It was not simply her appearance, though that had been the first thing he noticed. It was something in the way she occupied the stream, maybe… like the audience existed, mattered, but didn’t frighten her into becoming careful.

He knew that had to be partly performance. Everything on camera usually was. Still, he wanted to keep watching long enough to work out the kinks and seams. Not because he was interested, but because he was curious. And there was a difference. At least, there ought to have been.

“Alright gutter sluts,” YN smiled, addressing her team. “I’m going back to the van to grab some salt and the DOTS. Anything else we need or want?”

Jimin made a strangled noise and buried his face against Jungkook’s shoulder. “Gutter sluts?”

Jungkook was already laughing too hard to answer. Taehyung repeated the word thoughtfully, as if testing whether it belonged in his vocabulary. “It’s affectionate.”

“It is not,” Jin said.

Onscreen, YN’s teammates all answered at once.

“Smudge sticks.”

“A flashlight.”

“My dignity.”

“Can you bring me back to life?”

“He’s not even dead.”

“No,” YN replied flatly through the stream. Her character moved quickly through the farmhouse, flashlight bouncing over peeling walls and scattered furniture as she headed for the front door.

Jin watched her face rather than the game for a moment. There was something oddly precise about her timing. She let the others pile nonsense into the silence, then cut through it with a single sentence. It reminded him of the way the members spoke to one another when the cameras had been running too long… Everyone always competing for the last word until someone ended the entire conversation with one well-placed insult. He could understand why the younger ones watched her. That was all, he decided. Understanding, not interest.

Taehyung reached for the soju bottle and filled his own glass. “Do you think she calls everyone that?”

“Probably,” Jungkook answered.

Jimin lifted his head. “What would she call us?”

“Unemployed,” Jin said. Three heads turned toward him. He gestured around at the room. “Look at you.”

“We just finished a tour,” Jungkook protested.

“And immediately became people who watch strangers hunt ghosts.”

“You’re watching too.”

“I’m trapped here.”

The front door of the farmhouse opened onscreen, and YN’s character stepped out into the rain. Jin’s eyes followed automatically. The game’s van stood at the edge of the property, its interior harshly lit against the dark. Her teammates kept talking through the radio, each offering increasingly useless requests.

“Check the sanity.”

“Grab the thermometer.”

“Bring the music box back.”

“Why would she bring the music box back inside?” Jin asked.

Jungkook glanced at him. “It can trigger an event.”

“It can also be used to trigger a hunt.” Jimin smiled.

“Because it’s a cursed possession?” Jin asked. Jungkook’s eyebrows rose slightly. Jin lifted his glass. “You explained it earlier. I listened.”

Jungkook accepted that easily and turned back to the stream. No suspicion. Jin didn’t know why he felt relieved. Inside the van, YN’s character began collecting equipment. Salt, DOTS projector, a smudge stick she almost forgot, prompting the chat to flood with warnings. Jin noticed her eyes skim the messages. She didn’t read most of them out loud, there were too many. Still, she seemed to catch certain names, certain jokes, and responded to a few without losing track of the game. That kind of attention took practice. He wondered how long she’d been streaming, then wondered why he’d wondered. The answer irritated him enough that he reached for a piece of chicken.

Taehyung took the last one first. Jin stared at his empty fingers as Taehyung ate it slowly. “You saw me reaching.”

“I thought you were gesturing.”

“With chopsticks?” Jin frowned, leaning across the table to steal from Jungkook’s plate instead.

Jungkook moved it out of reach without looking away from the television. “Get your own.”

“This is my own. I’m older than you.”

“That isn’t how ownership works.”

“It should be.”

Onscreen, YN finally finished loading her arms with equipment. Jimin pointed. “She took too much.”

“She always does that,” Jungkook said. “Then she drops something important when the ghost hunts.”

Jin looked back toward the screen. YN’s character had stepped down from the van and started across the rain-soaked path toward the house again. Her teammates were still arguing, and her chat was still warning her. She looked entirely unbothered. Jin rested his elbow against the arm of the couch and told himself he was only waiting to see whether Jungkook’s prediction was correct.

“I have the sticks, DOTS, and the salt!” YN announced to her teammates. “Rook, Yuna, Skyler? Where you guys at?”

For half a second there was only static. Then three voices all answered at once.

“Upstairs hallway.”

“Garage.”

“I’m dead.”

YN stopped just outside the front door for a beat. “Skyler,” a voice labeled YUNA said carefully. “You are standing right next to me.”

“Oh, then garage.”

ROOK laughed so hard his microphone crackled. Jungkook dropped his head back against the couch. “They never know where they are.”

“They’re in one house.” Jin said.

“That really doesn’t help them.” Jimin replied.

YN shifted the equipment around her inventory onscreen before pushing through the front door. The farmhouse was dark again, Jin watched the flashlight move over the walls once more, then glanced toward her face camera when she narrowed her eyes at the game. She looked suspicious before anything had even happened. It was expressive, that face of hers. Easy to read. Or perhaps only easy to think he could read.

“Okay,” YUNA said through the radio. “We think the ghost changed rooms.”

YN stopped. “The ghost did what?”

“It might be upstairs now.”

“Might?”

“We lost the temperature.”

“How do you lose a temperature?”

SKYLER’s voice cut in. “I dropped the thermometer.”

“Where?”

“Upstairs?”

Silence. YN stared into the camera. Jin smiled into his glass, he tried to suppress it, but the expression stayed. No one was looking at him anyway. Taehyung had begun explaining to Jimin why a ghost changing rooms was strategically elegant, Jungkook was already predicting that someone would die within the next minute.

YN stepped farther into the house. “Alright,” she said. “Rook, come get the salt. Yuna, place the DOTS wherever you think the room is now, Skyler locate your missing sense of direction and then maybe the thermometer.”

“I’m in the garage,” Skyler insisted.

“You said that thirty seconds ago.” “I still am.”

“Then how did you drop it upstairs?”

Another pause. “That’s actually a really good question.”

Jimin dissolved into laughter again. “She sounds tired of them.”

“She chose to play with them,” Jin said.

“That doesn’t mean she can’t regret it.”

Jin considered that. Fair. The game’s atmosphere shifted as YN moved through the foyer, a low creak sounded somewhere overhead. Her character looked up. The others were still talking to one another, but she had gone quiet and focused in the small face camera window. Not frightened, but alert. He found himself waiting with her.

A figure flashed past the doorway at the end of the hall. YN jerked the mouse so hard the camera spun toward the wall and Jungkook shouted. Jimin grabbed Taehyung’s sleeve, and Taehyung shouted because Jimin had grabbed him. Jin flinched, though he covered it by reaching for the bottle of soju again. Onscreen, YN swore under her breath.

Rook laughed. “You saw that, right?”

“No,” YN said. “I actually love whipping my camera around for no reason.”

Jin looked down while he poured. He was still smiling, it was not the kind of thing anyone would notice, just a little amusement. A little curiosity. The same curiosity that had him wondering what other games she played, whether she was always this caustic with her friends, whether she was funnier when she was tired or just less filtered. He caught the direction of his thoughts and stopped them.

There was no reason to build a person out of scattered moments on a screen. He knew that better than most. YN was a performer, whether she used the word or not, and he was a stranger on a couch. Nothing connected them. Nothing needed to.

“Hyung,” Jungkook said. Jin looked over, and Jungkook was holding his plate toward him. “You wanted chicken?”

Jin took the plate automatically, it was empty. He stared at it while Jungkook grinned. Jin shoved it back into his hands. “You’re irritating.”

Onscreen, YN’s teammates began shouting again. The lights flickered, and the front door slammed shut. Jungkook leaned forward, “Hunt.”

YN froze in the middle of the hallway, still carrying around all of her equipment. She had nowhere obvious to hide from what Jin could see from where he, too, was leaning forward.

The death animation swallowed the screen quickly and loudly. Jimin yelped, Jungkook swore, and Taehyung clapped once, sharply, as if the ghost had just scored a goal. Jin flinched despite himself, the movement small enough to disappear under everyone else’s reactions.

“Told you it was a demon, now you’re dead and we have to hope that Yuna will clutch the round because Skyler definitely won't." Rook laughed, also dead.

“Fuck you and your mother,” YN hissed.

Jungkook folded forward laughing. YN’s camera shifted toward the crumpled body of her character, one leg bent awkwardly beneath her and the other extended across the floor. “Oh, look at my body. It’s kind of sensual.”

Jin’s drink caught in his throat. He coughed once into his fist. Jimin turned to him, “Are you okay?”

“The soju went down wrong.”

Jimin accepted that, already looking back at the television. Taehyung leaned closer, examining the corpse through the screen. “She’s right.” “She is not.” Jin said.

“It has a certain elegance to it.”

“She’s collapsed beside a radiator.”

“A tragic elegance," Taehyung amended.

Jungkook rubbed his eyes. “She always says things like that when she dies.”

“You say that as though this happens often,” Jin said.

“It happens enough.”

Onscreen, Rook was still laughing while YN’s character wandered the map as a ghost, circling her own body with evident fascination. Jin found himself smiling again, not because the joke had been especially clever, but because of the ease with which she had made it. The scare had ripped a genuine reaction from her, but she had recovered almost instantly, turning the embarrassed moment into something everyone else could laugh at with her. It was a useful instinct, a familiar one. He knew what it was to feel a room tilt toward awkwardness and redirect it before anyone could see too much.

Then Yuna died. “She got me! Did we just lose?”

“No,” YN sighed. “Skyler is still alive.”

“So, we lost.”

“Isn’t he your boyfriend?”

“This is why I know these things.”

The entire living room erupted as Skyler was killed by the next hunt. Jungkook threw himself back against the couch, Jimin was laughing so hard he’d gone silent, and Taehyung pointed at the television as though Skyler might somehow defend himself.

“They had one job,” Jungkook sighed.

“They had several jobs,” Jin said. “And accomplished none of them.”

The results screen loaded, contract failed, very little money earned, equipment lost… YN’s teammates were already arguing over whose fault it had been.

“Rook called it a demon and no one listened.”

“I was collecting evidence.”

“You were singing.”

“It helps me focus, babe.”

Jin took another drink, this time more carefully. The others were still laughing, replaying their deaths in fragments, but Jin’s eyes moved back to the small camera window. YN looked less rattled now. Amused, annoyed, still carrying traces of adrenaline around her eyes. He wondered, again, how old she was. If he guessed, he’d say around Jungkook or Jimin’s ages.

“Do they ever win?” Jin asked.

Jungkook glanced over. “Yes.” Jimin shot him a look and Jungkook revised, “Sometimes.”

“And how often is sometimes?”

Taehyung answered. “Enough to keep hope alive.”

“That sounds like gambling.”

“Streaming is kind of similar,” Jimin said.

Onscreen, the group loaded back into the lobby. YN’s team continued bickering and blaming one another while she checked the chat, thousands of messages racing past in several languages. Jin watched her skim them, and then she caught one, laughed, and shook her head. He could not read what had prompted it from his distance from the TV, but for reasons he didn’t care to examine, he wanted to. Not urgently, not enough to move closer to the screen, just enough that the stream no longer felt like it was only background noise. He supposed it hadn’t felt that way for a while.

“What else did you say she plays?” Jin asked.

Jungkook answered without looking away. “Everything.”

“An actual answer, Jungkook.”

“Skyrim, Call of Duty, Baldur’s Gate, Zelda, Overwatch, Dead by Daylight… Party games too.”

“She’s bad at driving games.” Jimin added.

Jungkook nodded. “But will insist she isn’t.”

Jin looked at the channel name beneath her camera only for a moment, then he committed it to memory without acknowledging that he had. The lobby deliberated on another contract, finally selecting one at a modern house. Jin leaned back against the couch and crossed one ankle over his knee again, posture loose and expression indifferent. No one paid him any attention. That suited him.

He still didn’t know what had caught his interest so deeply, only that when Jungkook reached for the remote to lower the volume during an argument with Taehyung, Jin said, almost absently, “Leave it.”

Jungkook did, and the next game began. It lasted forty minutes. Long enough for Taehyung to move from the floor to the couch and then back to the floor again. YN’s team finally identified the ghost correctly, though only after Skyler used the last smudge stick by accident and Rook locked himself outside during a hunt.

Jungkook raised both hands in victory when the results screen confirmed it. “There.”

“One successful contract,” Jin said. “Congratulations.”

“You were literally watching the entire time.”

“I had nowhere else to look.”

Jungkook gestured again around his living room. “There are walls and three people around you.”

“The stream was more interesting,” Jin countered, the truth slipping out before he could reconsider it.

No one reacted. Jimin was busy reading something on his phone, Taehyung had started stacking empty glasses in a pyramid, and Jungkook was already browsing other videos from YN’s channel while the stream briefly paused for an advertisement and break.

Jin felt foolish for noticing that none of the others had taken interest in his admission.

“Let’s watch the Skyrim one,” Taehyung said.

“She’s live,” Jungkook replied.

“She’s taking a break.”

“She’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“She always takes breaks during stream. The countdown is on the screen, Taehyung.”

Jin glanced at the TV, the countdown was indeed there as the advert ended, but Jungkook’s other comment… “You know her schedule?”

“Roughly.”

“That’s concerning.”

Jungkook pointed the remote at him. “You watched fishing videos for four hours last week.”

“Those were instructional.”

“You know how to fish.”

The pastel holding screen was overlaid with soft music on the TV, the countdown timer now read eight minutes. Chat continued moving, Jin still could not read most of it from where he sat, but names and emotes passed in a blur. Messages in Korean appeared frequently enough to catch his eye, mixed between English and other languages he did not recognize at a glance. He wondered whether YN spoke Korean at all.

She returned before the timer finished. Not to the game, just to the camera. She had taken her headset off and tied her hair back, bottle of soju much similar to their own in one hand while she adjusted something offscreen. The game window remained minimized. Jungkook turned the volume up slightly. YN settled into her chair and began talking to the chat while waiting for the others.

The change was subtle. Without the game demanding half her attention, she seemed calmer. Less performative, perhaps, though Jin knew better than to assume that meant more honest. Still, he listened. She answered questions about upcoming streams, mentioned a charity event she was considering, and complained that one of her moderators kept trying to convince her to play a farming simulator despite her inability to keep even fictional plants alive.

Jin smiled once when she admitted she had accidentally married the wrong character in a game and refused to reload out of principle. He didn’t ask what the game was, though he almost did. Instead, he let the others carry the conversation around him. The evening began to thin out, Jimin checked the time and groaned. Taehyung lay flat on the rug, staring blankly at the ceiling while Jungkook disappeared briefly into the kitchen and returned with water bottles. He threw one to each of them. Jin caught his.

“You’re all sleeping here,” Jungkook said.

“I’m going home,” Jin argued.

“You drank. All of you. You’re staying.”

“I’ll call someone.”

“You’ll wake your manager and he’ll kick your ass.”

“That’s his job.”

“It is not his job to rescue you from my house at two in the morning because you think you’re too old to stay over, hyung.”

Jin twisted the bottle cap open. “He enjoys feeling needed.”

Jimin murmured, “That’s what you tell yourself.”

Jin kicked lightly at his ankle. YN’s gameplay still played in the background, the sound of her teammates finally returning to their computers filled the silences between her reading comments out loud. The easy conversation shifted into chaos again almost immediately. Jin drank his water and watched without comment, and by the time the next map was loaded, Taehyung was asleep on the floor. Jimin lasted another ten minutes before curling into the corner of the couch with his eyes closed. Jungkook remained awake, but only barely, head tipped back and remote balanced loosely against his stomach. Jin was the only one remaining upright.

He glanced around the room. No one was watching him, which shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. He picked up his phone and opened Twitch, not because he wanted to follow her, only because the television screen was too far away to read the channel information clearly. That was reasonable enough. He searched the name beneath her camera, and the profile appeared immediately. YN, verified, a couple million followers across all platforms, a schedule, past broadcasts, clips with titles that suggested the younger members hadn’t exaggerated her tendency toward chaos.

Jin scrolled once, then again. A short biography listed her age and he stopped, read it, calculated the difference without meaning to. His mouth tightened slightly. It wasn’t scandalous, she was only some odd years younger than Jungkook. It wasn’t absurd… Still, enough years were between them that he felt newly aware of himself. Of the lines beside his eyes when he laughed, of how long he had already been living publicly while she had likely been finishing up school, of how different their worlds were despite both existing through screens other people watched from afar.

The attraction, though, didn’t vanish. That would have been too convenient. It simply became something he placed carefully at a distance… a private observation, nothing actionable or important. He locked his phone with stiff fingers while she argued with Skyler about who had stolen the strong flashlight. Jin looked back at the stream, and for another few minutes he allowed himself to watch it without analysis.

Then Jungkook stirred beside him. “You’re still awake?”

“Obviously.”

Jungkook blinked toward the screen. “She’s still alive?”

“For now.”

“Ghost type?” He mumbled, wiping at his chin.

“Moroi, probably.”

Jungkook’s head turned slowly. “You learned the ghosts.”

“I am listening to their endless arguing about them, so yes.”

Jungkook blinked again, nodded, yawned, and closed his eyes. A few minutes later, his breathing had evened out again. Jin waited, not consciously, only until he was certain everyone else was asleep again, then he unlocked his phone again. YN’s profile was still open on the screen. His thumb hovered over the follow button, following meant nothing. It wouldn’t notify anyone in the room, and it certainly wouldn’t make him part of anything.

It was simply a way to find the channel again without searching for it. Jin pressed it, and the button changed. Following, no sound or alert, nothing dramatic. He lowered the phone and glanced again at the TV. YN had survived another hunt, she laughed into her microphone while her team shouted over one another. Jin listened for a few seconds longer, then, without thinking too hard about why, he turned on the stream notifications.

“Well, since my friends are headed to bed like responsible adults on the opposite side of the globe,” YN smiled at the camera, sipping at her soju, “it’s that time of night, divas. Skyrim time! Drink if you’ve got it, we’re about to fuck up Windhelm.”

Jungkook’s eyes flickered open at the word Windhelm, and Jin watched him stare blearily at the TV as the game title screen appeared beneath her camera. “Windhelm,” he mumbled.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I am.”

“Uh huh.”

Jungkook ignored him, shifted onto his side and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his face. Within seconds, he was motionless again on the couch, slumped next to Jimin whose mouth was open now against the corner cushions. Jin shifted further into his end of the couch with his eyes glued on the screen that changed again as YN loaded her save.

The harsh darkness of the loading screen gave way to snow-covered roads and mountains washed blue under the night sky. Her character stood outside Windhelm’s gates in mismatched armor, accompanied by a follower who looked deeply unequipped for whatever she intended to do.

This, at least, Jin understood more easily. Not Skyrim specifically–he had never played enough of it to try and claim any expertise– but the rhythm of a game played solo. The gradual quiet after friends left, and the way a person filled the space differently when there was no one in voice chat to compete with. YN took another sip of soju and began explaining her plans to her audience.

Apparently she held many grudges against the city, most of them seemed personal. Jin glanced at the time, it was late enough that he should stop watching. He had already followed her, turned on notifications, and learned more ghost mechanics in one night than he had ever wanted or intended to know. That was plenty. He could sleep.

Instead, he lowered the volume on the TV slightly so it would not wake the others. YN’s character passed through Windhelm’s gates, and immediately she veered away from the main road to steal a cabbage from a nearby vendor. Jin frowned, “What was the point of that?”

No one answered, and he looked around. Jimin was tucked against the corner still, a hand now trapped under his cheek. Taehyung remained sprawled on the rug beneath a blanket Jungkook must have tossed his way earlier. Jungkook’s face had disappeared completely inside his hood, and Jin briefly wondered if he would suffocate inside of it.

He turned back to the screen as YN sold the cabbage to a merchant for next to nothing. “That was a waste of time,” he told her quietly.

She could not hear him, of course. The chat seemed to agree, though. Messages poured past, several containing cabbage emotes and references to an incident he didn’t understand. YN responded as though the theft were a matter of principle, and Jin smiled. Alone, he didn’t bother trying to hide it.

He picked up his phone and opened the stream there as well, lowering the volume to zero. The smaller screen made it easier to read chat and inspect the channel properly without getting up. That was his only reason. He scrolled through the profile while the TV continued playing the stream, finally reading more into the information he only allowed his eyes to flick through earlier with the younger members still awake.

Her schedule was irregular but frequent, late-night Skyrim appeared more than once, as well as horror games with friends, competitive shooters, charity streams interspersed with clips whose titles were mostly variations of YN becoming angry at an object, game mechanic, or teammate.

A clip near the top read: YN DISCOVERS HER SKYRIM HUSBAND HAS BEEN DEAD FOR THREE WEEKS

Jin stared at the title, then tapped it. The short clip opened silently.

YN stood over an NPC’s body in the middle of a road, sounding genuinely horrified as she realized the man had apparently died several saves ago. The subtitles indicated that she demanded to know why chat had not told her. The chat had, according to the replies. Repeatedly.

Jin covered his mouth to keep his laugh quiet. On the TV, present-day YN was now arguing with a guard. He closed the clip and returned his focus to the live stream. A small indicator showed that she had noticed the new follower count climbing, though there were too many new names for any one account to register.

Jin preferred that. The idea of being noticed produced a strange mixture of temptation and discomfort. Attention was rarely neutral for him, it came with recognition and calculation. Even genuine kindness could change once someone understood exactly who they were speaking to. Here, he was only another silent name… He liked that more than expected.

YN entered a tavern and ordered a drink in the game, then lifted her real bottle towards the camera. Chat filled with beer emotes, and Jin looked toward the water bottle in his hand, then at the remaining soju on the table. He didn’t take it, the hour was already punishing enough without following a stranger’s drinking game. A younger stranger, he reminded himself. The age listed on her profile had stayed in the back of his mind. Not as an accusation, just context.

She existed in a different stretch of adulthood from him. Her life seemed louder, more spontaneous whereas his had been organized around responsibility for so long that even his impulsive decisions tended to come with staff and security concerns. He could find her attractive without romanticizing the distance between them. He could enjoy the stream without making it strange. There was nothing wrong with either. The insistence sounded unnecessary even inside his own mind.

Jin locked his phone again and left it on his knee. On the TV, YN attempted to pickpocket someone in the tavern and was caught immediately. The entire room became hostile. “Why would you do that in front of everyone?” Jin whispered.

YN drew her weapon as the tavern erupted into violence. Jin blinked at the screen as she shouted at the guards, sending them flying into the walls, and struck the wrong NPC with her sword, hitting her own follower afterwards, and fled into the streets with half of Windhelm pursuing her. The chaos had unfolded so quickly that he pressed his knuckles against his lips as he laughed, shoulders shaking.

Taehyung shifted on the floor and Jin went still. After a few seconds of agonizing waiting, Taehyung settled again. Jin lowered the volume another notch. When he looked back, YN’s character had escaped by jumping into a freezing river outside of the city. She was laughing too, not gracefully. Her head was tilted back, one hand over her face, the sound breaking apart each time she tried to explain that everything had gone exactly as intended.

Jin studied her for a moment. That pull returned, quiet and unresolved. It wasn’t yearning, he didn’t know enough about her to yearn for anything real. It was closer to recognition without any real familiarity, the sense that there was something about her he would understand if he were given enough time to do so. That, he decided, was why he kept watching past 3 am, to identify it. A harmless exercise, a curiosity that would probably disappear within a few streams once the novelty wore off. YN recovered from the disaster and began climbing back toward Windhelm, Jin watched the follower struggle to keep up behind her.

“You should leave the city alone,” he murmured.

She immediately turned around and headed back towards the gates.

Jin sighed, then reached for the soju.

The soju was warmer that it should have been. Jin poured only a little, more out of companionship with the moment than any real desire to keep drinking. He raised the glass toward the TV without thinking, then caught himself halfway through the gesture. He looked around the room, noting the sleeping forms of the other three men. Then he drank.

YN marched back through Windhelm’s gates as though the guards had not attempted to kill her less than five minutes prior. The bounty notification appeared immediately. Jin sighed, “you know they remember you.”

YN attempted to walk past the nearest guard. He immediately stopped her in her tracks. The chat began flooding with variations of PAY YOUR CRIMES and RUN. YN selected the dialogue option to resist arrest.

“Why?” Jin huffed, staring at the screen in shock.

She drew her weapon again, and the city devolved into chaos once more. Jin’s lips pressed together, but the laugh escaped anyway, quiet and breathy, shoulders trembling while he tried not to wake anyone. A guard struck YN’s character from behind and her health dropped sharply.

“Potion,” Jin muttered as she opened her inventory. “Good.”

Then she ate eleven wheels of cheese.

Jin blinked. “What are you doing?”

The health bar climbed and he stared at it. “That works?”

He glanced toward Jungkook, instinctively prepared to ask, but the younger man was still either sleeping or succumbed to the fabric of his hood. Jin turned back and watched in horror as YN consumed several loaves of bread, three apples, a raw fish, and something that appeared to be an entire cooked goat leg while the guards waited patiently outside the frozen inventory screen.

“That is disgusting,” he whispered.

She closed the menu and resumed fighting at full health.

Jin’s eyebrows lifted, “Effective, though.”

The battle lasted for another minute before YN accidentally shouted a civilian down a staircase. She went completely still and the chat exploded. Jin covered his mouth as her camera pivoted slowly toward the staircase. The civilian lay motionless at the bottom. Her expression shifted from horror to calculation.

“No.”

She crouched beside the body and began looting it. Jin laughed into his hand. It was the sort of decision Taehyung would make in a game, cause a disaster, stare at it solemnly, then search the pockets. YN took six gold and a pair of boots.

“That was not worth it,” Jin sighed as she equipped the newly stolen apparel. “They don’t even match.”

Chat apparently agreed. Messages flew past criticizing the outfit while YN defended the boots with growing outrage. Jin leaned closer to his phone to read. One viewer asked why her character was dressed like a “medieval lost-and-found bin.”

Another claimed the boots completed the look. YN read that one aloud and pointed triumphantly at the camera. Jin reexamined the outfit… fur armor, steel gauntlets, a mage’s hood, newly stolen normal boots. “No,” he said. “They made it worse.”

His thumb moved toward the chat box. He stopped. The field waited at the bottom of the screen, he could type anything, something harmless.

The boots are terrible.

Thousands of other people were already saying the same thing. His message would disappear instantly, unnoticed. That should have made it easier to send one, instead, he closed the chat. Not yet.

He didn’t know why the idea of speaking felt more intimate than following her, perhaps because words created the possibility of an answer, however unlikely that was. Watching, at least, was passive. Speaking meant stepping into the room. He preferred the doorway, for now.

The fighting finally ended when YN escaped into a nearby building and crouched behind a table until the guards lost interest. Jin shook his head, “That shouldn’t work.”

YNs character remained motionless while the detection indicator slowly closed. Her face grew calmer too. She took another sip of soju and began talking to chat about what she intended to do next. The plan involved breaking into a manor, planting an item on someone, and possibly stealing every plate in the building. Jin listened with the wary attention of a man hearing the early stages of a crime. Why the plates mattered was never adequately explained by her, and the stream settled into a softer rhythm of lockpicking, looting, and YN chatting with viewers while searching drawers and bookshelves. The occasional sharp burst of panic happened when a guard passed nearby, but never became anything too bothersome.

Without the others awake beside him, Jin became more conscious of her voice. Not its pitch or accent, exactly, though she did sound American, but its cadence. The way it sped up when she became excited, the small pause before a joke when she already knew it would make chat angry, the quieter tone she used when someone shared something sincere between all of the nonsense.

A viewer mentioned having a difficult week, and YN stopped rummaging through an NPC’s wardrobe long enough to respond. The shift was immediate but not exaggerated. She did not offer reassurance or turn the moment into a performance of compassion. She simply spoke to them for a few seconds, warmly and directly, and then moved on before the person could become a spectacle. Jin’s smile faded into something more thoughtful. There, perhaps that was part of it. The contrast.

She could call thousands of viewers assholes and somehow make it sound affectionate, then recognize when one of them needed gentleness without announcing she was being gentle. It was an appealing quality, he allowed himself to admit that much. Attractive did not mean significant and interesting did not mean destiny. He was old enough to know the difference.

On the rug, Taehyung stirred and rolled onto his side. Jin lowered his phone immediately, though there was nothing incriminating on it beyond a public stream. Taehyung blinked up at the TV, “she’s still playing?”

“Apparently.” “Did she fix Windhelm?”

“She made it worse.”

Taehyung gave a sleepy hum of approval before his eyes closed again. Jin waited until his breathing settled before picking up his phone again. Only then did he look down at the closer and muted version of the stream. YN was carrying a stolen silver platter through a dark hallway. He shook his head at the antics, blinking down at the closed chatbox.

When the stream eventually ended, after YN was arrested, escaped, lost her horse, found the horse again, and then somehow became the legal owner of three dozen cabbages… Jin remained seated in the silence. The TV displayed the channel’s offline screen. For several seconds, he did nothing. The room felt oddly empty without her voice filling it.

That was only because it had been playing for hours. Habit often formed quickly, silence always felt noticeable after sustained noise. A rational explanation.

Jin picked up the remote and turned off the TV. Darkness settled over the room.

He stood carefully, collecting empty glasses and carrying them into Jungkook’s kitchen. He drank his water, checked that the door was locked, then returned with blankets for Jimin and Jungkook. Neither woke as he draped the fabric across their sleeping forms.

Before lying down in the remaining empty armchair, he checked his phone one last time. A notification from Twitch sat near the top of his screen.

YN POSTED A NEW CLIP

He opened it. It was the moment with the stolen boots. The caption read: FASHION IS SUBJECTIVE. CRIME IS FOREVER. <3

Jin watched it once, then again, because the first time he had been reading the caption. He shut the screen off, sighing, and pressed his phone against his chest and closed his eyes. The attraction would pass, probably, and if it did not, it would remain exactly what it was then: private, distant, and his.

Jin woke with a stiff neck, one sock missing, and Taehyung’s foot resting against his shin. For several seconds, he had no idea where he was. Then Jungkook snored from the couch and his memory returned in pieces. Cards, soju, Phasmophobia, Windhelm, stolen boots… Jin reached under the armchair for his phone.

The screen lit up with the usual collection of messages, staff schedules, a group chat that had somehow accumulated 57 notifications overnight, and several alerts from apps he had forgotten to silence. When he unlocked his phone, it was still on GremlinHours Twitch page, the red live ring around her profile notably absent.

He accessed his settings and disabled alerts from appearing on his lock screen, not because there was anything to hide, but because he simply preferred a tidy phone. Jin returned it to his pocket and nudged Taehyung’s foot away. “Get up.” Taehyung made a sound of deep personal suffering. “It’s morning,” Jin responded.

“That’s cruel.” Taehyung groaned.

“You’re sleeping on the floor.”

“It’s comfortable right now.”

“You’re using my leg as a pillow.”

Taehyung opened one eye. “It’s a good leg.”

Jin stared at him. “Move.”

Jungkook was waking up on the couch, stretching before standing up like he’d never been asleep. He padded towards the kitchen, barefoot and silent, and filled a glass of water at the sink. He drank it quickly, looking as though he’d been summoned against his will to do so.

Jin sighed, standing and heading to the kitchen himself. He opened the refrigerator and grimaced. It contained several varieties of sauce, protein drinks, kimchi, and nothing he considered breakfast.

“Do you live like this?”

Jungkook leaned against the counter. “There are eggs.”

“Where?” Jungkook opened a drawer. Jin stared. “Why are your eggs in a drawer?”

“It’s the egg drawer.”

“That is not a thing.”

“It is here.” Jungkook’s phone buzzed against the counter. He picked it up, read the screen, and chuckled. “She posted a Windhelm clip.” Jin kept his back turned while removing the eggs. “Oh god, what are those boots?”

Jungkook opened the video and YN’s voice filled the kitchen at low volume.

“Fashion is subjective–”

Jin cracked the egg harder than necessary. The shell collapsed into the bowl.

Jungkook glanced at him, “You got shell in it.”

“I see that,” Jin grumbled, then picked the fragments out with exaggerated concentration while the clip replayed behind him. He had already seen it, twice, and the knowledge felt strangely private in daylight. Jungkook laughed at the same moment Jin had the night before, and Jin found himself noticing the differences. The clip was funny, but shortened and polished and stripped of the quiet stretch that had surrounded it the night before.

He preferred the stream. The thought arrived naturally and he did not examine it. By the time breakfast was ready, Jimin and Taehyung had staggered into the kitchen and taken seats at the counter. The conversation quickly shifted toward plans, aches from the tour, and whether they would meet the others later in the day.

YN was not mentioned again. Jin was relieved, but also faintly disappointed. Both reactions were unreasonable, so he ignored them.

Four days passed before he watched her again.

Not deliberately, he had come home late after a recording session, removed his shoes, and dropped onto the sofa with the intention of watching television until his mind stopped moving. His phone vibrated beside him.

GoblinHours is live: BALDUR’S GATE, BAD DECISIONS, BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

Jin read the title, then locked his phone. He changed his clothes and washed his face, reheated food he hadn’t originally planned on plating for himself that night. When he returned to the living room, the notification was still there. Watching for a few minutes would mean nothing, he had followed her for that purpose anyways. He opened the stream on his phone before transferring it to his TV. YN’s face appeared first, animated with outrage while several other voices played from the game through her headset. The game filled most of the screen around her.

Jin set his food on the coffee table. He had little idea of what was happening, there were dice, a pale elf who seemed offended by quite literally anything happening around him, and a large red woman that YN seemed deeply attached to. An entire party was trapped inside a building because someone had stolen an object in full-view of its owner. Jin watched silently for several minutes.

YN attempted to talk her way out of the situation, and the dice failed her. Combat began immediately. “Of course,” Jin murmured.

He ate while the disaster unfolded. This stream felt different from the last one. Less frantic than Phasmophobia, more conversational than Skyrim. YN stopped frequently to debate dialogue options with chat, then ignored the majority decision whenever it didn’t suit her. Her viewers complained, and she insulted them. They sent affectionate emotes in response. Jin began to understand their relationship, not fully, that would have required the familiarity he didn’t possess, but he understood enough to see that the cruelty was mostly ritual. A language that was built over time between the audience and the person at the center of it.

He watched until his food was gone, then until the dishes had cooled beside him. When he finally checked the time, nearly two hours had passed. Jin frowned, that was longer than intended. He reached for the remote, before he could close the stream, YN began reading messages from viewers who had submitted character names for a future playthrough. Most were ridiculous, and she rejected several immediately. Then she read one Korean name aloud, pronunciation practiced and careful but slightly uncertain. Jin paused as she tried it again. It was closer, and the chat began offering corrections, many of them were contradictory. Jin opened the chatbox on his phone, fingers hovering. He could type the correct pronunciation, nothing personal, nothing flirtatious. Useful information from one anonymous Korean viewer among thousands. He wrote it phonetically, read it once, and then deleted it.

Someone else would explain. Someone always did. A moment later, another Korean viewer posted the correction. YN repeated it correctly and thanked them. Jin felt briefly pleased, then mildly annoyed with himself for feeling anything about it. He placed his phone facedown, her age returning to him, not forcefully, but as a quiet reminder.

So did everything else. His name, his career, the complicated consequences attached to otherwise ordinary interactions. A message from him would not be ordinary if she ever learned who had sent it. That didn’t mean he could never speak in chat, it only meant that he should understand why he wanted to before he did. At present, he did not. Attraction was surely part of it, curiosity too, and maybe boredom, though the idea seemed less convincing. He still couldn’t name the rest.

Jin picked up the remote as YN selected a dialogue option chat had begged her not to choose.

The pale elf disapproved, and a fight began. Jin lowered the remote, “five more minutes,” he said to the empty room.

Twenty minutes later, his phone displayed a low-battery warning as he watched the chat. He plugged his phone in on the endtable, eyes focusing now on the TV alone. YN, unaware of him, laughed as another carefully constructed plan collapsed around her.

Jin’s ‘five minutes’ became the rest of the stream.

Jin did not acknowledge that fact when it ended. He simply stared at the offline screen for a moment, collected his dishes, and went to bed later than intended. The next morning he was tired, that was the only consequence. No revelation, no dramatic shift in the shape of his life. By breakfast, YN had been reduced to a pleasant memory of laughter and poor decisions involving dice.

He did not think about her during dance rehearsals, or while he answered emails. He did not think of her when a stylist mentioned Skyrim and Rust while discussing vaguely medieval or apocalyptic concepts for a shoot. He certainly didn’t open the Twitch app during lunch to chek whether she had updated her schedule.

The schedule happened to be there when he opened it for an unrelated reason.

YN would be live twice that week. One Call of Duty stream and one Sims stream titled: BUILDING MY ENEMIES HOUSES WITHOUT BATHROOMS XXXXX

Jin read the title twice and closed the app.

He missed the Call of Duty stream. It wasn’t intentional, work had just ran late and it was followed by dinner with Hoseok and Namjoon, and that was followed by nearly an hour spent standing beside his car while Namjoon explained an essay he had recently read and then chatted absentmindedly about Pokemon. By the time Jin had returned home, the stream had ended. He noticed the absence only because the notification that he’d allowed on his lockscreen after much deliberation had changed from LIVE to Watch the replay now.

He dismissed it. Watching live was one thing, a replay required effort and intent. He was not going to become the sort of person who rearranged his evening around the broadcasts of a woman he had never met.

The next day, a clip appeared in the BTS groupchat. Jungkook had sent it. YN was crouched behind cover in Call of Duty, whispering an elaborate tactical plan to her team before accidentally throwing a grenade into the wall directly in front of her.

The explosion killed her character instantly. Her webcam remained perfectly still for three full seconds, then she removed her headset and walked out of the room without a word. Taehyung responded with twelve laughing emojis.

Jimin wrote: She planned that for five minutes

Jin watched the clip, then watched it again because Hoseok sent a message halfway through the first viewing and distracted him. He did not react to it. Jin’s group chats were active enough that silence never looked strange. A minute later, Jungkook sent another clip. This one showed YN returning to her chair with a glass of water, sitting down, and announcing to her teammates that the game had been sabotaged by “the military-industrial complex.”

Jin pressed his lips together and reacted with a single thumbs-up. Neutral, almost dismissive. No one commented.

He caught the sims stream by accident. The notification arrived while he was in bed, reading through a script he had already read twice. He ignored it for twelve minutes, then he opened the stream on his phone and set it beside the pages.

YN had created a character based on someone she disliked, though she refused to identify them. The Sim had poor hygiene, no cooking skills, and a house containing several sinks but no toilet. Jin tried hard to focus on the script, but looked up when YN placed a refrigerator in the garden. She had also built a swimming pool around the front door.

He lowered the pages, the viewers were voting on whether the Sim deserved a bed. Jin opened the chat, the poll showed 78% favor of no bed. He stared at the results. Cruel. He voted for a bed, and the percentage didn’t change at all. YN glanced toward the poll, “22% of you are weak,” she said. “This is why society is collapsing.”

Jin’s eyebrows rose. He had offered mercy, and she had insulted him for it. The absurdity pleased him more than it should have. He set the script aside. For the next hour, he watched YN construct what gradually became less a house and more an elaborate violation of building codes. Every room was accessible only through another room, the kitchen contained a fireplace directly beside the curtains, and there were no smoke alarms.

“You’re going to kill him,” Jin said.

YN added another fireplace. Jin shook his head. The chat moved more slowly than it had during Phasmophobia. Not slowly enough to follow everything, but enough that individual messages remained visible for a few seconds. People suggested furniture, YN ignored the sensible suggestions and embraced the worst ones. One viewer asked for her to add a ladder into the swimming pool, and she did, and then another told her to remove it after the Sim entered it. She accused them of being a murderer, then bookmarked the suggestion.

Jin opened the message field and typed: At least give him a fire alarm.

He looked at the sentence, it was ordinary enough, no one could identify him from it. Nothing about it revealed his age, career, location, or even his personality beyond a concern for fictional fire safety. His thumb hovered over send, YN placed another rug in front of the fireplace, Jin sent the message. It vanished into the flow of chat immediately.

His pulse did something fairly irritating. He waited, not because he expected her to see it, but because the possibility existed now. YN continued decorating and the chat moved on.

Jin relaxed. There, he had spoken once and nothing had happened. The world remained intact. He reached for the script again.

“Who said fire alarm?” YN asked, leaning toward her monitor.

Jin’s hand stopped and the chat filled with viewers claiming credit. YN scrolled upward, “Moon–” she squinted. “Moonrabbit. You think this man deserves safety?”

Jin went completely still. His username appeared briefly on the stream, highlighted beside the message. There wasn’t any recognition in her voice, of course there wasn’t, he was just one anonymous account among thousands. Still, hearing the name aloud created a strange sense of intimacy, thin as thread and entirely imagined.

YN selected the smoke alarm from the menu. “Fine. Moonrabbit has chosen mercy.” She placed it on the wall, then she built another fireplace directly below it.

Jin stared. “That defeats the purpose.”

As though responding to him, YN smiled at the camera. “But mercy has limits.”

The chat erupted, and Jin lowered his phone against his bedspread. A quiet laugh escaped him, insignificant. She had read a message, streamers did that constantly, she would forget the username within minutes if she had not already. He should have found that reassuring. Instead, a small, absurd part of him felt pleased that for several seconds, something he had said had entered her world and changed it, even if the change was only a smoke alarm inside a virtual death trap.

He opened the chat again, fingers resting against the keyboard, then stopped. One message was enough. Two might look eager, and that thought embarrassed him immediately. No one was tracking how often he spoke and no one knew who he was. He was inventing rules for a situation that in all honesty was too small to require any.

Still, he did not type again. He watched from the doorway, exactly where he belonged.

The next afternoon, Jin discovered that the stream had automatically granted him channel points, whatever those were. He searched through the rewards available through YN’s page. Some allowed viewers to choose YN’s next in-game outfit, others forced her to drink water, stretch, or speak in a particular accent for five minutes.

One reward cost an absurd amount and was simply titled: MAKE YN APOLOGIZE TO AN NPC

Jin smiled. He had nowhere near enough points, not that he intended to collect them. He closed the page, and that evening, while waiting for food to arrive, he opened it again and tuned into a Just Chatting stream. His balance had increased incrementally. Apparently, points accumulated simply from watching. Jin stared at the number, then at the reward. It would take months to earn… Jin did not know why that calculation lodged itself so comfortably in his mind.

The point balance was a quiet nuisance. Jin checked it more often than he checked several apps he actually needed. He wasn’t obsessive with it, only after some streams and sometimes before them… and occasionally during lunch when he had no intention of watching but wanted to see whether the number had updated correctly. It always had.

He still spoke rarely. One message during a Zelda stream when YN spent nearly twenty minutes attempting to reach a chest that was clearly decorative, another when she accused a Red Dead Redemption horse of betrayal after riding it directly into a tree. Once, late at night, when she had been playing Skyrim for nearly six hours and ignored chat’s increasingly frantic reminders to eat.

Moonrabbit: You have consumed more food in the game than you have in real life.

YN read it and looked into the camera. “That is slander, Moon. I had three almonds.”

Jin stared dumbly at his phone. Moon. It was only a shortened username, nothing else, he knew that. Still, he replayed the clip the following morning while brushing his teeth, just to verify that he had heard it correctly. He had.

Over the next few weeks, Jin learned the shape of YN’s streams. Not her schedule, she did not appear to possess one in any meaningful sense, just the shape. The hour when the energy shifted from performance into something softer, the point at which the alcohol made her more honest but not yet reckless. The games she played when she was restless and the ones she chose when she needed comfort.

Skyrim meant conversation, Call of Duty meant aggression, and The Sims meant vengeance. Red Dead Redemption meant she would spend forty minutes brushing a horse and then deny being attached to the animal.

Jin learned which teammates could be trusted. Yuna usually could, Skyler could not navigate, and Rook was better at games than YN admitted and worse at being quiet than any human being had any right to be. He learned moderator names, inside jokes, the reason chat spammed cabbages whenever YN claimed she had a plan… he did not learn anything she had not chosen to share. That distinction mattered to Jin, maybe more than it should have. He had no interest in searching for old interviews or digging through private histories assembled by fans. He understood too well how invasive curiosity could disguise itself as affection. The stream was enough. More than enough, some nights.

The subscription happened during Dead by Daylight.

Jin had been watching from a dressing room while waiting for a shoot to resume, one earbud hidden beneath his hair. YN was playing survivor, albeit badly. Not because she lacked skill, but because she kept abandoning safe positions to rescue teammates who had made objectively atrocious decisions.

“You’re going to die,” Jin murmured to the screen. YN didn’t hear, obviously. Instead, she doubled back for Skyler, winding through a mess of branches and building remnants. The killer appeared, YN took a hit, unhooked Skyler, and went down in his place. Jin frowned at the screen. Skyler escaped without looking back once. “Coward.”

The stream cut to an advertisement. He had not seen many ads on her channel before, maybe they were scheduled. Maybe the app had changed something. Either way, the sudden cheerful commercial irritated him enough that he opened the subscription menu. The lowest tier cost almost nothing to him, which was not the point. Subscribing would make him more visible– a badge beside his username, a marker of continuity, YN might start recognizing the account. He should have found all of these things undesirable… he did, mostly.

“Seokjin-ssi?” He locked his phone, glancing up at the staff member leaning through the doorway. “They need another ten minutes.”

“That’s fine,” he nodded.

The door closed and Jin looked down again. The ads had ended when he pulled the stream up again. YN was spectating Skyler, who had survived entirely because she had sacrificed herself.

“He’s not even repairing anything,” she complained. “I died for a man crouching behind a rock.”

Jin pressed subscribe. He selected the setting that prevented a public alert, no animated banner or announcement to signal his purchase. No message appearing in chat. A small badge materialized beside moonrabbit. That was all. Jin exhaled, YN never noticed. He told himself he preferred it that way.

Two streams later, she did. She was playing Overwatch and losing patience with a team member who kept demanding healing while sprinting alone into the enemy team.

Moonrabbit: Tell him you cannot heal poor judgment.

YN read the message during the respawn screen. ”Exactly, Moonrabbit. Thank you.” Her eyes shifted toward the username. ”Oh, you subscribed.”

Jin went rigid. The dressing room was empty this time, but he still lowered the brightness of his phone. YN smiled, not broadly, just a small and warm curve that felt different from the grin she used when chat amused her.

”Thank you, Moon. Welcome officially to The Gutters.”

The game resumed and she moved on. Jin did not. Welcome officially. He adjusted the earbud, though nothing was wrong with it. He watched the rest of the match in distracted silence, uncomfortably aware of how pleased he felt. That was exactly why he had hesitated. Not because he feared being discovered, though that was there too, but because tiny scraps of acknowledgment could become disproportionately valuable when someone was lonely enough, curious enough, or foolish enough.

Jin was not lonely, not precisely. His life was crowded. His phone never stopped, his family loved him, the members occupied so much of his emotional world that solitude had often felt like a luxury. But there were forms of isolation that survived crowds, the kind created by never knowing whether someone liked the person or the story attached to him. YN liked neither because she did not know either existed. Whatever warmth she offered Moonrabbit was directed toward a username with a dry sense of humor and an unhealthy concern for safety regulations in her gaming sessions.

It was uncomplicated, for now. Jin knew better than to mistake uncomplicated for harmless.

At the next group dinner, Jungkook propped his phone against a water glass and played one of YN’s recent clips. She was attempting to teach Rook how to drive in GTA. The car lasted a handful of seconds. Taehyung laughed before the crash had even happened.

Jimin leaned across the table. “She should stop letting him drive.”

“She’s worse,” Jungkook said.

“She is not,” Jin replied before thinking.

Three faces turned toward him, sending his heartbeat stumbling. Jin lifted a piece of meat from the grill and placed it on his plate. “At least she knows she’s bad,” he added. “That one sounds too confident.”

Jungkook considered this, then nodded. “True.”

Conversation moved on, no suspicion. Nothing in Jin’s expression had changed, nothing in his tone had exposed the private hours he spent listening to the same voice that played through Jungkook’s phone speakers. Still, he was more quiet through the rest of dinner.

He disliked how easily the secret– he hated calling it that– could have surfaced through something as small as instinctive defense. He was not defending her, he barely knew her. He knew the version that she broadcast. The version that was funny, perceptive, reckless with digital vehicles, unexpectedly kind, and far too near Jungkook’s age for him to be thinking about at midnight while waiting for notifications.

The age gap had not disappeared merely because weeks had passed. If anything, the familiarity made it more important to remember.

YN’s life appeared unsettled in ways his no longer was. She wasn’t immature, he would not insult her that way, but her life was still expanding. She could move countries, change careers, vanish into a new obsession. Jin had obligations woven into his bones. History followed him into every room. Whatever attraction existed between him and a woman on a screen belonged safely inside fantasy because reality would just weigh it all down.

He understood that, and he accepted it even more so.

His phone vibrated underneath the table with a stream notification.

GoblinHours is live: SKYRIM AND SOJU – LET’S MAKE TERRIBLE CHOICES :-))))

Jin did not reach for it, but Jungkook reached for his. “Oh, she’s live again.”

Taehyung immediately said, “Put it on.”

Jungkook began casting the stream to the TV mounted on the restaurant’s private-room wall. Jin remained perfectly calm. YN appeared onscreen, already arguing with chat about whether she had accidentally joined a cult. Taehyung lifted his glass as YN raised hers toward the camera. ”To bad decisions,” she said.

Around the table, the rest of the younger members copied her. Jin hesitated only a moment before doing the same.

“To bad decisions,” Jungkook echoed.

Jin drank without speaking. His phone remained untouched under the table, her stream pulled up. But when YN greeted chat and added, almost absently, ”Moon, behave tonight. I saw you encouraging the horse theft last stream,” Jin nearly inhaled his drink.

Jimin patted his back while Jungkook laughed at something else entirely. No one noticed the heat rising under Jin’s collar. On the TV, YN continued talking, unaware that Moonrabbit sat in a private dining room with three of her regular viewers, trying not to choke himself to death over the sound of a nickname.

Jin waited three days, not because he had decided against donating, but because he wanted the decision to feel less connected to the restaurant. Less connected to YN saying Moon in front of the others and his body reacting as though she had touched him.

Three days felt respectable, measured. By the third night, it also felt completely arbitrary. He was home alone, showered, dressed in an old t shirt, and sitting at the dining table with a bowl of ramyeon growing soft beside his laptop.

YN was playing Red Dead Redemption, or, more accurately, YN was attempting to rescue a stranger from a gang hideout while stopping every thirty seconds to calm her horse. The horse’s name was Bugatti, because her last horse, Tax Fraud, had fallen victim to a very large cliff. Jin had learned that two streams ago. He had also learned that Bugatti frightened easily, disliked snakes, and was treated with considerably more tenderness than any human character in the game.

”Easy, baby,” YN murmured as the horse tossed its head.

Jin looked up from his food. The softness in her voice made him strangely aware of the empty room around him. He lowered his gaze again, the stream continuing beside him. He had only opened it as background noise, something familiar to fill the empty corners of the room while he ate. He did not need to watch every movement or hear every joke. Still, when YN rode past the gang hideout entirely because she had been reading chat, Jin noticed. “You missed it.”

Chat informed her at the same time. She cursed, turned Bugatti around, and blamed the map. Jin smiled as a donation alert popped across the top of the stream. A viewer had sent a large amount with a message requesting that YN use it toward a future charity event. YN stopped immediately, her expression softened as she thanked them, sincere and careful in a way Jin had come to recognize.

Then she added, ”That amount also gets you access to the Discord, by the way. One of the mods will message you. No pressure to join, but it’s there.”

Jin’s attention shifted. He had heard her mention the Discord before. Private channels, game suggestions, occasional voice chats with moderators and longtime supporters, early announcements, community movie nights… He had never considered joining, but that wasn’t entirely true.

He had considered it and dismissed the idea before it could fully develop. The stream was public, watching required nothing from him, chat required very little. Discord felt different, more persistent, and people would surely notice when someone returned. Moonrabbit could exist in chat as a series of occasional comments without becoming a person. In a smaller community, the account would begin gathering more shape.

And YN would be there.

Not constantly, not privately, but still, she would be closer. Jin stared at the donation banner until it disappeared, then he looked down at his food. He should finish eating. Instead, he opened the channel information. The donation tiers were listed plainly. The amount required for Discord access was high enough to discourage casual entry but not high enough to be remarkable where he was concerned.

That was exactly what made it dangerous. Money distorted scale. What felt minor to Jin could feel intimate or extravagant to someone else. He had spent years watching strangers attach meanings to gifts, and he didn’t want YN to feel bought. He didn’t want special treatment.

He wanted–

Jin stopped, because that was the question. What did he want? Access, apparently. A quieter room in which she might remember his name more often. The possibility of understanding what she was like when the audience was smaller. It sounded invasive when phrased so honestly…

He closed the page. Onscreen, YN dismounted Bugatti and immediately entered an ambush. Gunfire erupted and JIn watched her take cover behind a wagon while insisting she had planned out the entire scenario. He ate another bite, grimacing at how cool the noodles had gone. He should have reheated them, instead, after the fight ended, he opened the donation page again.

The message box waited. He could donate anonymously, no public alert or spoken thank you. The moderator would still contact the account afterward. It would be cleaner, less performative. Jin entered the amount and paused, reduced it to exactly the lowest tier that granted access, then increased it slightly because choosing the precise minimum felt somehow worse. He considered the message.

For Bugatti’s emotional damages felt too playful. For the next charity stream felt too formal. No message was best. He selected private donation, hesitating with one finger over the confirmation button. It was still a choice. Not fate, not momentum, not something that had simply happened because the stream was playing. He was choosing to move closer. Even anonymously, even carefully, he was choosing closer. Jin could recognize that small decisions became habits before they became problems.

He pressed confirm. The payment processed without sound, and nothing appeared on the stream. YN continued looting the hideout, unaware. Jin sat back, relief came first, then disappointment. He frowned at himself, he had chosen privacy, he wanted privacy. A public reaction would have defeated the purpose. His laptop chimed a few minutes later, a direct message from one of YN’s moderators sat in his inbox.

LanternMoth: Hi, Moonrabbit! Thank you for supporting the stream. Your donation qualifies for annual Discord access. Totally optional, but here’s the invite if you’d like to join. Please read the rules when you arrive–privacy is a big deal in there.

Below it sat a link. Jin read the message over and over again. Privacy is a big deal. Good. He clicked and the server opened into a welcome channel filled with emojis and brief introductions. There were fewer people than he’d expected. Still hundreds, enough to disappear within. A list of channels ran down the side. Announcements, game requests, clips, food, pets, a private supporter section, voice rooms, and near the bottom, a channel labeled: after-hours.

Jin did not open it. He read the rules first. No sharing screenshots outside of the server, no asking YN for private information, no discussing her location, no contacting members privately without permission, no celebrity speculation, invasive questions, or identity hunting. His mouth tightened fractionally at the last two. Apparently, the community had learned boundaries the hard way.

He reacted to acknowledge the rules, and a bot granted him full access. More channels appeared and the member list shifted. YN’s name sat near the top, offline. Jin looked at it longer than necessary. Then he opened the introductions channel. The most recent message was a simple template.

Name or nickname:

Country or time zone:

Favorite games:

Fun fact:

He nearly closed the app. Name was impossible to disclose without possibly giving away his identity, time zone narrowed too much, and fun fact was a trap entirely where his interests were concerned. He read the intros from the few members before him. Most used usernames, most only gave countries, and nobody seemed to demand any further details.

Jin typed slowly.

Nickname: Moon

Country: Korea

Favorite games: League, MapleStory, and anything that doesn’t involve inventory management

He stopped at fun fact, deleting the line entirely, then posted his message. It appeared at the bottom of the channel, and nothing happened. No alarms, no sudden recognition. One person reacted with a moon emoji. Another replied: Inventory management is the real final boss.

Jin smiled and typed: Exactly.

Then he closed the server, which should have been enough for the night. He returned to the stream, YN had reached a town and was attempting to sell stolen jewelry. Jin picked up his chopsticks, and his laptop chimed again. He glanced toward Discord. A new reaction had appeared under his intro. A silver rabbit, left by YN. No message, no greeting, only the small icon. Jin stared at it.

The rational explanation was obvious, she likely reacted to every introduction when she had time. A simple gesture to make new members feel welcome. Nothing personal or special, he knew that. Still, he did not close the server again. He left it open in a separate tab while YN rode Bugatti into the evening, and every few minutes his eyes drifted back toward the silver rabbit as though it might disappear if he stopped looking.

For the next week, Jin did almost nothing in the server. He read messages other users sent, kept updated on stream polls, and lurked. That was all.

The Discord existed differently from the stream. It was quieter, fragmented into smaller conversations that continued whether YN was present or not. People posted screenshots of glitched games, disastrous Sims houses, rare Skyrim finds, and meals they had cooked while watching old streams. A channel dedicated to pets moved faster than nearly everything else.

YN appeared sporadically. A message at three in the afternoon sometimes, a photo of a lopsided sandwich at midnight, a complaint posted just before morning broke:

YN: whoever suggested i start a new baldurs gate campaign as a bard, i hope ur pillow is warm forever

The message had accumulated dozens of laugh reacts by the time Jin saw it later in the morning. He added one, nothing more. He learned quickly that she didn’t dominate the space within the server. Her moderators did most of the work, enforcing rules without drama and redirecting people when conversation drifted too close to personal territory.

YN entered when she felt like it, scattered a few messages through several different channels, and then would vanish again. It should have made the server feel less compelling, instead, Jin found the unpredictability strangely comforting. There wasn’t a demand to keep up every hour of the day, and zero expectation that he speak. He could open it between schedules, read for a few minutes, and close out of it unnoticed.

On the eighth day, someone posted a photograph of homemade soup in the food channel. The broth was pale, the vegetables had been cut into wildly inconsistent sizes.

Cloudyday: first attempt. Bullying welcome.

YN: looks comforting

YN: but why is that carrot the size of a human organ

Jin laughed in the back seat of the car. His manager glanced at him through the mirror. “What?”

“Nothing,” Jin shook his head, locking his phone. He lasted ten seconds before opening it again.

Cloudyday: i got tired of chopping man

YN: the carrot knew and took advantage of your weakness, it seems

Without thinking too much, Jin typed for the first time.

Moon: A properly sized carrot should not require a knife and fork.

He sent it. YN reacted with a laugh react, and Jin shut the app immediately. He looked out the car window, irritated by the warmth that had reached his face. It was a reaction emoji, she had likely pressed it while walking, talking, or doing something else entirely. He knew this, yet his body still seemed unconvinced.

The first direct exchange happened because of Skyrim. YN posted in the game-suggestions channel late one evening.

YN: serious question

YN: if i install another twenty mods, is the game more likely to become beautiful or melt my pc????

Responses arrived immediately. Most of the members encouraged her, and several warned her. One mod responded a few minutes later:

LanternMoth: The last time you added five mods, everyone in Whiterun lost their clothes.

YN: that actually wasn’t a bug

YN: that was liberation, buddy

Jin read the exchange on his sofa, a leg folded beneath him. He shouldn’t participate, he knew little about Skyrim modding beyond what he had absorbed from her streams. But then someone linked a complicated visual overhaul that appeared likely to destroy her PC right away.

YN: downloading this immediately thnx

Jin frowned, opening the page. Even without technical expertise or extensive Skyrim experience, the installation requirements looked elaborate. He returned to Discord.

Moon: That mod requires several other files and a specific load order.

The channel showed YN typing below his message.

YN: you say that like i take load orders seriously

Moon: Then you should not download it immediately.

YN: wow

YN: joined the server eight days ago and already oppressing me

Jin’s thumbs paused over the keyboard. He could hear the words in her voice, and that made answering more difficult than it should have been.

Moon: I’m trying to prevent another citywide clothing incident.

YN: cowardddd

Several other members reacted to the exchange. The conversation moved on almost instantly, people debating which mods were worth a load order risk. Jin remained still with his phone in both hands. She had responded to him directly, twice, and it had felt… easy. Not thrilling or overwhelming, but natural, as though Moon belonged inside the exchange. Jin set his phone down and stood up, pouring himself more water. He remained in the kitchen long enough for the conversation to move beyond anything he might answer.

Distance was useful. He had begun visiting the server more often than he intended, but he was not losing perspective. YN was friendly because this was her community, she knew Moonrabbit as a subscriber who occasionally made dry comments and stressed game safety. She did not know Jin. If she did, everything would change. That alone could certainly keep him careful.

A few nights later, YN appeared in the after-hours channel. Jin had still never opened it, the name suggested intimacy he did not need. The channel probably contained drunken conversations, personal stories, people speaking more freely than they did elsewhere in the server. He preferred not to intrude.

But YN started a thread inside the channel that night.

YN started a thread: insomnia club

Jin looked at the screen, it was nearly four in the morning. He had finished working hours earlier but had failed to sleep, his mind refusing to settle after a long day of recording. He opened the channel, noting the thread had so far contained fewer than twenty active accounts.

YN: anyone else awake for absolutely zero good reason or am i uniquely cursed?

Responses came from different time zones. Some people were at work, some were just waking up, and others, like her, had no excuse. Jin read without chiming in. She complained that she had tried tea, music, reading, and a documentary about deep sea creatures.

YN: now i am awake AND deeply concerned ab the ocean it’s all fucked upppp

Someone suggested counting backward, another recommended breathing exercises, YN rejected both with theatrical hostility.

YN: siiiigh

YN: moon r u awake or are u one of those sensible people who has a bedtime??? I see ur green icon

He checked the member list as though another Moon might exist. None did.

Moon: I was sensible several hours ago.

YN: such a tragic fall from grace

Moon: I’ll blame the ocean documentary too.

YN: see!!! u understand me

Jin’s mouth curved. He looked around his dark living room. No staff lingered in the doorways, no cameras with red indicators were pointed at him, and no members were sprawled nearby needling him for attention. Only his phone and the quiet hum of the AC that filtered through his home filled the silence.

The thread continued around them, nothing private or inappropriate. YN asked the group to vote on which game she should play the next evening. People argued over Zelda and Dead by Daylight. Jin kept from voting himself, he had work and would likely miss the stream entirely.

YN: moon is abstaining from democracy

He answered before overthinking himself into a shallow grave.

Moon: Democracy gave you seven fireplaces in one Sims house.

YN: and history remembers my greatest work ((((:<

Jin laughed quietly, then the age difference surfaced again, sudden and sobering. The hour, the casual intimacy of sleepless strangers, the ease with which he could begin imagining this as something it was not hit him with force. He had to be careful not to mistake access for closeness. YN knew a sliver of him, a deliberately edited one.

Moon was funny when Jin had time to compose the sentence. Moon never had bad moods, never arrived exhausted, never became impatient or defensive. Moon had no history except the messages YN could scroll through.

Moon was an incomplete person.

Perhaps that was why she found him easy to talk to and poke fun at. Jin placed his phone on his chest, debating leaving the thread. He should sleep. A new message appeared.

YN: okok actual question for the insomnia club

YN: what is one game you wish you could play again for the first time?

The replies slowed. People gave thoughtful answers now, nostalgia weighing heavily on the responses. Jin considered what his would be… games from his childhood, old favorites connected to the members, worlds he had entered during years when everything in his real life had been changing too quickly to process.

Moon: MapleStory. Not because it was perfect, but because I miss who I was when everything in it still felt enormous.

He read the message after sending it, noting that it revealed more than anything else he had said so far. Not his identity, nothing dangerous either, but something true to him. He nearly deleted it.

Then YN reacted to it with a white heart emote. A minute passed before she responded.

YN: yeah

YN: i think sometimes we don’t want the game back

YN: we want the version of ourselves who didn’t know where it all led yet

Jin went very still, the thread continuing under her message and his fingers. He didn’t continue to read it. He looked at her words until the screen dimmed, for the first time since entering the server, his attraction felt secondary. It was still present and inconvenient, but now there existed the first quiet suggestion that YN might understand something he had never said out loud. Or typed. Whatever.

There was a feeling that lived there now, something they shared that Jin hadn’t realized. It was smaller than intimacy, and somehow more dangerous.

Moon: That may be exactly it.

She reacted with another heart.

YN: alright cursed people, i’m going to attempt sleep again

YN: behave while i’m gone

The thread filled with goodnights, and Jin added his own.

Moon: Goodnight. Stay away from the ocean.

YN: no promises, moon

Her status went offline. Jin remained awake for another hour. He didn’t reread the whole conversation, only the part about wanting an earlier version of oneself. And once, only once, the final message with his name.

The insomnia conversation changed nothing, Jin told himself the next morning. It had been a thoughtful interaction between strangers in a group thread. Nothing intimate and nothing uniquely theirs, despite how it had felt the night before. YN had spoken to several other people and reacted to their messages as well. By noon, the thread had been buried under notifications from active channels. Photographs of breakfast, complaints about work, and an argument over whether cereal qualified as soup notified Jin throughout the day.

There was no reason to return to the thread from the night before. Jin returned to it twice. Only to check something he remembered incorrectly. Once realizing he hadn’t, Jin closed his phone and returned to work.

That afternoon, all seven members met at the studio.

The room filled quickly with overlapping voices, discarded jackets, coffee cups, and the familiar disorder that formed whenever BTS were all together without cameras requiring structure. Yoongi occupied one corner of the sofa, listening to Hoseok describe an idea with the patient expression of someone pretending not to have any opinions yet. Namjoon stood near the desk, reading something on his phone while Jungkook leaned over his shoulder without permission. Jimin and Taehyung had somehow turned stretching into a competition next to the coffee table. Jin sat in front of the mixing console and attempted to remain above all of it.

“Hyung.”

He ignored Jungkook.

“Hyung.”

“No.”

“I haven’t even asked anything.”

“You were going to.”

Jungkook dropped into the chair beside him. “Did you like the stream the other night?”

Jin looked over. “What stream?”

“You know… The one you said was more interesting than my walls? The stream.”

Jin turned toward the console again. “I don’t remember.”

“You watched it for hours.”

“I was drinking.”

Jungkook accepted that with a shrug. “She’s playing Lethal Company tonight.”

Across the room, Taehyung looked up from the floor, straightening his shirt. “What time?”

Jungkook checked his phone. “Late.”

Jimin groaned. “I have something early tomorrow.”

“That has literally never stopped you,” Jin said.

“It should start to.”

Hoseok looked between them. “Who are you guys talking about?”

“YN,” Taehyung replied.

Namjoon looked up from his phone. “The live streamer?”

“You know her too?” Jin asked before he could make the question sound less interested.

Namjoon adjusted his glasses. “I’ve seen the clips Jungkook has sent. The one where she tried to negotiate with a zombie wasn’t bad.”

“That was The Walking Dead,” Jungkook nodded.

“She thought choosing silence would make her character appear threatening,” Jimin added.

“It did.” Taehyung insisted.

“The zombie ate him.”

“A threatening death.”

Jin listened as the conversation spread. Hoseok had seen one of her dance game streams. Yoongi knew her name because a producer had mentioned her charity work in passing before, and Namjoon had, actually, watched several of the clips Jungkook had sent in the groupchat.

She existed closer to their world than Jin had realized.

Not personally, but visibly. Famous enough to be recognizable, established enough that a future overlap wouldn’t be impossible. The thought made his stomach tighten.

He examined the reaction, it was not entirely excitement. The safety of Moon depended on distance. YN could like Moon’s jokes because she didn’t know there was a public figure behind them. She didn’t have to wonder whether she was speaking correctly, or whether anything she said would become news, or if a casual exchange carried hidden expectations and dating rumors.

Jin did not want that ease to disappear. He also did not want to admit how much he had begun valuing it.

“Hyung.” Jungkook nudged his arm. Jin blinked at him. “You’re staring.”

“At?”

“The desk.”

“It’s a very good desk.”

Yoongi glanced over from the sofa. “It isn’t.”

“You chose it.”

“And I regret it. Daily, actually.”

The conversation moved on. No one connected Jin to YN because there was no reason to. Still, when Jungkook later suggested putting the stream on during dinner, Jin was the first to object. “We should discuss the arrangement.”

“During dinner?” Jimin groaned, staring at him.

“Yes.”

“You hate discussing work while we eat.”

“I’ve matured.”

Yoongi looked at him blankly. “Since when?”

Jin ignored him. He did not want YN’s voice filling the room while the server remained open on his phone around others. He did not want someone to glimpse Moonrabbit in chat and hear YN respond with familiarity. The risk was tiny, but that did not make it comfortable. They ate without the stream, and Jin pretended not to be relieved.

He reached home after midnight. YN had already been live for over an hour. Jin changed clothes before opening the stream, an act of discipline that felt increasingly ceremonial. Lethal Company filled the screen. YN, Rook, Yuna, and Skyler were aboard a small ship, arguing about who had spent all their excess money on a shower.

“I thought it was functional,” Skyler said.

”It is functional,” YN replied. ”It functions as proof that you shouldn’t control our finances. Ever.”

Jin smiled while opening Discord. The server was active, members discussing the stream in real time. He kept the chat hidden. After the previous night, he preferred to retreat silently.

A sensible correction. On stream, the team landed on a moon covered in fog. Within minutes, Skyler had vanished. Rook was killed by something YN could not identify on the monitor in the ship. Yuna returned to the ship carrying a metal sign and no useful equipment. YN eventually ventured through the fog to the facility alone, addressing the audience with the weariness of an underfunded manager. Jin watched for nearly twenty minutes without typing.

Then YN’s character encountered a small creature in a hallway. She stopped, and the creature stopped. “It’s cute,” she whispered.

Chat filled with warnings. Jin knew enough about her by now to predict the next decision.

“Don’t,” he groaned.

She approached it.

“No,” he shook his head. “YN.”

The creature launched itself at her face. Jin jumped so hard that he had startled himself again. Her character stumbled blindly through the facility while YN screamed into the microphone, hands jerking against the mouse and keyboard loudly. She walked directly off a railing, and the screen went black.

Jin covered his eyes. A notification appeared in Discord. YN had posted in the live-chat while waiting for her teammates to finish the round.

YN: nobody say anything

Responses poured in automatically. Jin watched them accumulate. He should remain quiet, he had intended to remain quiet.

Moon: You just attempted diplomacy with a parasite.

There was a pause, then YN’s laughter came through the stream. She hadn’t read the message out loud, just looked toward her other monitor and chuckled, visibly trying to stifle it. Jin stared at the TV. In Discord, a response appeared.

YN: you’re on thin ice tonight, moon

The message was ordinary, public and one of dozens. His reaction was not. Warmth spread through him, slow and unwelcome. Jin leaned back and placed his phone facedown on his chest. There it was again, the appeal he had been attempting to name. Not merely attraction, not simply that she was beautiful or funny, but the pleasure of being met.

Moon offered a sentence, and YN caught it at the angle he had intended. She did not require any explanation, didn’t smooth the humor down into something safer. She returned it, which was rare. Rarer than beauty, and much more dangerous where Jin was concerned. Jin picked up his phone.

Moon: I’ll proceed carefully.

YN reacted with a knife emoji. He laughed under his breath, then stopped himself from sending anything else. The stream continued, and he watched from a little farther back, determined not to let one enjoyable exchange turn into a pattern he could no longer control.

Near the end of the night, YN’s team finally met a decent quota. Rook celebrated, Yuna took credit, and Skyler bought another decorative item for the ship to which YN threatened to revoke his purchasing privileges permanently. Jin’s eyes burned from exhaustion, but he stayed through the final minutes.

As the others left the voice chat on stream, YN remained on camera to say goodnight. She thanked the subscribers, donors, and moderators, then she glanced toward her second monitor.

“And the Discord degenerates who spent the last four hours encouraging us–seek professional help, maybe.”

Chat responded with hearts, and YN smiled.

“Except Moon. Moon’s on thin ice and doesn’t get healthcare.”

Jin’s mouth fell open. She moved on immediately, reminding everyone of her next stream. No emphasis or suggestion that the comment held meaning beyond the earlier joke. Still, she had remembered it for hours. Remembered him. Jin looked down at Discord, and he did not respond. There was nothing he could say without revealing how thoroughly the comment had landed in him. The stream ended, and a moment later, YN appeared in the server again.

YN: goodnight guttersluts

Messages followed, Jin waited until dozens of others had replied before adding his own.

Moon: Goodnight. I’ll begin preparing my legal appeal.

Her response came just before her status changed to offline.

YN: denied

Jin smiled into the darkness of his home, then set his phone on the nightstand, rolled onto his back, and stared at the ceiling. He had been careful, revealed nothing, the members remained unaware. YN knew only Moon. Everything was still contained, but for the first time, Jin understood that his secrecy was no longer protecting only his identity. It was protecting this version of their connection, and somewhere under that realization was a question he did not want to answer yet.

How long could something remain uncomplicated when one person knew the truth and the other did not?

By early winter, Moon had become part of the normalcy of YN’s streams and Discord.

He was never the center of it all, never the loudest voice, but he was present. If YN posted a picture of a catastrophically overcooked grilled cheese at one in the morning, Moon would eventually appear to ask if she’d mistaken charcoal for seasoning.

If chat insisted a horror game wasn’t scary, Moon would quietly remind everyone that half the server had screamed at virtual mannequins before. He rarely spoke first, he almost always landed one line before disappearing again. People stopped greeting him like a newcomer, he had become one of the regulars. Jin found that realization strangely alarming.

“Jin.”

Jin blinked. He’d been sitting in the makeup chair while a stylist worked on his hair. “Hm?”

The stylist laughed. “I’ve been trying to get your attention for, like, thirty seconds.”

“Oh.”

“You were somewhere else.”

“I was thinking.”

“And smiling.”

Jin’s expression disappeared so quickly it almost hurt. “I was?”

“Mmm,” she nodded, continuing to work without another comment.

Jin looked down at his phone resting in his lap. Discord was open, YN had posted exactly two minutes earlier.

YN: bugatti kicked me today :////

Attached was a photograph of the horse in Red Dead Redemption staring blankly into the middle distance. The caption beneath it read: no remorse in those eyes

Moon had replied before Jin consciously decided to.

Moon: He knows what you did in Windhelm last week.

She reacted with a crying laughing emoji.

YN: that’s between me and the guards

Jin locked his phone, chuckling, and caught his stylist’s eyes in the mirror.

“...Good joke?”

“Sort of.”

A few days later, Jungkook wandered into the studio carrying takeout and bad ideas. “I’ve got something.”

Yoongi didn’t even look up from the computer. “No.”

“I haven’t even said what it is yet–”

“No.”

“You don’t know what it is, hyung.”

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“I absolutely do,” Yoongi deadpanned.

Jungkook grinned. “What if…”

“No.”

“...we do a charity livestream where we all play horror games?”

Yoongi sighed as Hoseok paled. Taehyung looked interested immediately, “I’d do it.”

Namjoon glanced over his laptop. “For charity?”

“For charity.”

“...I’d consider it.”

Jimin groaned. “I hate horror.”

“You love horror.”

“I hate playing horror games.”

Taehyung looked delighted. “I’ll protect you.”

“You’ll hide behind me.”

“I would never.”

“You absolutely would, Tae.”

Jin listened while pretending not to. His chopsticks had paused halfway to his mouth.

“A multiplayer horror stream could raise a lot…” Hoseok mused.

Jungkook nodded. “Exactly.”

“Who would host?”

“I don’t know.”

“We could invite someone,” Namjoon suggested.

“Like who?” Jimin asked.

“There are lots of gaming creators.” Jungkook shrugged.

The conversation drifted toward logistics before anyone suggested names. Jin kept eating, his heartbeat had picked up for no sensible reason. It was hypothetical, nothing more. Had to be.

That weekend, YN announced she was playing around with ideas for her next big streaming event. She didn’t mention horror games at all, thankfully. She did mention a 24 hour community stream supporting children’s hospitals. She outlined the possible ideas while sipping coffee. “Games, art, community challenges…” she counted on her fingers. “...and if we hit the final donation goal…” she sighed dramatically. “...my moderators want to choose a dance I have to learn.”

Chat exploded, and for once, the Discord was faster. Within minutes, a dedicated thread appeared.

Dance Suggestions

Hundreds of replies. Jin read them with growing amusement. Half of the server wanted something impossibly difficult, the other half wanted YN to learn something intentionally embarrassing. Someone suggested ballet, another suggested breakdancing, and a moderator pleaded for mercy.

YN: if any of u say “idol choreography” i’m deleting the server <3

She was, of course, too late. Three people immediately recommended BTS songs, Dionysus among them.

YN: absolutely not

YN: have u people LOST YOUR MINDS

More replies flooded in, and she doubled down.

YN: i enjoy having knees

Jin watched the screen. He had never actually considered what it would look like if YN attempted one of their choreographies. The mental image was… unexpectedly endearing. He scrolled through the suggestions again, ignoring the suggestions for Dynamite and Butter. The debate grew surprisingly serious as more of their songs were suggested.

Jin stayed out of it, because that felt wiser than contributing any damning recommendations.

YN: okay compromise

YN: if we somehow hit the absurd stretch goal, i’ll let chat vote

YN: but if u pick something impossible i’m learning exactly one move and declaring victory

That sounded about right. Jin reached for his tea as his phone buzzed again. A private notification from LanternMoth lit up his screen.

LanternMoth: Hey, Moon! Hope you’re doing well. Just wanted to let supporters know we’re putting together a community suggestion document for future charity collaborations. Nothing official, just brainstorming creators, games, ideas, etc. Feel free to add anything if inspiration strikes!

Jin read it twice. Creators and collaborations. His thumb lingered over his screen, he could suggest anyone… or no one. His identity remained completely hidden. There was no expectation that he contribute. He closed the message… and reopened it five minutes later. Finally, he typed one sentence.

Moon: Co-op streams with creators from different fields tended to attract new audiences for charity. Musicians who genuinely enjoy games could be fun, if anyone would actually agree.

He sent it. Simple and direct. He had not mentioned BTS, he had not mentioned himself, it was merely an observation. Still… for the first time since Jungkook had pulled up her stream months ago, an invisible thread had been tossed forward into the future. Jin looked out the studio window. YN was probably somewhere laughing at another ridiculous dance suggestion, completely unaware that an anonymous supporter had just nudged a tiny domino without realizing how much stood behind it. He had no intention of pushing any further. Life, he had learned long ago, was perfectly capable of doing that on its own.

YN disclosed her location accidentally. At least, that was how it looked.

She was halfway through a late night Skyrim stream, mildly drunk and deeply offended by an NPC who had charged her for a room she claimed she had already paid for.

Chat was moving quickly with questions, jokes, and arguments over whether she should rob the innkeeper or not. Then someone asked what time it was for her. YN glanced at the corner of her monitor on stream. “Almost three.”

The chat reacted immediately, several viewers began calculating time zones. YN’s expression changed, only slightly. A tiny pause, a flicker of realization. Jin noticed this because he had become too familiar with the way she looked when deciding whether she should say something. It wasn’t the biggest thing, he supposed. She’d mentioned moving continents previously, but had never actually disclosed what country or city she was in now.

She took a sip of soju. “Before you weirdos start doing geography,” she said, “I should probably clarify something again, because some of you are very adamant that it is not three a.m in Seattle.”

Jin’s hand stopped over the bowl of tangerines on his table. YN leaned back in her chair. “I don’t live in America anymore.”

Chat slowed for less than a second before going at the speed of light. Messages flew too quickly for Jin to follow.

WHATSINCE WHEN???? CANADA?

EUROPE???????????

ARE YOU IN WITNESS PROTECTION??!?!?!??!

YN laughed, “No, I’m not in witness protection. I mean, maybe emotionally sometimes.” More questions flew in while she rubbed her thumb over the label on the soju bottle, visibly choosing her words. “I haven’t lied about it, really. I mentioned it a while back, actually. I just haven’t publicly harped on it because some of you could turn a restaurant receipt into a military operation.”

That earned a flood of guilty looking emojis. Jin’s attention sharpened, he understood the caution immediately. Location was not a harmless detail once enough strangers cared.

“But I’ve been here for a year now, so keeping it vague is becoming increasingly stupid… I live in Busan.”

Jin froze. YN remained on the screen, Jin remained in Seoul. They had never met, the distance between them was still measured in far more than double digit kilometers. But until that moment, he’d imagined her elsewhere. America, probably. Maybe Canada. Somewhere across an ocean, safely embedded in another life. Busan was not another life, it was a train ride, a domestic flight, a city Jin knew, a place his family knew. The revelation removed an abstraction he had not realized he was using as protection. Chat had become unreadable again.

YN lifted both hands. “Calm down. No, I’m not telling you where in Busan. No, you may not guess. If you recognize a cafe or street from something I post, congratulations on having eyes. Keep it to yourself.”

Her tone stayed ligoht, but something firm lived under it. The moderators began posting reminders immediately.

No location speculation.

No searching property records.

No asking for neighborhoods.

No posting sightings.

Jin looked toward Discord. The server had already locked several traveling related channels and enabled slow mode in the general chat. LanternMoth had posted, too.

LanternMoth: Reminder: city-level disclosure is not permission to investigate further. Do not speculate about YN’s home, routine, or current location.

Jin reacted to the message before reading anything else in the slow-moving chat. YN returned her attention to the stream. “There, now you all know. I live in Busan, the world continues rotating.”

Rook, who had apparently remained silently connected to voice chat, spoke for the first time in several long minutes as he waited for Skyrim to give way to Dead by Daylight. “You made it sound like you had committed an atrocious crime.”

“If only it were that simple,” she sighed.

Chat, thankfully, began spamming horse emotes as YN’s Skyrim mount came into view. She had affectionately coined him Piss Queen after her previous horse met an unfortunate end at a waterfall. Jin sat with a tangerine now forgotten in his hand, staring at the city name that still repeated sparsely in the chat. Busan. He heard it differently than the international viewers would. Not as a destination, as proximity. His mind began supplying details before he could stop it.

The weather there, the ocean in winter, how quickly the KTX could get him from Seoul Station to Busan. The fact that he had perhaps been in the same city as her during schedules without knowing… He shut the thoughts down. That was exactly the sort of thinking YN had warned against. City level information did not make her available. It did not invite coincidence, and it certainly did not justify curiosity about where she spent her ordinary life. Jin peeled the tangerine carefully. Onscreen, YN had saved her game and exited to her pastel desktop, launching Dead by Daylight as her other friends joined their Discord call.

He watched for another minute, but the stream now felt subtly altered. Not because she had changed, she was still the same, but because his mental picture had. Her Korean references had made more sense, the convenience store drinks that appeared beside her keyboard, the delivery food, the occasional frustration with apps on her phone, the hour she streamed, the soju… How had he not realized?

Maybe it was because he had simply not allowed himself to assemble the clues. That would have felt too much like looking. A message dinged in Discord.

Cloudyday: busan gutters rise up

Several members reacted.

YN: do not rise up. sit down immediately.

Jin smiled, his fingers moving toward the keyboard. He could say something neutral like ‘Welcome to Korea,’ but that was too strange after a year. ‘Busan is a good city,’ felt too personal. He typed nothing. The chat did not need to know he was Korean beyond what his introduction already said.

YN certainly did not need to know the reveal had affected him at all, because it shouldn’t have. He reminded himself of the facts. She was still younger, still a stranger, still unaware of his identity, and still someone whose community he inhabited under a partial truth. If anything, the physical closeness made his restraint more important, not less. Distance had made the whole thing feel theatrical, Busan had now made it feel possible.

Two days later, the members met for dinner.

Jungkook arrived late, dropped into his chair and announced, “YN lives in Busan.”

Jin did not react, at least, he hoped he did not.

Jimin looked up from the grill. “What?”

“She said it on stream.”

Taehyung’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”

“For a year,” Jungkook nodded.

Jimin laughed. “And none of us knew?”

“She kept it private,” Jungkook said. “Just said Korea before, sometimes.”

Jin focused on turning the meat. Hoseok glanced over. “That could make a collaboration easier.”

The tongs paused in Jin’s hand for a fraction of a second.

Namjoon nodded. “Logistically, yes.”

“Collaboration?” Jimin asked.

Jungkook shrugged, “We were thinking about that charity stream. I’ve talked about it with some friends and they mentioned her for it.”

“What friends?” Jin asked.

The question came too quickly. He covered it by placing meat onto Jimin’s plate. Jungkook didn’t notice. “Online friends I game with,” he answered. “Fans have mentioned us to her, too. A couple of other creators, as well.”

Yoongi took a drink. “She does have a pretty big Korean audience.”

“She speaks Korean pretty well too,” Taehyung added.

Hoseok looked at him. “Does she?”

Taehyung nodded. “She uses it sometimes on stream.”

Jin knew that. He had listened to her switch languages when thanking Korean donors, laughing at her pronunciation mistakes before correcting herself. He had once spent ten minutes composing a message explaining an idiom, then decided against sending it. Still, he said, “I hadn’t noticed.”

Jungkook reached for the meat Jin had just cooked. “That’s because you don’t watch much.”

“True,” Jin nodded. The lie was small, smooth. Almost effortless now. That bothered him more than near discovery. Conversation shifted toward other things, schedules and music, whether they would spend more time locally in the coming months. Jin stayed quiet.

When Jungkook mentioned he might reach out to YN’s management someday about a gaming collaboration, nobody treated it as significant. Why would they? It was a professional idea, a future possibility, the kind of overlap that happened constantly between people with public careers. Jin lowered his gaze toward his glass on the table. For the first time, meeting YN no longer felt impossible. It should have excited him, but instead, unease settled under his ribs.

Moon had been safe because Moon could never walk into a room. Jin could. And if the day came, he would have to look at her while carrying months of private familiarity she did not know existed between them. He would know her favorite soju to drink during long streams, which games she played when she was anxious, what jokes made her laugh when she was overtired, that she feared deep water but adored the ocean from a distance, that she called him Moon.

She would know nothing about him beyond what the world already knew. The imbalance suddenly felt enormous. Jin turned his glass slowly between his fingers, he had always known the truth would complicate things. He had not considered what meeting her before telling it might feel like. Across the table, Jungkook was still talking.

“Busan’s good,” he said. “She probably likes the quiet.”

Jin looked down at the meat burning on the grill. “Yes,” he said softly, picking up the tongs before anyone noticed. “Probably.”

For the next several weeks, Busan became a fact that Jin tried not to touch. He did not ask questions, search for sightings, or pay closer attention when YN mentioned rain, traffic, or delivery times. He knew how easily curiosity could become trespass when one had enough resources.

So he treated the city like any other detail she had chosen to share. Public, general, meaningless. This worked reasonably well until she posted a photograph in Discord. Not of herself, not of a recognizable street. Just of the sea under a pale winter sky, dark water folding against a concrete edge. A paper cup sat near the bottom of the frame.

YN: needed to get out of the apartment before i started arguing with the furniture

The photo received dozens of reactions. People asked whether she felt better, someone recommended a cafe, and a moderator removed the cafe name immediately and reminded everyone not to speculate or recommend location. Jin studied the water, Busan had miles of coastline, countless places where a person could stand and take that exact photograph. He knew better than to identify it.

Still, something about the image pressed against him. Maybe because it was ordinary. A quiet moment offered without performance, no face, no joke sharpened for an audience. Only cold water and the admission that she needed air.

Moon: Furniture rarely admits when it’s wrong.

YN: exactly. deeply toxic household.

Jin smiled.

YN: but i feel better now. ocean threatened me back into perspective.

He hesitated.

Moon: Effective therapy, though the bedside manner is poor.

YN reacted with a white heart and Jin locked his phone. That should have been the end of it. Instead, while sitting in the back of a van later that afternoon, he found himself watching the sea slide past through the window. They were in Busan for work, the coincidence felt almost insulting. He had known about the schedule for months, long before YN’s disclosure, and not that long after Moonrabbit existed. Still, the city now carried a second presence in his mind. Not a location, but a possibility. Jin hated the word.

They had come down for two days of recording and promotional work for their next project and series of RUN BTS videos. By evening, Jungkook had convinced several of them to eat near the water rather than return directly to the hotel. They chose a private room, security handled the entrance, and everything had proceeded normally.

Jin sat beside Namjoon, listened to Taehyung argue about side dishes, and did not think about YN. Then Jungkook set his phone on the table. “She’s live.”

Jin’s chopsticks halted. Jimin laughed. “You always know.”

“I have notifications. So do you,” Jungkook replied.

“So do I,” Taehyung smiled.

Jin concentrated on a piece of grilled fish. Hoseok leaned over. “What’s she playing?”

“Skyrim.”

“Again?”

“She lives there.” Jungkook explained, propping the phone against a water pitcher. YN appeared in the small frame, wearing an oversized sweatshirt and complaining that her game had crashed for the third time. Behind her, the background looked exactly as it always did. No window, no clue, no evidence that she existed somewhere in the same city Jin sat in now.

Jin’s awareness of that fact became immediate and physical, his shoulders tensed and he took a drink.

“This mod list is held together by prayer and cybercrime,” YN told chat.

Taehyung laughed.

Namjoon glanced at the phone with slight interest. “What is she trying to do?”

“Make the snow prettier,” Jungkook said.

“It already looked fine.” Jin replied.

Jungkook looked at him, and Jin lifted one shoulder. “I remember the game.”

Nothing more was said as YN restarted her last save. The younger members watched in fragments while eating. Hoseok asked questions, and Namjoon became briefly invested in the lore. Jimin complained that every NPC looked suspicious. Jin barely spoke, not because he feared exposure or some elaborate unveiling of his indiscretions, but because the proximity made the stream feel too intimate. YN was somewhere beyond the restaurant walls, perhaps a twenty minute walk away, perhaps an hour, but she existed in the same weather, in the same city. Moon could be in Seoul, or anywhere else in Korea. Jin had never lied about being in Busan, but silence sometimes began resembling deception when enough context had accumulated around it.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he did not check it. A minute later, it buzzed again. Then for a third time. Jin waited until Taehyung and Jungkook became absorbed in an argument over whether YN’s current follower was useful or not. Under the table, he opened Discord.

YN had posted in the supporter channel.

YN: game crashed again

YN: i’m repelling technology tonight

Several responses followed before she messaged again.

YN: moon you’re quiet tonight. are u judging my load order from afar?

Jin gripped his phone harder as he read the message, pulse stumbling. Jungkook’s phone continued playing the stream less than two feet away. YN glanced toward her second monitor onscreen, waiting only loosely, attention already drifting elsewhere. She had no idea that the man she had addressed sat in a private restaurant room in Busan with six others who knew her voice now.

Jin’s first impulse was not pleasure, it was panic. Small, controlled, but unmistakable panic. He could ignore the message, Moon was not obligated to answer. He had been quiet before, but silence might stand out more now that she addressed him directly. Jin typed beneath the table.

Moon: I’m trying to determine whether prayers count as required dependency for mod load orders.

On Jungkook’s phone, YN looked down. Her mouth curved. “Moon says he’s trying to determine whether prayers count as required dependency where mod load orders are concerned.”

Jungkook laughed. Taehyung leaned toward the screen. “Who’s Moon?”

Jin’s hand went stiff around his phone. “Some person in her server,” Jungkook smirked. “He is funny.”

Jimin nodded. “That was good.”

Jin lowered his eyes to his plate. No one noticed he had stopped breathing properly. Onscreen, YN typed something. His phone vibrated in his hand.

YN: it does. install faith before graphics overhaul

Jin did not reply, he could not. Not with Jungkook’s phone broadcasting her face across the table. Jin’s stomach tightened as he looked at her on the small screen. For the first time, his anonymity did not feel private. It felt unfair. Not because he owed the internet his identity, not because a streamer was entitled to investigate every subscriber, but because YN had begun treating Moon like an actual entire person, and Jin had allowed her to build that person around carefully selected truths.

He had never outright lied. But he had let her assume equality between them. Two ordinary people awake at bad hours, two strangers talking about old games and hostile oceans. The truth would alter every past exchange retroactively, and that frightened him more than being recognized.

“Hyung,” Namjoon nudged the serving plate toward him. “You’re not eating.”

Jin picked up his chopsticks. “I am.”

“You’ve been holding the same piece for a minute.”

Jin placed it in his mouth and chewed automatically. Across the table, Jungkook turned the stream volume down as the rest of the food arrived. The conversation shifted toward the next day’s schedule and YN’s voice became background noise. Jin’s phone remained in his lap as a new Discord message appeared.

YN: you disappear every time i win an argument

He looked at it, the warmth blossoming despite everything. That was the problem.

Moon: I was giving you time to enjoy the rare experience.

YN reacted with a knife, and this time, Jin did not smile.

Later, at the hotel, Jin stood near the window and looked down over Busan. Lights stretched toward the dark outline of water. The stream had ended long ago while they were still at the restaurant. The others had long since retreated to their own rooms. He should have slept, but instead he opened Discord and scrolled through his messages in the group chat. Months of them now, mostly jokes and brief conversations, nothing that should have mattered as much as it did.

YN had not confided secrets to him, she had not made any promises. They were not friends in any conventional sense at all, yet still there was trust in the way she casually addressed him in the server. Expectation in the way she occasionally noticed his absences. A place shaped for Moon inside her community.

Jin sat on the edge of the bed and opened his account settings. His finger hovered over the option to delete the account. It would be clean, Moon could disappear before reality complicated anything further. YN might ask once, then the community would move on. He stared at the button and could not press it. The thought of vanishing without any explanation felt cruel, but the thought of staying felt selfish, and the thought of telling her the truth felt impossible at this point.

Jin closed the settings. A direct message notification appeared. From YN. His entire body went still on the bed. They had never spoken privately, not once. He opened it.

YN: hey, serious question

YN: did i make u uncomfortable talking about u on the stream?

Jin read the words several times. The anxiety within them was quiet but unmistakable, as his had been earlier at the table. She had noticed his silence and worried that she had crossed a line. He answered quickly.

Moon: No. You didn’t do anything wrong.

The typing indicator appeared.

YN: okay

YN: you just went quieter than usual

Jin looked out toward the window, at the city. At the reflection of a man who had built his entire adult life around being seen and was now terrified of one woman seeing him too clearly.

Moon: I’m private by habit. Sometimes I overcorrect.

That was true. Painfully so. YN took longer to respond.

YN: understood

YN: i won’t ask for details

YN: but for what it’s worth, you don’t have to earn your place here by being entertaining all the time

Jin’s throat tightened as the message struck somewhere unguarded. He had spent years being entertaining as instinct, armor, and responsibility. YN could not know that, couldn’t possibly know how precisely she had found him anyway. He typed several different answers and deleted each one before finally typing something true.

Moon: Thank you. I mean that.

YN reacted with a white heart.

YN: goodnight, moon

Jin’s eyes softened on the words. The city remained beyond the glass, close enough to hold both of them and vast enough that they might never cross paths. For the first time, he wished the distance were greater. For the first time, he wished it were gone.

Moon: Goodnight, YN.

He set the phone down, then sat in the dark, unable to decide which was more pressing: that she still knew almost nothing about him, or that she had begun understanding him anyway.

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