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JEJU HEAT: Chapter 21

ACT V: The Breaking Tide

Nobody Like You

Softened in memory; emptied in sorrow; redeemed in water.

word count: ~20k Characters: ITZY Shin Ryujin, ITZY Shin Yuna (+ ITZY member cameos)

Intro | Masterlist | Series Index Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | BTS: Ryujin

TW: emotional damage

@fahzball @shin--nim @shambler990 y'all asked for the sad chapter first and ya got it! Looking back, this was probably the right choice. You guys are geniuses. And @xana86 you were "down for anything" so here's 20k words of sad-girl-hour for ya :)

A/N: Dedicated to Ryeji, to ITZY and to every MIDZY. But this chapter also belongs to everyone who's watched their favorite person become a stranger and couldn't figure out which one of you changed, to anyone who discovered the personality they built to protect themselves was the thing pushing everyone away. But most of all, it belongs to the ones whose worth was decided by others before they ever got a say. (Also, there are 19 real ITZY lore pieces that I've dramatized as flashbacks. If you caught them, you're a real one.) Ch22: Companion piece to Ch21. The room "renovation" from Minho/Yeji/Lia's pov. Final chapter of Act 5.

[RYUJIN - THIRD PERSON]

Hit you like the mafia.

The track ended and the MAMA penthouse vanished. The gold light and the champagne taste evaporated, leaving Ryujin with the cold terrace rail against her forearms and Jeju's suddenly freezing summer air on her skin.

(I actually decided to write this scene around 'That's a No-No' before it went viral. I discovered it by Googling "ITZY angry songs" and deciding this was the one. Funny how the universe works... huh.)

The shuffle rolled over. "That's a No No" kicked in with all its brass and percussion and chants, the Moombahton beat landing heavy through her AirPods, and she let it fill the empty space.

She'd been out here too long. Her jaw ached from clenching through the fight and clenching through the replay on top of it. The chill had crept past her elbows, and her fingernails had carved defensive half-moons into the pad of her thumb.

She'd been twenty in that penthouse and she was twenty-three on this terrace, supposedly the exact same girl. The MAMA memory tasted warm and certain, unlike the wreckage of the last two hours.

Fuck Yeji and her quiet little "evolution". Fuck her sudden allergy to fun and her bullshit about needing to change, as if changing meant looking at Ryujin like she was a phase Yeji had outgrown. They built something together, the two of them, bunks to stages to every room they'd ever walked into as a unit, and Yeji was out here acting like she couldn't wait to go solo.

The kick drum agreed with her, her poor AirPods rattling their tiny guts out trying to slam a bass line built for stadium subwoofers directly into her skull. She dug the crescent deeper into her finger and stared at the dark.

The pool light was on, casting a teal glow upward through the surface that made the deck look exactly like the opening shot of the high-budget poolside porn Ryujin usually searched for on her phone at one in the morning. She looked back and suddenly Yeji was at the pool's edge, ruining the aesthetic. She had both arms wrapped around Minho from behind, her face buried so hard between his shoulder blades it looked like she was trying to hide inside him. Her fists were bunched tight in his shirt. Minho just stood there, making it easy, taking her weight with his broad back while his hands locked over her forearms. Ryujin couldn't hear the words over the distance, but she saw the tension, the ragged hitch of Yeji's shoulders as she spilled her guts directly into his spine.

Ryujin's chest went tight and hot and she pushed off the railing and went down the terrace steps before the rest of her caught up to what her legs already knew, which was that she couldn't stand there and watch that bullshit for one more second.

Move up faster faster, gettin' louder louder.

The bass dropped and her feet found the beat and before she knew it she was marching furiously down the path to her own voice.

She and Chaeryeong had recorded the brass and percussion three times because the first two weren't loud enough, and the final version turned her spine into a middle finger every time it came on. The gravel crunched under her slides in time with the kick drum and everything behind her got a little smaller with every step.

The resort path cut between stone walls and hedges that swallowed the villa lights within twenty steps. She wanted the dark and the salt air and her own group in her ears telling her she was right. Can't let you kill my vibe, that's a no no. The pre-chorus landed like a fist bump from a version of herself who still had her shit together and she took it gratefully and kept walking.

Her legs burned from the pace as her hands kept curling into fists, just to keep the option available. The air smelled like volcanic rock and sweet citrus, but she was moving too fast for the smells to stick.

Yeji's face in the living room wouldn't stop replaying. The hurt underneath was what kept catching. She could handle Yeji angry - she'd been handling Yeji angry since trainee evaluations when Yeji used to go dead-eyed and terrifyingly calm right before she snapped. She kept seeing that flash of real, unguarded pain from the moment when Ryujin said you've changed and meant it as a weapon, watching Yeji catch it as one because they both knew exactly what it was and Ryujin couldn't even pretend she'd meant something else.

She kicked a stone off the path and it cracked into the hedge.

Fuck Yeji for being hurt by something true, and fuck her for acting like growing up required a standing ovation. They'd been the same person for six years, matching each other's appetite and chaos. Ryujin remembered exactly what that appetite looked like: the two of them rotating on a cameraman in a hotel bed after Inkigayo, synchronized, high-fiving over his chest while publicly grading his thrusts. Ryujin had called them Ddaeng Ddong, a dumb duo name she'd forced on Yeji years earlier, repurposed as a mocking victory banner while Yeji rode a guy breathless. They used to devour people together.

Until some guy with nice hands and a nice dick showed up, and suddenly Yeji was wrapping herself around his back like he'd invented breathing.

And they were on the same pool deck where Ryujin had ridden Minho yesterday, demanding he eat her out with the same aggressive conquest energy she used on everyone else. But down there right now, Yeji was pressing her forehead into his spine, eyes closed, surrendering her weight.

The tenderness was going to make her throw up. This was Hwang Yeji. The same girl who once bent a guy's dick backward until he cried because he grabbed her hair and she hadn't said he could. Now that same girl was trading in the bunks and the breathless hotel rooms and every space they'd ever owned together for a man who probably folded his socks, and currently had his hands folded protectively around Yeji's own.

What the fuck was Ryujin supposed to do with that? Clap?

Do what I want, say what I wanna.

The lyric landed and her jaw unclenched for the first time since the living room. Yeah. That was the whole point, wasn't it? She'd said what she wanted to say and she'd do it again.

You think that you know me?

She heard her own voice in her ears delivering the rap she'd laid down in a booth at JYP on a Tuesday five years ago, standing with her headphones half-off because one ear always needed to hear herself raw. She'd written the line about netizens, about comment-section psychologists who thought they knew her from a fancam. You can think what you want. I respect you, but hey you, don't ever cross that line.

She was the one who'd crossed the line tonight.

She'd stood in that living room and aimed for the thinnest crack in Yeji's concept because she'd helped build it. Six years meant she knew exactly which words would make Yeji's eyes go wet and her body brace against crying. Ryujin had deployed them on purpose, swinging with the ruthless efficiency she used in a dance break.

What kind of asshole does that to her best friend?

The synth bass was still grinding underneath the percussion but something had shifted. The beat that had been holding her upright all walk sounded off, like a speaker that got wet and was playing the right rhythm at slightly the wrong speed.

If you ever wanted me to fall, it's a pity but that's no, I'm sorry.

Lia's voice came in on the bridge, loud and clear and so sure of itself. I'm gonna keep singing, I'm gonna keep dancing, there's nothing to be scared of for me.

Ryujin almost laughed as she pushed past the last of the stone walls along the path. She was terrified. Of Yeji's quiet certainty in the living room, and of this widening space between them, as if getting louder could somehow mask the fact that her best friend was no longer standing next to her.

The brass and the drums played out together and Lia's voice faded.

The ocean rushed in to fill the quiet. The heavy thing in her chest surged up into the empty space where the beat used to be. She dug her phone from her pocket, jamming her thumb at the screen and walking too fast, trying to force the song back to the start so the quiet had nowhere to land. She needed noise.

The sudden flare of the lock screen washed out her night vision, leaving everything outside the glass pitch black. She dropped her chin, furiously swiping at the stubborn playback widget while her feet carried her blindly forward.

She clipped her shoulder hard against a low-hanging branch.

The canopy shuddered and a heavy tangerine dropped straight down, cracking against her knuckles and shocking her grip open. Her phone clattered onto the gravel, illuminating a patch of crushed shell. The tangerine rolled to a stop beside it, the rind splitting on impact and sending a sharp, acidic burst of citrus into the cold air.

"OW - FUCK."

She dropped to a crouch, shaking her hand out with a wince. Her knuckles stung and the branch was still swaying overhead like it was proud of itself.

She grabbed the tangerine first, arm pulling back on instinct to launch the fucking thing into the dark and watch something else break tonight. Her shoulder rotated into the throw before her nails broke the rind and the scent hit her full in the face, sharp and sweet and so unmistakably Jeju that her throat closed.

She knew this smell.

She knew this smell from the inside out. It was a tangerine grove two Novembers ago, juice running down her wrists and the sun on her neck while she grinned at a camera, deciding this island was her favorite place on earth. It was the passenger seat of a rental car with the Jeju mountains sliding past in the mist, and Yeji's voice asking something casual about building a house here someday.

Her arm came down.

She stayed in the gravel crouch, the tangerine bleeding orange oil into her palm. The smell filled her head with a version of herself she'd spent two years pretending she'd outgrown. Beside her, the phone screen buffered. She'd kept it on loop the whole walk down, thumb catching replay before the last brass note faded, but the tangerine had slowed her by ten seconds and shuffle slipped through the gap.

The shuffle spun the barrel again.

"Nobody Like You" kicked through her headphones in a bright, aggressively upbeat pop-rock rush. Her own voice opened the track, the three-years-ago recording of her saying yeah, uh, what? What? wielding pure brat attitude like it was an actual personality. Present-day Ryujin crouched in the dark, feeling the distance between that girl and this one.

She stood up slowly, shoving her phone in her pocket. She kept walking because the alternative was crouching in the gravel having a spiritual crisis over a piece of fruit, and she still had enough pride left to find that mortifying.

The hedges opened up, the path giving way to sand. The beach was a small, empty crescent tucked between rock outcrops. She walked straight to the waterline, letting her slides sink into the wet grit and the freezing ocean wash over her toes. She stood there gripping a crushed tangerine that smelled like the best November of her life while Yuna's voice fed through her headphones, singing about being a bad girl with standards too high for the world to reach.

They'd all been that girl once. Yuna sang it like she'd invented the concept, but Ryujin had laid the blueprint for unapologetic before Yuna even learned how to walk in heels. And Yeji had been right there beside her, matching her step for step. They had been two girls who burned through rooms whether the rooms wanted it or not.

The water pulled back. The sand shifted under her slides, and there was Yeji asleep at ten o'clock.

***

It was their last night as roommates. Ryujin stood in the GS25 party aisle at nine-thirty, eventually buying four packs of both pink and holographic streamers. She added three boxes of stick-shaped chocolate and a carton of watermelon juice, because Yeji had a watermelon juice addiction and was currently in month three of eating the exact same chocolate twice a day and chose sugar and naps over actual parties every time, flatly refusing to behave like a twenty-year-old idol.

The walk back took four minutes. She planned out the layout: streamers on the top bunk, chocolate on the desk. Tomorrow Chaeryeong was moving in and Ryujin was getting the single room. It meant the end of fighting over chargers and defending her half of the rug. It meant sleeping in a quiet room, which she'd spent months complaining about wanting.

She opened the door at 9:40 PM. The lights were off. Yeji was utterly passed out, mouth slightly open, one arm hanging off the edge of the top bunk with her dark phone still in her grip. She'd gone into a coma before ten o'clock on their last night sharing a bedroom, because apparently sentimentality didn't interrupt her sleep schedule.

Ryujin stood in the doorway with pink and holographic streamers in one hand and a GS25 bag in the other and thought you've got to be fucking kidding me.

She stayed there for a while. The tightness in her throat was absolutely just annoyance that the streamers were going to stay in their plastic wrappers and her money was wasted. Just annoyance, and maybe sugar crash from the chocolate she'd eaten on the walk home.

She dumped the supplies on the desk and ate an entire box of stick-shaped chocolate on the floor in the dark. She drank the whole carton of watermelon juice out of spite, climbed into her bottom bunk, and stared at the underside of Yeji's mattress. The party was a lame idea anyway. Throwing a farewell party for a girl moving down the hall was pathetic. It was fine.

The next morning, Yeji found them.

Ryujin was kneeling on the floor, shoving a hoodie into her duffel bag, when Yeji picked up a plastic-wrapped cylinder of holographic pink from the desk. She turned the package over in her hands. Her hair was wrecked from a ten-hour blackout.

"Did you buy streamers?" she asked, ruffling a hand through her sleep-wrecked hair, her voice gravelly and utterly confused.

Ryujin continued shoving the hoodie down. "They were on sale."

Yeji looked from the plastic in her hands to the empty carton of watermelon juice beside them. "Were you going to decorate?"

"No, I was going to eat them." Ryujin yanked the bag zipper closed and sat back on her heels, glaring up at her. "Yes, I was going to decorate. You fell asleep at ten o'clock like a fucking grandma. What was I supposed to do, tape them to your unconscious body?"

Yeji lowered the package. The confusion vanished, her face settling into the exact quiet expression she used when she caught Ryujin trying to hide something soft.

"Ryuddaeng-ah."

Ryujin pointed a warning finger from the floor. "Don't start."

Yeji tilted her head, ignoring the finger. A slow, infuriating warmth took over her face. "Oh, you were going to throw us a party."

"I was going to throw MYSELF a party." Ryujin dragged herself off the floor, grabbing her bag and deliberately refusing to look anywhere near Yeji's smile. "You were invited as a courtesy."

The streamers stayed in their plastic wrap on the desk for three days before Ryujin threw them away, staying mad about two thousand won's worth of party supplies for four months.

Two thousand won of wasted streamers and four months of wasted anger, and she'd learned absolutely nothing from either. The first time she chose solitude over Yeji, she'd tried to throw a party to cover the cost. Tonight she'd just walked out the door.

***

A wave came in and covered her feet, the sharp cold curling her toes against the sand. The tangerine felt heavy in her hand, the citrus oil mixing with the salt air. Something warm and inconvenient settled into the place where the anger used to be, impossible to put back.

But these days I keep thinking, yo, baby I pay attention to you, why do I keep an eye on you again and again. Lia sang it sweet and wondering, and the wondering pulled the next one out of Ryujin's chest.

***

The driving school car smelled like pine air freshener and stress. The instructor sat clutching his clipboard against his chest, quietly hallucinating a different career, while Yeji sat behind the wheel holding ten and two, breath suspended inside a stationary Kia Morning.

Ryujin sat in the backseat because she'd already passed on her first try, mostly because she was good at things that required her body to do exactly what she told it to, and driving was effectively just choreography with a seatbelt. But that logic apparently didn't apply to Hwang Yeji. The girl was an apex predator on stage, a terrifyingly precise machine who could hit a blind floor mark down to the millimeter in platform boots. But once the backing track ended, she instantly reverted to a hopelessly clumsy house cat who routinely bumped into doorways, set chocolate on fire, and was currently treating the steering wheel like an unexploded bomb. She was on her second attempt after the first one had ended with a curb and a sound that the instructor described as "concerning."

They were here together because they'd enrolled together just for the "Not Shy" music video driving scene. When Yeji realized neither of them had a license, she'd said "we should just do it together" and Ryujin had said "no shit."

Yeji was doing objectively fine. The turns were clean, the speed was consistent, and the instructor had stopped gripping the oh-shit handle, which was progress. Then the GPS said turn left and Yeji turned left and ended up in a lane for a U-turn she was absolutely not supposed to be making.

"Why did you do that?" the instructor asked, measuring his syllables just to keep from screaming.

Yeji looked at the lane. She looked at the sign. She looked at the instructor with her full cat-eyed sincerity, confused by her own behavior.

"I know... why did I?"

She said it like she was hoping he had the answer to her own decision. It was so pure and bewildered that Ryujin totally lost her shit.

She laughed until her stomach cramped and the seatbelt locked, a breathless wheeze that made the instructor twist around in alarm to ask "is she okay?" as Yeji watched through the rearview mirror, her ears turning that bright, mortified shade of red. Which only happened when she'd done something accidentally hilarious and was exactly split between being embarrassed and being pleased she'd made Ryujin sound like that.

"I know," Ryujin managed between gasps. "Why did I. That's your defense."

"Honest question," Yeji said, still in the U-turn lane, still looking confused, and Ryujin's stomach cramped again and the instructor closed his eyes and let his head drop back against the headrest.

Yeji passed on her second attempt. Ryujin brought it up twice a month for the next year because the material was bottomless, and because making Yeji's ears go red remained one of the great recurring pleasures of her life.

Like three weeks later, sitting shotgun while Yeji meticulously reversed into a spot at the company parking garage.

"Remember when you almost killed us in the U-turn lane?" Ryujin asked, casually kicking her sneakers up onto the dashboard.

Yeji slapped Ryujin's ankles off the plastic while keeping intense eye contact with the rearview mirror. "I didn't almost kill us, I was going fifteen."

Ryujin let her feet drop, grinning as the tips of Yeji's ears once again hit that Yuna-coded shade of mortified pink. "I know, why did I. That's going on your tombstone."

Yeji wrapped a punitive hand around the gearshift, strangling the leather, and forcefully shoved it into Park. The sheer violence of the grip instantly made Ryujin worry for whoever ended up underneath Yeji in bed. She gripped the wheel and aimed a glare through the windshield carrying the same destructive hostility she supposedly used to wring grown men dry. "I hate you."

Ryujin pointed a stern, advising finger at the windshield. "You're driving, keep your eyes on the road."

Yeji turned her head slowly, giving her dead-eyed stare. "We're parked."

Ryujin patted her shoulder and popped her seatbelt. "Safety first, Hwang."

Tonight in the living room, Yeji's face had gone red too. Except Ryujin hadn't been trying to make her laugh.

***

The chorus hit with all five of them singing, letting Yeji and Lia lead. No matter where I look, it's only you, the one who's gonna melt me. She'd harmonized with these voices since she was sixteen, trained her ears to find their tunes like a bird call. The ocean blurred. Her eyes stung from the salt air or the wind or whatever she was going to call it until she ran out of alternatives.

No matter where I go, there's only you.

The memories stopped arriving one at a time and started coming in waves that matched the ocean, each one rolling in before the last had pulled back, and she stood in the water and let them come because she'd run out of things to stop them with.

***

She remembered Yeji sitting on the practice room floor after a twelve-hour Cake rehearsal, sweat dripping off her chin, her legs gone. Everyone else had left. Ryujin was destroyed too, but her thighs still worked because they were her main weapon and she'd be fucked if they didn't.

"Get up."

"I can't."

"Get on."

"Ryujin, I literally cannot stand."

"I didn't say stand, I said get on."

Ryujin turned around, offering her back. She crouched and waited while Yeji dragged herself up, lifting dead weight after three hours of full-out runs. Ryujin stood, letting Yeji's chin find the groove of her neck in comfortable silence. Yeji's legs had quit and Ryujin's still worked. You carried the person who needed carrying, and the burning in your thighs was just the price you paid for them trusting you enough to go limp.

"Your shoulders are so broad," Yeji mumbled into her neck.

"Thanks."

"Like, freakishly."

"Get off my back then."

"No." Yeji's arms tightened. "They're good broad. Carry broad."

Ryujin laughed and kept walking toward the parking garage. The burn in her thighs didn't matter. Being the unbothered cool girl was always a performance, but carrying someone who literally couldn't bend her knees was just gravity. You didn't need the concept to do it.

She didn't know when she'd stopped being able to drop it.

***

Then there was Yuna in a sparse waiting room at KBS during their debut week, sitting on a leather couch trying to look like a grown idol, knees pressed tight together, elbows tucked to her ribs. She looked so alone, a giant teenager terrified of taking up too much space. The rest of the group came packaged as 00 and 01 liners, leaving their fifteen-year-old maknae stranded at the bottom of the roster without a single chingoo. Ryujin crossed the room on autopilot, dropping onto the cushion beside her. She reached over, grabbed the loose wire of Yuna's mic pack, and snapped it securely into the clip at her waist. Yuna jumped slightly, looked over, and Ryujin smiled first because someone had to. The tension dropped out of Yuna's shoulders immediately and she leaned her head against Ryujin's shoulder.

Five years later, same girl, different couch. The living room two hours ago, girls' night, soju on the floor between them. Yuna had said it quietly into the space between all of them: I'm sorry I'm like this. Horny and stupid and weird.

"You're not stupid," Ryujin had said, and the tenderness in her own voice surprised her so badly she'd corrected within a breath. "You're a LITTLE stupid."

One honest second before the defenses snapped back on. Because staying in it meant acknowledging that Yuna hadn't invented any of this out of nowhere - the bratty confidence, the sexual bravado, the loudness as a shield. Yuna had learned the whole playbook by watching Ryujin do it first. She'd copied Ryujin's swagger so faithfully it came with all the original damage still attached, and now she was sitting on a villa couch apologizing for being the person Ryujin taught her it was cool to be.

Ryujin could've been the unnie who fixed the mic wire one more time. Instead, she'd immediately deflected, pouring another shot and turning it into a joke about hookups. Because acknowledging the damage was harder than performing it.

***

Then there was their dumbass name. Sitting cross-legged on a studio floor for 2TZY while a producer asked them to pick a duo name, both immediately over-thinking it.

"Something cute," Yeji said, straightening her posture.

"Something tough," Ryujin said at the same time, slouching back on her hands.

They looked at each other across the floorboards. Yeji tilted her head, challenging. Ryujin narrowed her eyes, refusing to compromise.

"Ddaeng Ddong," Ryujin blurted out.

Yeji stopped tilting her head, going still. "What?"

"Ryuddaeng, Yeddeong. Ddaeng Ddong." Ryujin gave a single, unapologetic shrug. "Like a doorbell. Because that's the sound we make when we arrive."

Yeji stared at her, blinking slowly. "That's the worst explanation I've ever heard for anything."

"It's ironic."

"It's a doorbell, Ryujin."

"But you like it." Ryujin pointed a sneaker at Yeji's knee.

"I didn't say I liked it." Yeji immediately dropped her chin to hide her mouth.

"You're smiling."

"That's my face," Yeji mumbled to the floor, her ears already turning pink. "It does that sometimes."

They were Ddaeng Ddong from that day forward. It got whispered across dressing rooms and texted at hours that made no sense. Ryujin would send Ddaeng Ddong at two in the morning and Yeji would reply Ddong Ddaeng, a conversation compressed into nonsense words. Nobody else used it because nobody else was meant to.

She tried to remember the last time either of them had texted it and couldn't.

***

Then there was the dark rug of the living room at two in the morning. Ryujin sat with her back against the sofa, her phone lighting up her face. She was deep in a theqoo thread, one of those community posts that went semi-viral and got screenshotted across every platform until it became unavoidable. The title was all-caps: something about wanting Ryujin to stop making "that expression." The expression was the one she made on stage - the lowered chin, the narrowed eyes, the cool-girl face she had spent years perfecting so nobody could see through it.

The comments read like homework-avoiding teenagers who had already decided they hated her before they even clicked the link. She tries so hard to act cool? Her signature 'style' is fucking cringe. And: When she debuted she wasn't like this but now she always has to make that face. A sub-thread had spawned specifically about her rap delivery - how she dropped her voice into that signature low rasp, and how people had to skip her parts because it made them uncomfortable or some shit. Two hundred upvotes. Two hundred strangers dissecting the concept she had built to survive them and deciding it was an embarrassment.

Earlier that month, ITZY's own producer had commented on her public Instagram telling her to get botox. Ryujin had absorbed the hit, logged onto Bubble at four in the morning, and apologized to the public on his behalf, defending the man who insulted her face. She figured it was just another task the job required, and Shin Ryujin was nothing if not ruthlessly committed to the act.

Lia walked out of the hallway wearing an oversized hoodie and carrying two cold glasses of water. She didn't ask what Ryujin was reading because she read it off the tight line of her jaw. She didn't offer a hug or tell her it would be fine because that wasn't her way. Instead, she carefully set one glass on the rug, sat cross-legged beside her, and watched the screen scroll for ten seconds.

Then Lia reached over, trapped Ryujin's thumb, and scrolled back to the top of the thread to read the title. She looked up at Ryujin.

"Wasn't the last round about your legs?"

Ryujin stayed still.

"So you built the face," Lia said. "And now they hate the face too."

Ryujin's lungs emptied. Lia never raised her voice and never softened a truth. You couldn't run a concept around her.

"You know they're mostly miserable twenty-somethings typing this on their commute because their actual jobs suck, right?" Lia added, picking up her water and taking a slow sip. "Total jobless behavior."

Ryujin dropped her head back against the upholstery and bark-laughed at the ceiling, drawing her first real breath in twenty minutes. Lia was back at the villa right now, probably perfectly aware that Ryujin was unraveling long before the fight even started, and Ryujin had walked out before Lia could do the one thing she did better than anyone else.

It made a paranoid edge of Ryujin's brain wonder exactly what else Lia had quietly collected on this trip. Lia acquired secrets effortlessly and wielded them masterfully. If there was actual unexploded ordnance lying around the villa right now, Lia already knew about it. She probably had the exact moment of ruin neatly backed up to a hidden camera roll while the rest of them were too busy making terrible decisions to notice the recording light.

***

Then there was the V Live from April, sometime between the Guess Who comeback teasers and the album drop, with both of them in the practice room at midnight because they'd been working on the point choreography and lost track of time. Yeji had said "should we go live?" and Ryujin had said "we look like shit" and Yeji had said "MIDZY won't care" and she was right, because MIDZY would watch them read a phone book in matching pajamas and still call it content.

They sat on the practice room floor with Yeji's phone propped against a water bottle, their hair wrecked, neither of them wearing any makeup, and they were the most themselves they'd ever been on camera.

Yeji started telling the story about the 2019 Asia Artist Awards rehearsal, the formation disaster where they'd both been standing in the wrong spot and spent ten minutes glaring at each other across the stage because neither would admit they'd miscounted. Ryujin cut in before Yeji even got to the good part - "No, because YOU were in the two-three and I was in the three-two, and you kept INSISTING -" and Yeji fired back "I was NOT in the two-three, you literally walked to the wrong mark and then blamed me for being in your eyeline -" and they were both talking over each other, reconstructing the argument in real time with matching hand gestures, their voices climbing over each other's in the exact same rhythm they'd been fighting in four years ago. Then Ryujin got so animated making her case that her loose practice shirt gaped open at the collar and her tits spilled toward the camera, and she was too deep into proving Yeji wrong to notice or care. Yeji noticed. Mid-sentence, still clapping back about the formation, Yeji reached over and buttoned Ryujin's top with one hand while her mouth kept going about stage markers and Ryujin batted the hand away and Yeji buttoned it again, firmer, eyes still on the camera, finishing her sentence about how Ryujin's spatial awareness had "always been her weakest skill as a performer, honestly." Ryujin's jaw dropped. The chat lost its mind.

It happened eleven times in half an hour. Someone in the comments counted. The chat was moving so fast that the words stacked into a wall of MARRIED MARRIED MARRIED streaming past in real time, and Ryujin read them aloud because reading the comments was part of the V Live format but also because the word was funny, "MARRIED", applied to two girls sitting on a practice room floor at midnight with bad hair and no makeup finishing each other's sentences about a thing that happened when they were trainees.

"They think we're married," Ryujin said to the camera.

Yeji covered her face with both hands and laughed into her palms.

She had this ridiculous squeaky cackling laugh, pitched way too high for a cat-eyed girl who regularly made grown choreographers adjust their posture, muffled by her fingers but audible because Yeji and volume control had never been formally introduced.

Ryujin could've picked that pitch out of a stadium of ten thousand voices, because she'd been hearing it since she was sixteen and her brain had placed it under a word she only ever used for one place and one person.

She'd heard it again and again on this trip, aimed at someone else.

"We're not married," Ryujin said to the camera, leaning back on her hands, grinning. "We're worse than married. Married people can get divorced."

Yeji dropped her hands. Her face had gone gochujang red. "Yah, don't say that."

"What? It's true. You can't divorce your Ddaeng Ddong."

"I absolutely can divorce my Ddaeng Ddong."

"You won't."

Yeji looked at her. The redness faded and what was underneath it was warm and steady and sure. "No," she said. "I won't."

The chat exploded. They'd given them enough material for six compilation videos and enough fan theories to fill a library with Ryeji fanfiction, and it didn't matter because the broadcast wasn't for the fans. The same way the bunk beds weren't for sleeping, and the driving school wasn't for driving, and the streamers weren't for decorating.

And the trip wasn't for Minho.

***

She remembered Chaeryeong standing behind her at a vanity mirror in Manila before a fan-sign event, using her graceful dancer's fingers to tuck three stray strands of pink hair behind Ryujin's ear. Chaeryeong focused on the task with the same gallery curator intensity she used on side dishes. They were talking about some dumb K-drama, and Chaeryeong had sighed wistfully, smoothing the hair down.

"I just think it's nice," Chaeryeong said, her eyes meeting Ryujin's in the glass. "Not having to fight for someone. Just knowing you're totally safe with them, you know? Like, you can be your worst self and they won't care. You can just be, and they won't ask you to be anything else."

"Spare me the monologue," Ryujin snorted, rolling her eyes and leaning away from the gentle hands. "You're so hopelessly vanilla."

Which was a flat-out lie. Ryujin knew for a fact Sunwoo regularly tied that girl to headboards and choked her with silk ribbons until she sobbed, a level of romantic domestic depravity that even Ryujin found kind of intimidating. But Chaeryeong just patted her shoulder, unphased by the insult.

Ryujin spent the next three days obsessing over the word safe. Chaeryeong was building a quiet relationship with Sunwoo that Ryujin aggressively categorized as boring, just to avoid admitting she was jealous of a door she'd nailed shut herself.

***

She remembered the Cozy House kitchen on Jeju, six months after their first group trip to the island back in 2022, back when the five of them were filming a reality show about running a guesthouse. Ryujin had been standing at the stove with a spatula she was holding like a sword, mainly because she didn't or couldn't or wouldn't do things gently. She only did things thoroughly and with sweeping conviction, operating under the belief that if the pajeon was going to be stirred, it was going to know it had been stirred.

"Ryujin-ah, you're not attacking it. Turn the heat down," Yeji said, hovering just over her right shoulder with her arms crossed, radiating intense micromanagement energy despite possessing culinary skills that would have gotten her immediately expelled from JYP if boiling water was a trainee evaluation criteria.

"It's called getting a crisp edge, unnie," Ryujin said, flipping the pancake with borderline violence. "And you're banned from having stove opinions until you figure out how to fry an egg without destroying a non-stick pan."

"I have good taste!" Yeji insisted, still standing her ground because relinquishing control was physically painful for her. "I'm providing leaderly supervision."

"YOU can't even operate a microwave without adult supervision. Step back before you hurt yourself."

Yuna kept weaponizing her ridiculous wingspan, tactically snaking a gangly arm through the gap between Ryujin and Yeji's shoulders every forty seconds to steal half-cooked batter right out of the hot oil. She used her two-inch acrylic nails as heat-resistant tongs, plucking the food with terrifying dexterity to save her actual fingertips from turning into grilled sausages. Lia would actively swat her wrist, Yuna would shriek like she had just been stabbed, and then the same painted claws would reappear thirty seconds later because she operated on pure, unrepentant maknae entitlement and the appetite of three golden retrievers.

Chaeryeong was at the counter arranging banchan, analyzing each small dish, stepping back to evaluate, and adjusting the kimchi by three millimeters. She'd been doing this for twenty minutes, and the kimchi had been repositioned four times. Nobody told her to stop because Chaeryeong arranging things was Chaeryeong at peace and you didn't interrupt Chaeryeong's peace, you just let her align her side dishes and accepted that the table was going to look like a magazine spread.

Yeji had technically been assigned to "hospitality and cleanup" because nobody trusted her with meal preparation for paying guests. A role so devoid of authority she rejected it immediately, electing to act as the kitchen's self-appointed floor manager instead. Officially banished from the heat zones, she spent her time hovering between stations and wielding her personal conviction that garlic solved all human problems, which it did, just not in the sort of fatal quantities Yeji was suggesting. She drifted back to Ryujin's side just to reach past her shoulder and grab a piece of dried squid, meticulously mixing three different condiments on a small plate before dunking the squid into the resulting sludge. Then her face did that tiny twitch between her eyebrows and mouth that meant needs mustard as clearly as if she'd shouted it. Ryujin was already sliding the yellow bottle across the counter before the look finished forming. Six years of catering and dorm meals meant Yeji's face was just a language Ryujin spoke fluently.

"How'd you know I was gonna ask for mustard?" Yeji asked.

"Because it's you." Ryujin kept her eyes on the stove. "You always want mustard."

"Not true. Sometimes I want bean sauce."

"Yeah, forty seconds ago." Ryujin tapped her spatula against the pan. "Your left eyebrow did the bean sauce thing."

"I have a bean sauce thing?"

"You have a whole condiment rack. Left eyebrow is bean sauce. Mouth corner is mustard. Nose scrunch means you're looking for the mayo. And whatever the fuck you just did with the squid in that nasty mayo-chili thing is a crime against humanity."

Yeji stared at the side of her head. "You know my condiment faces."

"Someone has to."

"Since when?"

Ryujin flipped the pajeon again with another dose of aggression. "I don't know, since forever? Same way I know you drive in dead silence because you're scared of missing the GPS, and you take your teddy bears to the doll hospital instead of buying new ones, and you still cry at the Toy Story 3 incinerator scene even though you know they survive."

"I don't cry at cartoons, Ryuddaeng."

"You sniffled. Four times."

Yeji went quiet for a second. She had forgotten her banishment from the heat zone, absently holding a wooden spoon she had no business wielding over the bubbling pot, standing close enough that Ryujin felt the stove's heat radiating off her apron. "You pay attention," she mumbled.

Ryujin hated that tone. It was too soft for the kitchen, too exposed, like Yeji was catching up to the fact that someone had already seen her. It felt like being caught.

"Don't make it weird," Ryujin said, reaching over her for the salt. She pointedly plucked the wooden spoon out of Yeji's hand. "And get the fuck away from that pot. Go supervise the kimchi or something."

When had she decided that knowing Yeji this well was a liability? Because of that damn reflex, the girl she could read better than anyone else had just spent the evening fighting a version of Ryujin who pretended she couldn't read a damn thing.

***

The individual memories blurred together into the sheer physical muscle memory of the five of them moving as a unit. A flash of her walking through Incheon airport, surrounded by flashbulbs and screaming bodies. They moved through the terminal like a Teukgongdae strike team, applying five years of stage formations directly to walking speed. Yeji took point, Chaeryeong tucked into her left side, and Ryujin automatically slotted in at stage right. She maintained a strict three-step distance to cover Yeji's blind spot, never checking her spacing. Her body knew where it belonged in the formation.

Tonight she'd deliberately broken the line, leaving a gaping fucking hole on the right side that nobody else had the history to fill.

Ain't nobody like you.

***

The water pulled back, dragging the sand out from under Ryujin's slides. The crushed tangerine was warm against her palm. She was still standing upright, which was going to have to be enough because the next verse was hers.

Because of you, softly permeated in my hard frozen heart, I can't tell you from head to tail, this is not my style.

Except the bunk beds were real.

***

It was the old dorm room before the solo room she'd won in the ghost leg game, before any of the walls she'd put up since. There was bottom bunk Ryujin and top bunk Yeji and the hallway light leaking under the door in a thin gold line while everything outside the room stayed enormous and uncertain and indifferent to whether two rookies in a shared bedroom survived the year.

She used to climb up with her hands finding the ladder rungs in the dark by feel and her bare feet on the cold metal, the mattress dipping when she crawled in beside Yeji while neither of them said anything because saying something would've meant admitting that the trainee evaluations had been brutal or that the choreographer had screamed at them again or that the future was a door they couldn't see through and the only plan anyone had given them was to keep running at it and hope it opened before they hit it. They just lay there breathing, Ryujin on her back and Yeji on her side with their shoulders touching in the narrow bunk while their breathing found the same rhythm by accident.

Sometimes Yeji came down instead, her cold feet finding Ryujin's shins under the blanket and her forehead pressing against Ryujin's collarbone. Ryujin held still to let Yeji's breathing slow against her chest because that was all she needed to do, just be there, just let her body be the thing Yeji leaned against when the world was too heavy to hold upright. It was the same way she'd been leaning into Minho's back at the pool half an hour ago.

Yeji's breathing would even out and Ryujin would lie there listening to it the way she used to listen to the morning routine from the bottom bunk, treasuring the sound of someone she loved being okay. She never had to think about it, because thinking would've meant naming it, and naming it meant admitting that Shin Ryujin, the girl who didn't need anyone, needed this girl so much she climbed a ladder in the dark just to sleep next to her.

Wait. Fuck.

Nineteen-year-old Yeji collapsing onto Ryujin's collarbone in the dark meant loyalty. Twenty-four-year-old Yeji collapsing onto Minho's spine at the pool and his chest on the couch meant treason. But it was the same fucking thing, wasn't it? Just an exhausted girl turning someone into a bed so she didn't have to stand up anymore. Ryujin had spent the last six months going absolutely batshit over it, ripping her best friend to shreds for executing the same trainee reflex she’d used since day one. Someone else caught the weight, and Ryujin took that as permission to burn the whole house down.

It all worked because she used to be soft. Before she made being an unbothered bitch her brand, she was just a girl climbing into her best friend's bed because being scared together was better than being tough alone. The middle-finger spine was just a survival tactic. Once the internet decided her thighs were public property, she figured the only way to avoid getting eaten alive was to break everyone's teeth. The concept worked great on cameras and boys. But tonight she'd used it to gut the only person who actually knew how fake it was.

Her jaw ached. The waves kept coming and her own voice in her headphones kept singing about a frozen heart melting.

Yeji's verse came in.

Don't smile like that again, yo, I can't pretend not to know, why do I keep thinking of you again and again, oh my god what on earth are you.

Ryujin wanted to answer so badly her mouth opened to the empty Pacific. The answer was simple: she was the person who'd stayed for Chuseok.

***

Everyone had gone home.

Chuseok break, 2019, the year they'd debuted. The dorm emptied the way it always did around holidays, the shoe rack getting lighter pair by pair over the course of a morning. Lia's white sneakers went first, then Yuna's platform boots because Yuna packed like she was fleeing a fire and was always the first one out the door. Chaeryeong's loafers next, lined up neatly by the door until her sister arrived and then gone. By noon the hallway was quiet enough to hear the pipes in the walls and the fridge hummed louder than usual.

Ryujin was in her room packing. She had her train ticket to Seoul printed, her mom's last text pulled up: What time are you getting to Seoul Station? Appa is making galbi. Her sneakers were on the rack by the door. Her bag was half-zipped on the bed. She was thinking about her dad's galbi and her childhood bedroom and the feeling of sleeping in her house again instead of a dorm, where the walls were thin enough that you could hear someone breathing in the next room.

Through that very wall she heard Yeji in the kitchen. The electric kettle clicking on. A cabinet opening and closing. Then Yeji's voice, on the phone, and Ryujin wasn't trying to listen but the dorm was empty and sound carried.

"No, it's fine, eomma. I know. No, it's just scheduling. It's fine. I'll be fine. I'll just... yeah, I'll probably just practice. Maybe watch something."

Ryujin could hear the lie through a wall. In the tone she used after fourteen-hour practices to tell the managers she was fine. Yeji couldn't get home to Jeonju for Chuseok. The reasons didn't matter. The fact was that the dorm was empty and the holiday was tomorrow and Yeji was boiling water for ramyeon alone in a kitchen designed for five people.

"I'll call you tomorrow morning." Yeji's voice got impossibly small, the sturdy leader act instantly cracking the second she thought about her dogs. "Give Hongsam and Insam a treat for me, okay? Tell them I miss them. Say hi to unnie too. Love you."

The phone call ended. The wrapper crinkled. A minute later, the acrid, unmistakable smell of scorching starch drifted through the vents because Yeji, distracted by trying not to cry over missing her dogs on the night before Chuseok, had put dry noodles in a hot pot and forgotten to add water.

The smoke stung her eyes. She looked at her packed bag, her mom's text, and her sneakers by the door, and came to the blunt, factual realization that her best friend was literally not going to survive a three-day weekend unsupervised. If the sadness didn't take her out, the stovetop definitely would.

She unpacked the bag and put the sneakers back in the closet. She walked into the kitchen, finding Yeji standing at the stove frantically waving a dish towel at a smoking pot, her face trying very hard to look fine with eating alone.

"So what do you want for dinner?"

Yeji looked up, her eyes spectacularly red and brimming with tears that were officially one hundred percent the fault of the starch smoke and absolutely nothing else. "What?"

"For dinner. Burning ramyeon is not dinner, it's a hazard. How the fuck do you even burn a soup?"

"I forgot the water." Yeji looked down at the blackened block of noodles, her voice thick. "Ryujin-ah, you have a train."

"I don't have a train."

"You literally just showed me your ticket this morning."

"Changed my mind. I'm staying. What sounds good, should we order chicken? We should order chicken. Or jjajangmyeon. Both. We should order both."

"You don't have to -"

"I want to. Also, you really need to turn that burner off before the sprinklers go off."

Yeji turned to the stove and grabbed the dial, and her hands were shaking, just enough that the smoking pot rattled against the metal grate. She kept her back turned, and Ryujin let her. They were eighteen and nineteen, and they didn't have the vocabulary yet for whatever Yeji's eyes were doing.

They ordered chicken and jjajangmyeon and tteokbokki because Yeji had said "should we get tteokbokki too?" in a slightly unsteady voice and Ryujin had said "obviously", because obviously anything Yeji wanted tonight she was getting because the alternative was Yeji eating ramyeon alone on the kitchen floor, and that was an image Ryujin rejected the way she rejected bad choreography.

They ate on the floor because the table felt too big. Yeji put a movie on her laptop, but neither of them really watched it. The important thing was the boxed chicken and the fact that they were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder so the empty dorm wouldn't feel so loud.

Yeji passed out halfway through whatever was playing. Her head tipped sideways and landed heavy on Ryujin's shoulder, instantly dead to the world. Ryujin dragged a blanket over both of them with her free hand, careful not to shift her weight. Her dad's galbi was amazing, but she didn't give a shit right now. Throwing away the train ticket hadn't even required a second thought. Yeji was alone and missed her dogs, so Ryujin stayed. There was no other version of that night.

She stayed because leaving simply wasn't an option her body knew how to execute. Reaching for the salt, carrying Yeji to the van, tossing a good train ticket in the trash - her body always did the work while her ego was still building its case.

Tonight she'd managed to override the system. She'd successfully trained herself to walk away instead of going soft, and congratulations to her, the training worked. She was currently standing ankle-deep in freezing ocean water at midnight while her best friend was somewhere far away clinging to a guy she'd fucked to prove a point, all because staying meant admitting she needed her. She'd spent years protecting a fake tough-girl persona, and now she was finding out what happens when you play stupid games.

Who teaches their own body to leave the people who love them and then wonders why they end up alone? Who builds a house for someone and then burns it down because they can't admit they wanted to live in it together? Who picks a fight with the only person who would never fight back, and then wonders why they don't have anyone left to fight with?

She didn't know when she started crying. All she knew was that her face was wet, her breathing was broken, and the salt on her lips wasn't from the ocean.

The last one crawled out of an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon at the company three weeks before the trip.

***

They were dead on the practice room floor during a break, flattened by post-tour exhaustion. Lia was facedown on a yoga mat, Yuna was scrolling on her back, and Chaeryeong was stretching her calves by the mirror.

Yeji sat cross-legged against the glass, maintaining that perfect posture while scrolling. She'd been quiet for ten minutes, which meant she was mapping out exactly how to pitch whatever scheme she was brewing.

"Management said we can pick the location for the trip," Yeji said, not looking up from her screen, but her diction made it clear who the question was directed at.

Ryujin lay flat on the hardwood, forearm draped over her eyes to block the harsh lights. "Mm."

"I was thinking Jeju." Yeji dropped the statement like she was suggesting what to get for lunch. "Jimin-ah recommended the resort where all the industry people hide out. They're going too. They got private villas with room service. Also, BLACKPINK sunbaenim is headlining their summer festival that weekend."

Across the room, Yuna bolted upright, instantly breathless. "Wait! Like, ACTUALLY BLACKPINK sunbaenim?"

"Yes, Yuna-yah, actually BLACKPINK sunbaenim," Yeji said mildly, still looking at her phone.

"Oh my gosh, VIP section?" Yuna demanded, scrambling excitedly to her feet. "Like, breathing the same air? Holy shit, I have to practice my moves."

She abandoned her phone on the hardwood and immediately launched into the chorus choreography for As If It's Your Last, loudly vocalizing the synth bass line to the ceiling. She was hitting the hip isolations with full stadium enthusiasm. Lia didn't even lift her face from her yoga mat. Chaeryeong just watched Yuna pop her hips in the mirror with mild, exhausted amusement.

The tragic irony of that one-woman flash mob was that Yuna's dedication to being a total slut would cost her the tickets two weeks later. Ryujin had blown up the maknae's phone during the midnight drop, well aware Yuna was currently getting her back blown out in some hotel room by that quiet backup dancer they'd gotten into a screaming match over after their tour encore. Ryujin had ceded the guy because she "had options" and he wasn't worth the energy, and now Yuna was too busy riding her hand-me-down dick to answer seven consecutive calls during a national Blink emergency. When the eighth call went to voicemail, Ryujin ruthlessly pivoted to Karina, who was awake and melodramatically sad-girl spiraling over an actor she'd dated for six fucking weeks, because BLACKPINK tickets waited for no man's thrusts. Look, Ryujin respected the hustle, but you don't get to call yourself "Head Blink" if you ignore a midnight drop for mediocre dick that your unnie literally gave you.

She'd screamed at Yuna for an hour over that guy and forgotten his name by morning because the things she fought hardest over were never the things she kept or cared about.

But in the moment, Yuna screaming the lyrics provided the perfect distraction.

Ryujin moved her arm just enough to squint up at Yeji's face. She kept her jaw locked to hide the massive spike of adrenaline hitting her chest. Yeji knew what she was doing - she'd weaponized the festival lineup specifically to guarantee Ryujin would bite.

"Jeju's perfect," Ryujin stated evenly.

A tiny shift moved across Yeji's face. The corners of her eyes softened. She pressed her lips into a deeply satisfied line before quickly burying the reaction by dropping her thumb back to the glass.

"I thought you might agree," Yeji replied, scrolling faster.

The whole exchange took twenty seconds. Ryujin dropped her arm back over her eyes and completely forgot about it.

***

She stood in the freezing surf and finally realized how much of an idiot she was.

The damaged tangerine was still sticky in her hand. She was still standing on Jeju right now. The same island where she'd declared to a camera two years ago that it was her favorite place on Earth. The same island where Yeji had driven a rental car too carefully through the mist and asked her, casual as suggesting lunch: should we come build a house in the mountains at Jeju-do and live here later?

When management handed over the company card, Yeji picked Jeju.

Yeji had actually done it.

She'd built the house in the mountains. She just built it out of a private villa rental and a clear week in July instead. And Ryujin had willfully walked right out the front door and tried to burn it down.

Yeji had never picked between them. She'd brought Minho for herself and booked Jeju specifically for Ryujin, just to fulfill a casual promise she'd made years ago. She had room for both of them. Ryujin was the only one who demanded a choice. She manufactured a war out of pure insecurity, locked onto a made-up threat, and fired a kill shot point-blank into her own teammate.

I'm the type of girl that should do everything she wanna do, I'm the type of girl that should have everything she wanna have, now I want you bad, I can't lose, so babe ain't nobody like you.

The track hit its final chorus. It was supposed to be a flex, but tonight it sounded like an instruction manual. She wanted her best friend back. Her feet were already shifting in the wet sand, ignoring her brain's objections because her body had taken over and it was screaming to go home.

She measured love in the only units she knew: tallying who fucked who, who came first, and whose body earned what. She crammed every single interaction into a sexual hierarchy because she was too thick to use any other metric. That meant she wasted the whole trip treating Yeji's happiness as a personal attack instead of recognizing the same old reflex, the one she'd been using since they were trainees, the one that had always meant I care about you so much that I want to be the person who takes care of you when you're too tired to stand.

The path was dark. The island smelled like the trip Yeji had built for them, and Ryujin was suddenly standing in the middle of it feeling like an absolute fucking idiot.

A harsh, ragged laugh tore out of her throat, sounding wrecked against the empty beach. She brought her hand up to aggressively scrub the tears off her cheeks, forgetting what she was holding. The crushed tangerine dragged directly across her face, smearing sticky, sweet-acidic citrus oil over her jaw and mixing it straight into the salt of her own crying.

"You're infuriating, Yeddeong," she said out loud to the dark water. Her voice cracked right down the middle, thick and wet. "What the fuck am I doing."

She stood there - twenty-three years old, alone, her face sticky with ruined fruit and regret, and desperate to get back to the villa before she lost the only person she cared about more than anything.

***

She dragged her phone out of her pocket with trembling fingers and bypassed the music app's shuffle button. She had spent the damn trip letting an algorithm throw tracks at her like emotional shrapnel, letting it score her misery while she kept her hands clean. That was over. She jabbed the search bar, and her wet, sandy thumb skated uselessly across the glass three times in a row, leaving a gritty orange smear where the keyboard should have been. She wiped her hand on her shorts, tried again, got as far as BE before the screen registered a phantom tap and pulled up Beyoncé's entire discography.

"Oh, FUCK off."

She held the phone up to her mouth like she was about to bite it. "Siri, play 'Bet On Me' by ITZY." She was already composing the unhinged rant for the group chat about Apple's war on wet fingers when a calm, unbothered voice cut through her AirPods.

"Here's 'Bet On Me' by ITZY."

She stared at the screen. Siri had come through. First useful thing anyone had done for her all trip, and it was a stupid voice assistant with zero emotional intelligence. She shoved the phone back against her thigh and kept walking.

The synth settled into her headphones, slow enough to pace the break of the waves.

There's nothing inside me, not yet.

She tightened her grip on the sticky tangerine and took her first step off the beach. The bass dropped two seconds later, vibrating against the base of her skull, and walking immediately felt too passive.

She broke into a jog, kicking heavy clumps of wet sand onto the back of her shorts while she aimed for the dark opening of the coastal path. Her wet slides slapped against the steep dirt incline and the jog naturally escalated into a desperate, lung-burning sprint.

The cold air scraped her throat as she dragged in raw breaths that tasted of copper. The dirt path spiked violently past the tree line, flooding her thighs with burning acid on the ascent. The slides flapped uselessly against her heels, slipping backward in the loose gravel with every awkward push, and her lower back seized hard enough to make her want to collapse into the damp ferns and just breathe.

Walking in the dark, the compass broken.

Hot, bitter resentment burned in her chest over walking out that door, but she refused to stop. She clamped her jaw tight, dropped her hips low, and forced her body to move like she did on stage. She attacked the incline like a dance break, anchoring her weight and driving her toes hard into the rubber to keep the sandals from flying off. She snapped her core with every stride, forcing her heavy knees upward whenever her thighs failed.

Without the courage to fall, you can never fly.

The lyrics pulsed through her headphones in a punishing tempo that matched the frantic slapping of her sandals up the slope. Sweat broke across her forehead and slid hot and stinging into her eyes, but she left it there. Her lungs starved and her legs shuddered under the vertical climb as the spite burned out into pure exhaustion.

But still, I can't stop.

She gritted her teeth and threw her shoulders forward in rigid pumps, twisting her torso to drag her dead legs up the incline. An invisible tether looped around her ribs and pulled tight, dragging her straight back to the girl on the deck. The earlier anger had launched her up the first half of the hill, leaving only the agonizing need to see Yeji's face to pull her through the rest. Every muscle tore and rebuilt around the single necessity of going home to her Yeddeong.

The messy, sliding rhythm of her feet hitting the dirt dragged her mind straight back to the music video set. She remembered pounding the asphalt inside the echoing concrete underpass with the girls flanking her sides. The director had ordered them to sprint full-force toward the blinding light at the end of the tunnel. A strange, weightless euphoria had rushed into her lungs on that final take. She felt so free under the staging lights, stripped of intricate choreography and reduced to pure forward movement alongside her members, her sisters, her family.

She had spent five years confusing invincibility with freedom. She built a bulletproof cage out of swagger and casual cruelty, convinced that needing nothing made her untouchable. But feeling her lungs burn in the dark, she finally understood the high of that staged sprint. Real freedom wasn't about outrunning every single thing that could hurt her. It lived in the terrifying, wide-open act of choosing what you ran toward.

The tree canopy swallowed the path in darkness just as the track surged into the final chorus. Ryujin dragged in a ragged breath and let her chest heave against the steep grade before looking up. A faint teal glow filtered through the dense branches near the top, where the underwater lights of the villa pool bled into the night.

Following that faint light, I want to run there.

She ignored the burning in her calves and locked her eyes on the glow to keep running.

***

The next song played and Kill Shot hit the bridge in her ears as her slide caught the last stone step. The apology she'd been rehearsing on the run - three tight sentences, in and out before Yeji could hide in the villa and pretend everything was fine - evaporated. Because something was wrong with the music.

Kill shot, one remaining count - everything falls down, so never doubt, swish swish -

Except the swish swish wasn't coming from the goddamn track.

There was a wet percussion bleeding through the AirPods that had no business being in the mix. Heavy and rhythmic. A thick smack that synced with the bassline for two bars before falling half a beat behind. She frowned, pressed the silicone deeper into her ear, and caught it again. Louder than the track. Bouncing off the stone walls somewhere past the hedges.

She yanked the earbud out.

The Jeju night hit her unscored. The outdoor shower was running at full blast. The pool filter hummed. And cutting straight through the steam curling over the top of the stone stall came the sharp, unmistakable sound of wet flesh violently slapping wet flesh.

Swish-smack.

Ryujin stopped breathing because what she saw felt like a shot through the heart.

She stepped off the crushed gravel and pressed her back flat against the dark side of the hedges. The tangerine in her fist was sweating. She was gripping it hard enough to bruise the peel.

Teal light from the pool flooded the courtyard. Minho's board shorts were drifting toward the skimmer in the deep end. Three steps closer, crumpled on the dry deck right outside the shower stall, Yeji's brown bikini sat in a puddle on top of the white mesh cover-up she'd worn all day. Stripped off mid-stride, apparently, with the bottoms turned inside out.

The last time Ryujin saw them, Yeji was practically hiding inside Minho's shirt on the terrace, looking like she was about to cry into his spine and call it rain. That was what... a little while ago.

Ryujin mouthed holy fuck, Hwang to nobody and swallowed hard.

The shower's slatted bamboo doors were shoved wide open. Pool light cut through the steam, throwing bright horizontal stripes across the dark volcanic tile.

And across the two people using it.

The absolute whiplash of the contrast made Ryujin want to physically gag. Apparently these two fucking disasters were either so aggressively horny or so hopelessly emotionally fucked up that they had just mutually agreed to start using their crotches for emotional release.

Yeji was bent double. One hand was planted flat against the wet wall while the shower head dumped heavy water straight between her shoulder blades, flooding down the arch of her back. Minho stood right behind her, his right hand clamped over the dip of her waist to lock her hips firmly in place while his left arm reached across her body to wrap his fingers around the front of her throat, aggressively pulling her head straight back into the rushing spray.

This was the exact same shower where Ryujin had caught him balls-deep in Yuna yesterday morning, minutes before she'd dragged him out of this exact stall to violently ride him blind on the pool wood. She had just had this guy inside her yesterday morning. But the sheer physical shock locking her ribs right now came from how the fuck they were doing it.

Ryujin watched his cock drive straight forward and vanish between Yeji's thighs, burying it so deep the base of his shaft smacked flush against her dripping ass with a wet crack before he pulled back to let the thick friction rip loud over the falling water and violently slammed right back in, every single driving thrust knocking Yeji's shoulders dangerously forward and swinging her bare breasts against the dark stone.

Ryujin had tracked Hwang Yeji's behavior for seven years and she had never seen her willingly take this angle - Yeji absolutely did not do doggy, she got on top and aggressively set the fucking pace so she could look down and watch boys desperately scramble to piece themselves together. Yeji once bent a male idol's thumb backward at a club until something audibly popped just because he put his hands on her exposed waist, she strictly never let any guy put his hands anywhere near her neck, and she did not make high, desperate whining noises while letting herself get manhandled in a courtyard.

This girl happily letting her head get pinned back by her throat while taking a heavy pounding from behind and dropping breathless, half-choked whines out of her mouth was doing all three of those strictly forbidden things at the exact same time, a total fucking stranger hijacked into her best friend's body that was haphazardly operating those same hips Ryujin had watched systematically destroy dozens of industry guys just for the sport of it.

Bitch, what the FUCK are you doing.

Minho slid his left hand around the side of Yeji's face, clamping his wet palm directly over her mouth to muffle the raw sounds she was spilling into the courtyard.

Yeji's hand snapped up. She seized his wrist, violently ripped his hand away from her lips, and pinned his arm flat backward against the tile.

"No." The word tore out of her. It was gasped and wrecked, but it carried the exact same iron authority she used to snap fifty backup dancers to attention when they were doing their BORN TO BE rehearsals. "Let them hear."

"Then tell them." His voice cut through the steam, dark and breathless. "Tell them whose you are."

"Yours." Yeji threw her head straight back into the falling water. "Fuck. Minho. Yours."

Ryujin's fist clenched shut. The tangerine gave way, the thick rind snapping open and bleeding warm fruit juice aggressively into her palm.

Hwang Yeji wrote the manual on absolute self-ownership. She and Ryujin had spent years tearing up the traditional idol handbook to build a shared philosophy around being unapologetic and bulletproof. They lived by a core doctrine and modeled it for the younger girls until the attitude became bone memory. You take exactly what you want and you never give anyone the privilege of claiming you. Ryujin knew the rules intimately. They had forged them together over the wreckage of exhausted men in breathless hotel rooms, fiercely proud that they could devour the industry and still keep the high ground.

And right now, Yeji was standing naked in an open stall and practically screaming yours into the Jeju night air with all the villa's doors wide open.

"Face me," Yeji demanded.

He pulled out. The wet, hollow pop of the separation rang off the stone. Yeji didn't even wait to find her footing before she whipped around, her bare spine slamming hard right back against the wall. She immediately hooked a wet leg over his hip. Minho dropped both hands under her thick thighs and hoisted her off the ground.

She locked her ankles tight behind his back. He drove straight upward into her.

The sound Yeji made - a high, wrecked "Oh..." buried directly into his collarbone - was a noise Ryujin had never heard her make in her life.

Don't feel it. Just make them feel it. Take the control and don't let it touch you.

That was the Yeji she knew - the arrogant bitch who rode their cameraman with her stupid pink highlight bobbing around while she and Ryujin rated the guy's stroke game out loud, and the terrifying leader who sat down on Stray Kids' visual center and clinically dismantled him on a penthouse mattress purely to prove a fucking point.

This Yeji was contracting her core to drag herself deeper down a guy's dick. Her wet back squeaked and slid against the stone with every brutal upward slam of his hips, and she was hiding her flushed face in his neck like she wanted to permanently crawl inside his ribs.

Ryujin clamped her free hand over her own mouth. Sticky fruit juice burned the open cut on her lip.

"I'm close," Yeji choked. The words fractured in her throat. Her nails dug violently into his wet shoulders. "Don't stop. Don't... don't change anything..."

Yeji did not beg. Ever. She handed out instructions. She gave guys live choreography notes while she was on top of them. Seven out of ten. Decent stamina. Stop thrusting up, you're throwing off my rhythm.

This girl was begging him.

Her hips seized. A sharp gasp caught in her throat, and raw physical tension locked up her thick thighs. She went rigid against the wet wall, wrapping him in a death grip.

Then she just broke.

The sound she let out started guttural and climbed into this unhinged, breathless high note that bounced off the shower walls and flooded the yard. Her thighs crushed in on Minho's waist. She wrenched his shoulders forward, burying her face into his wet skin, and shook against the tile in violent, heavy spasms. She was clamping down on him so hard Ryujin could physically see Yeji's abs jumping and flexing under the spray from beyond the gate.

Minho's rhythm shattered. His thrusts got short and desperate. His hips kept stuttering. Ryujin knew the exact signs because she'd been on top of him when his body pulled this exact stalling routine. He was right on the absolute edge.

Yeji felt it too.

The blood in Ryujin's veins went cold. Her brain immediately queued up the mental footage of Yeji lifting cleanly off the cameraman right before the guy lost it. She braced for the clean, clinical dismount, because that was the rule. That was always the rule.

Except Yeji didn't move.

"Inside," Yeji breathed into his wet neck. The word was muffled, dirty, and totally wrecked.

She locked her crossed ankles tighter. She dug her heels directly into his lower spine, wrenching his hips flush and refusing to give him an inch of space to pull back. She wasn't asking for it. She was ordering him to cum inside her before his brain even caught up to the trap.

Minho dropped his forehead against the stone wall right next to her ear. His broad shoulders seized up. He let out a harsh groan straight into her wet hair, drove his hips in deep, and Ryujin stood in the bushes and watched his whole body aggressively shudder while he knocked up her best friend.

The fruit in Ryujin's fist was just obliterated pulp.

***

September 2021. Hotel room after Inkigayo. Yeji was bouncing on their cameraman's lap with that stupid pink streak in her hair while Ryujin laughed so hard from the second bed she almost choked. They were running a tag team, passing him back and forth for twenty minutes, shouting out scores out of ten. The second his hips started jerking, Yeji pulled off. Smooth, bored, and perfectly clean. Ryujin swapped in, took the mess inside herself, and sincerely asked afterward why Yeji never just stayed put and took the creampie.

Yeji's cat eyes narrowed, turning even sharper than they normally were. "I don't give that part of myself away, Ryuddaeng. It's mine to control."

Three months later at The MAMA afterparty, Ryujin sat backwards on a chair and watched Jihyo teach Yeji how to turn the pull-out into a psychological weapon after Chan had accidentally doused her insides with his seed. Ten seconds later, Yeji walked across the penthouse, sat directly on Hwang Hyunjin's dick while Dahyun slapped her whiteboard marker against her palm screaming "HWANG ON HWANG, I have been WAITING for this card," and climbed off right as he lost it. She hovered over his chest while he shot on his own stomach, swiping a finger through the mess and tasting it like she was judging a fucking soup. "Good face. Terrible pacing." She owned the whole room that night.

The rule is absolute, Ryujin had realized right then. No exceptions. Nobody gets to keep her.

And then four hours later she caught Yeji standing by the penthouse glass, quietly, obsessively scrubbing at a drop of Chan's accidental cum on her thigh. Four hours later and Yeji was still trying to wash the evidence off her skin.

***

Back in the courtyard, present-day Yeji was standing still under the shower head, just watching Minho's thick cum slowly slide down the inside of her tanned thigh.

And she was smiling.

Ryujin swallowed dry air.

White mess dripped down Yeji's leg. The heavy shower stream washed the first drop away, but a thicker clump immediately pushed out to replace it. Her body was casually returning whatever she had forced him to pump into her. Yeji watched the mess fall, and then she tilted her wet head up at Minho. Her face was wiped clean of the frantic, disgusted scrubbing that had haunted that MAMA penthouse.

"Messy," Yeji murmured. She sounded giddy and amused.

It's mine to control.

The sticky fruit juice was drying on Ryujin's palm as a massive, ugly truth finally dropped heavy into her stomach - Yeji pulled off every guy she fucked because pulling off meant she permanently secured the high ground, forcing boys to cum on themselves because it meant she never had to participate in the terrifying reality of being vulnerable with them. Mine to control just meant that when a guy was ruined and desperate for her, Yeji got to stay untouched, keeping the men in her bed at arm's length the exact same way she kept everyone else boxed out behind the impenetrable leader smile and the strict three-meter broadcast buffer.

And tonight, she'd given it away like it was nothing. She dug her heels into his spine, demanded it inside, and dropped the word like it didn't cost her a damn thing. Not a single flinch. Her body executed the hold on pure reflex, smooth as hitting a center stage mark or catching Ryujin's eye across a packed green room. Which meant this wasn't the first time. Which meant she had probably been doing this with him since day one. For five hidden years. Ryujin had sat in a dozen hotel beds watching Yeji coldly pull off every guy in the industry, stupidly convinced she was watching the real girl.

Minho dropped to both knees on the flooded stone. He scooped water in his bare hands and started washing her thighs, but the cleanup got derailed immediately. His broad thumbs started tracing the wide flare of her hips, his fingers sliding up into her waist. Yeji leaned back relaxed against the tile and just let him touch her. She dropped one hand lazily onto his wet hair and dragged her thumb over his temple.

His hand slid lower between her thighs and stayed there, and Yeji's head tipped back against the tile while her fingers tightened in his hair. Whatever he was doing with his hand, he was patient about it, and Yeji's breathing went visible in the steam - her ribs expanding in slow, shaky pulls that Ryujin recognized from six years of watching Yeji try to hold herself together in front of cameras. Except this time she wasn't holding anything together. Her hips rocked forward once, twice, and a small broken sound carried across the wet stone, barely louder than the shower spray, and her whole body shuddered in a long, quiet wave that started at her thighs and rolled upward through her stomach and shoulders until she went still with her hand buried in his hair and her mouth open against the falling water.

Minho reached up and killed the water. The rushing noise vanished, leaving nothing but the pool filter humming and loud drops hitting the drain.

Yeji grabbed the only towel off the bamboo door. She was naked, water pouring off her shivering shoulders, but she ignored herself and wrapped the dry cotton securely around his chest instead. She turned her back on him and walked barefoot onto the dry pool wood, stopping right over her crumpled brown bikini.

She bent straight down at the waist. The gap in the bushes gave Ryujin a direct, glaring angle she did not want to see. Yeji's slit was swollen thick and dark pink, and a heavy, sloppy smear of white cream sat right at the entrance where the shower water missed. The underwater pool LEDs lit the whole mess up like a neon sign.

Yeji peered back over her bare shoulder through her dripping hair. She shot Minho this lazy, thoroughly fucked smirk, and clearly held the bent-over angle for an extra second for his eyes alone.

She grabbed the mesh dress, straightened up, and started walking back toward the house with this heavy, wildly satisfied sway in her hips.

"Who the fuck are you," Ryujin whispered to the dark.

The bitch who spent four hours flicking Bang Chan's accident off her skin was strolling naked across an open pool deck wearing Minho's cum and grinning about it.

Minho caught her around her bare waist before she made it three steps. He pressed a quick, loud kiss to her wet eyebrow, then immediately hooked both arms under her thighs and swept her off the ground.

"MINHO -" Yeji shrieked.

"Hold on."

"PUT ME -"

She flailed. Both her hands scrambled blindly for something to hold onto and locked around his bare dick.

The towel immediately dumped off his shoulders. "What are you DOING?" Minho barked, cracking up.

"I'm falling, I need a handle!"

"That is literally NOT a handle!"

Yeji threw her head back and laughed, loud and bright and unfiltered.

Minho carried her across the pool deck with Yeji holding onto his dick like a subway strap, the teal water glowing behind them, both of them cracking up.

The dark living room swallowed them up. Their laughter bounced off the indoor tile, dropping lower and fainter as he carried her up the massive glass staircase, until the villa finally went dead silent.

The heavy glass patio door clicked locked.

Ryujin stood frozen in the bushes. The crushed fruit in her fist was slow-dripping sticky juice onto her feet.

The pool deck was deserted and Ryujin stepped into the light.

Two sets of wet footprints tracked a direct line from the shower stall to the sliding glass door. Right in the middle of the trail, fat drops of milky white fluid sat directly on the dry volcanic stone, glowing faintly in the pool light.

The wet footprints were already baking into the warm wood.

The drop stayed.

Ryujin stared at it and finally got it. She had spent half a year treating Minho like a hostile invasion, entirely missing the truth. The massive Jeju villa rental, the refused Ddaeng Ddong divorce, the freezing toes under the dorm blankets - whenever Yeji cared about someone, she threw everything she had at them. Building houses in the mountains and locking her wet ankles together to demand a guy permanently wreck her were the exact same emotional reflex, reserved strictly for the tiny circle of people she planned to keep.

The brutal pull-out rule and the dead-eyed top energy were an impenetrable wall built to keep the rest of the industry the fuck out. Ryujin had stared at Yeji's final boss Leader concept for seven years and believed it was the real person.

But the terrified girl who used to crawl down a metal ladder in the dark just to touch somebody she trusted hadn't vanished. She found a much better place to hide, and she had always been capable of screaming yours with the windows wide open.

The pool light hit Ryujin from below, throwing harsh teal shadows up her face as she stood frozen at the ledge. Her calves were shredded from the mountain sprint, and her ribs burned from hauling raw panic across the island, demanding the same physical reset she had sought in this water yesterday when she’d finished testing Minho’s prowess and resolve on the deck.

She kicked her wet slides onto the dry stone and stepped off the ledge in her denim shorts, leaving her clothes on and her fist welded around the destroyed tangerine as she let her knees give out to hand her exhausted body over to the deep end.

She leaned her head back to float, letting the water absorb the weight of her soaked clothes while the night air brushed her face. For thirty quiet seconds under the dark canopy, her brain shut the fuck up and surrendered to peace.

Then a door clicked shut upstairs, but the bedroom window stayed wide open, letting the giggling from the courtyard mutate into thick, suffocated vowels bleeding across the night air. A heavy thud shook the ceiling, followed by wood banging against stone and another heavy impact, and then Yeji's voice dropped the leash. The fractured whimpering Ryujin had caught outside the shower turned loud and unguarded as the girl allowed herself to be physically dismantled.

Ryujin lay paralyzed in the water while two people destroyed a room above her, leaving her nowhere to hide from the noise. Any other night she would have made a sarcastic joke or mentally rated the guy's stamina, but knowing what it cost Hwang Yeji to drop the act and beg to be taken apart turned the sound into something she had no right to be hearing.

Something glass shattered upstairs, a lamp or a bottle swept off the nightstand, and the crack carried all the way to the pool deck while the two people who caused it kept right on destroying each other.

Ryujin exhaled every ounce of air in her lungs and sank.

The water rushed up to drag the world under, flattening the vicious thudding from the second floor into a dull vibration against her skull that faded away until the surface sealed shut over her head. The silence swallowed the noise above while soaked denim turned her shorts into concrete, pulling her steadily toward the ceramic floor.

Forcing her eyes open into the chlorine sting, she uncurled her fingers to let the destroyed tangerine drift weightlessly out of her palm. Orange flecks scattered into the turquoise current, washing the sticky wreckage of the night off her skin until the mess dissolved into nothing.

Her heartbeat hammered steady and hot in her flooded ears while the pool lights stretched her shadow across the white tile below. Dark strands of hair drifted around her face to catch the teal glow, spreading into a weightless veil that washed the heavy, bitter attitude away.

The memories of the trip played back behind her open eyes, losing their teeth in the chlorine now that the anger had washed off them. Yeji in the kitchen humming to a private playlist while leaning blindly against Minho's shoulder. Yeji waist-deep in the ocean, tightening her grip on his neck every time a swell hit so the water couldn't steal him. Yeji going heavy against his chest on the living room couch with a quiet exhale, letting someone hold her up because she was tired of doing it alone.

I'm not her. I don't need soft.

She'd said it yesterday morning on this same pool deck, leaning into Minho's ear with her back arched and her voice hard, daring him to wreck her because asking for tenderness would have killed her faster than anal ever could.

What if I do?

She'd always known. She'd wanted soft her entire career, through every frat house and every oversized sex toy and every man she collected and destroyed and forgot, through strutting naked into lunch to shock a table full of people who had only ever asked her to show up, through years of performing indestructible for an audience that would have loved the girl who climbed bunk ladders and stayed during Chuseok and bought streamers for a party that never happened. The swagger came later. The act came later. The girl who showed up came first, and she'd been enough the whole time.

She didn't know that girl's name anymore.

"What the fuck am I," she choked out in bubbles to the empty pool, and the blue expanse swallowed the question whole.

Her lungs traded their dull ache for a sharp burn, demanding air with every heavy thump against her ribs while the soaked denim anchored her legs in the deep end. Hanging suspended between the tile and the surface, out of breath and out of excuses, she tucked her knees and kicked hard off the ceramic floor.

She broke the surface gasping, dragging the night air deep into her lungs as chlorine and jasmine flooded her throat, only to find the villa still overhead. The frantic thudding had stopped, leaving the open bedroom window to spill a low, fading murmur from Minho over the patio before softening into silence.

And then Yeji laughed.

That squeaky, unfiltered cackle pitched too high for a girl who regularly terrified grown choreographers, the exact pitch from their trainee dorms and midnight V Lives that Ryujin could pick out of a stadium crowd because her brain had filed it under the feeling of home before she even knew the word for it.

The laugh floated across the water to settle warmly on Ryujin's wet face, loosening the tight fist in her chest enough to allow a full, deep breath.

As pale grey crept along the eastern edge of the sky, Ryujin rolled onto her back to give her weight to the pool. Her ears sank below the surface, blurring the laughter into the steady hum of the filter while she floated there, letting the chill seep into her shoulders and prune her fingers. Her body was already making the decision her mind had refused to articulate, operating on the same instinct that offered her own back as a mattress after a twelve-hour rehearsal or fixed a fifteen-year-old's mic wire the second she caught the panic. Her body knew what it was built for, and it had been screaming the answer at her for hours while she deafened herself with spite.

She was going to protect what Yeji found, carrying the history of this night in her chest and using every ugly minute of it the same way she ignored the burn in her thighs to carry Yeji to the van on a twelve-hour practice day. All because the person you carried it for trusted you enough to go limp, and the burning was just the price.

Karina would probably call this a "baptism" or some shit. Karina, who was apparently Catholic despite having done some distinctly uncatholic things with Ryujin in a Yonsei frat house two nights ago, would look at a girl floating alone in a pool past midnight and find the sacrament in it, because Karina found God in everything and Shin Ryujin, whose surname literally meant 'God' and who'd been nicknamed "God Ryujin" by fans who clearly hadn't met her, found God in nothing, which was probably why one of them had a spiritual vocabulary for moments like this and the other one was pruning in chlorine.

Above her, the couple upstairs went back to redecorating, apparently unsatisfied with the paint job. She floated under the lightening sky until the cold crept past her ribs and the water stopped feeling like a cradle.

***

[YUNA - THIRD PERSON]

The pink blinds were the wrong pink.

Two days ago they'd been perfect, the exact shade she'd picked to turn this room into Shin Yuna's Personal Territory, and now the same bubblegum looked like expired strawberry Yakult, that sad pink that happens when something meant to be fun has been sitting in the fridge too long and nobody wants to drink it anymore but nobody's thrown it out either.

She'd practically sprinted to her room after girls' night cratered, which, to be fair, was on-brand. Shin Yuna's official response to consequences had always been to leave the room before they fully arrived, a strategy that had worked brilliantly right up until the consequences started following her through walls in the form of rhythmic furniture displacement from the master bedroom directly on the other side of her headboard. She'd never seen her unnies actually fight before, and Yeji and Ryujin-unnie bickered constantly, Tom and Jerry energy where Ryujin stole Yeji's charger and Yeji threatened to cut Ryujin's hair in her sleep, but their fights had always ended in someone laughing or someone getting put in a headlock, and none of them had ever ended with one unnie storming out the door and the other getting her insides rearranged as coping therapy with the window wide open and the whole villa as the live studio audience.

Her phone sat right there on the nightstand, charging on the pink stand she'd brought (also from home, also matching, she had a SYSTEM), and her hand went to it because that's what her hand did. Her thumb automatically opened the apps to chase validation, hunting for a dopamine hit that would make her feel something before repeating the cycle. She'd been running this loop since she was sixteen and figured out that looking herself up online while touching herself was literally the fastest way to feel alive, and she'd gotten so good at it she kept a spreadsheet tracking her personal bests. It was either peak self-improvement or a cry for help depending on who you asked, and Yuna had never asked because asking would've interrupted her masturbating sprints.

She hadn't masturbated today. When was the last time that had happened? The answer was in her notes, it was always in her notes, but she didn't feel like opening the file. The numbers belonged to someone else, someone louder, someone who gave a shit about her own numbers.

She unlocked her phone anyway, because muscle memory was a bitch, and scrolled into the feed: TikTok first, then Instagram - her own grid, first, always, because Shin Yuna's morning scroll started with confirming Shin Yuna was still hot, which was like checking whether the sun had risen, but she did it anyway - then the fan accounts, then the comment sections, down the rabbit hole.

Her finger was between her legs before she'd made a conscious decision to put it there. Middle finger tracing slow circles over her clit in the groove she'd been wearing since predebut, the motion her body knew like breathing, the touch that had produced three orgasms before breakfast yesterday morning and four on the plane to Jeju and an uncountable number in dorm bathrooms across six years of trainee housing with thin walls and early schedules.

The fan accounts gave her what they always gave her. Her Waterbomb fancam reposted with heart-eye emojis. A Koreaboo article she'd already read twice. Pann comments by accounts that existed solely to tell Korean idols what Korean strangers thought about their hip-to-waist ratios.

She's pretty, has a great body, and a healthy mindset too. Yuna is genuinely so nice to look at.

Born in 2003, but she has such a mature charm that it's fascinating and makes you keep watching...

These comments used to charge her up. Two days ago she'd have read this exact praise and her finger would've sped up, the words going straight to her clit like her pussy ran on public approval, which was probably a concerning way to be wired but she'd never questioned it because it WORKED, it had always worked: be hot, get told you're hot, get off on being told you're hot, repeat forever.

Her proportions and her face are unreal.

She's born to be a celebrity. She's tall, has a small face and good body proportions.

They measured her small face and good proportions with numbers, strangers who'd never heard her voice crack on a high note or watched her cry in a V Live because she was scared she'd never be good enough and MIDZYs kept calling her special even when she'd insisted she was literally one of many nineteen-year-olds. Her finger kept circling because that's what it did, muscle memory running the program while the program produced nothing, and somewhere between one circle and the next the signal stopped arriving.

Her waist is unbelievably tiny. She naturally has hips too.

Face and body-wise, she and Jang Wonyoung are the top two.

She's beyond human.

So the strangers ranked her. They sorted her into a tier list like a gacha character, comparing her body to Wonyoung's like they were phone specs, and her finger kept moving against a stubbornly dry clit. Her body had never refused her in her entire life. The nervous system that dragged her off on a toilet in under two minutes, gave her an orgasm during turbulence at 30,000 feet, and finished four times before noon on the first day of this trip suddenly had nothing for her.

The way she deliberately wears it low so it shows is sooo guilty.

Bored commuters turned her clothing choices into evidence, evaluating her hips like a crime scene.

Nice to look at.

Her finger stopped dead at those words.

Yesterday morning she'd watched herself in that mirror while she came, filming herself because watching Shin Yuna lose control was the hottest thing Shin Yuna had ever seen, and she'd called herself a disaster and meant it like a trophy. Now she was lying in a dark room scrolling comments about her proportions and watching herself from outside, being scored the same way they scored her, and the thing that had been the thrill was eating her alive because she was content, she was product, she was nice to look at and nice to look at was all anyone had ever bothered to type about Shin Yuna at three in the morning on a Korean forum, and her body had finally caught up to what that meant.

Noise bled through the shared wall from Yeji's room.

The sounds started familiar. Muffled bedsprings groaned while Yeji's voice climbed into registers that yesterday morning had sent Yuna into competitive overdrive, racing to time her climax to the noises like she always did.

She tried again, shoving two fingers straight between her legs to dig directly past the harsh, dragging friction. Her pussy stayed stubbornly dry, but she forced her hand deep anyway to grind aggressively against her clit, locking her pumping arm to the frantic thudding of the headboard on the other side of the plaster. Every time Minho slammed into Yeji next door, Yuna violently matched the impact, thrashing her fingers inside herself to shock her own nervous system into operating.

Instead of the heavy, dripping slip that reliably ruined her sheets every morning, the raw friction burned. Her tight skin scraped hotly against her knuckles, stinging meaner the faster she pumped until a vicious cramp seized her wrist from fighting the uncooperative grip. Lying alone in the dark, she kept brutally rubbing an embarrassingly dry hole for zero payoff, trapped in the exact same frantic loop as someone aggressively refreshing a dead app until her arm finally gave out and she dropped her empty hand.

Then the rhythm broke. Yeji laughed and started bossing him around, bodies shifting over the mattress while they argued about camera angles. Yuna recognized that chaos from a thousand rehearsals. She carried pure ITZY practice-room energy into the bed, clearly failing at something and cracking up about it.

Then Yeji's voice went small.

"This angle makes my tits look flat," she said, muffled through the wall, and every word bled clearly through the plaster because the property had zero respect for privacy. "I look like a kid from up here."

Yuna's hand froze.

Minho answered her, his voice dropping low and warm against the plaster. "They're perfect. You're perfect."

Yeji threw an accusation about Karina's cleavage at dinner to deflect him, and his response bled right through the plaster, warm and utterly unbothered by the joke. "I'm saying it because they're perfect." Yeji gasped, a sharp sound cutting off her defense, before his voice dropped lower. "And because I know exactly what they do when I squeeze them."

Yuna pulled her hand out from between her legs and wiped her dry fingers on the silk sheet she'd brought from home because she had a SYSTEM and the system had crashed.

She'd let plenty of guys fuck her. She memorized the roster exactly like she tracked her orgasm spreadsheet, counting the numbers as proof she was wanted. Every single one of them had called her hot, called her tight, crowned her the best ass in the business, and every spoken compliment matched the internet comments word for word. They spoke in product review voices and delivered quality inspections. Nice to look at. Great proportions. S-line. Waist-to-hip ratio. They spoke the language of an evaluated body, because every guy she'd fucked had essentially graded down the product to confirm she was premium tier. Yuna had gotten off on it because getting off on being consumed was the only version of wanting she understood.

Through the wall, a boy paused mid-fuck to tell Yeji-unnie that the part she was insecure about was perfect, and meant HER body, her actual body, the one Yuna had never seen because Yeji-unnie remained the final boss of womanhood, composed and powerful and effortlessly poised, the unnie who'd never once let the maknae catch her being small. Yeji showed him something vulnerable and he answered it with five years of paying attention to ONE person. The sounds that followed - Yeji laughing while the headboard resumed, laughing like sex was funny and desperate and real all at once - were sounds she'd never heard anyone make while being fucked.

Nobody had ever looked at Yuna like that. They consumed her. They rated her. They called her hot in the same detached tone the internet used, and she'd gotten off on the attention because it was the only attention she'd ever known. Lying in the dark with dry hands under silk sheets while Yeji laughed through the wall, the validation loop that had sustained Shin Yuna since she was sixteen finally crashed into a wall it couldn't climb.

The renovation next door resumed in earnest, slamming the headboard against shared plaster in a frantic rhythm Yuna recognized from a hundred guys losing control. Except Yeji still laughed through the heavy thudding, and that bright sound destroyed Yuna more than anything else. Yeji was having real fun, sleeping with someone who made the sex funny and the awkwardness hot, trusting him enough to admit a physical insecurity and believing him when he called her perfect.

Yuna stared at the expired-Yakult blinds.

Somewhere in the wreckage of the last hour, between the fight and the comments and the finger that accomplished nothing and Yeji-unnie getting her insecurities kissed by a boy who'd spent five years memorizing her, a memory came up that she hadn't touched in years.

***

She was fifteen. It was their first week of promotions, and she sat curled in on herself on a KBS waiting room couch wearing a crop top she chose specifically to look older. She spent twenty minutes trying to fold her overgrown teenager frame into a compact package, hunching her shoulders and pulling her long legs in so she wouldn't take up too much physical space on the leather while she arranged her face into something convincingly idol-shaped. The other four older girls had their own rhythms locked down, moving in established orbits with Ryujin and Yeji paired off on one side while Chaeryeong and Lia held down the other. Yuna remained the late addition, the unexpected final piece pulled from the trainee B-team abruptly adjusting to the reality that this was her squad now even though none of them had personally recruited her.

Then Ryujin walked over, dropped onto the leather next to her, and casually grabbed the trailing wire of Yuna's mic pack where it had unclipped itself. She snapped it back onto the younger girl's waistband with one hand and flashed a slightly manic grin, simply because somebody had to.

Yuna's tense posture immediately collapsed. She unspooled her long spine against the cushions, tipped her head against the older girl's shoulder, and for the very first time since she signed her JYP contract she stopped trying to shrink herself to fit the room, letting herself take up space as a giant kid sitting beside someone who decided she belonged.

***

She'd literally imprinted on Ryujin-unnie from that one gesture like a baby duck locking onto the first moving thing it sees, which was embarrassing and true and also the reason she'd spent the next four years copying everything Ryujin-unnie did, the strut, the confidence, the "I'm the hottest person in any room and if you disagree you're LYING" energy, and never understanding that the girl who snapped her mic wire was being kind, and the power Yuna copied came from somewhere she'd never bothered to look because kindness was quiet and Shin Yuna had always been better at loud.

And Yeji-unnie, who braided her hair in the living room literally today and called her "our baby" and shouldered the whole group quietly - when did she become the person Yuna was COMPETING with instead of the unnie who called her baby? Yeji-unnie didn't change. Yuna changed what she was looking at, swapping the unnie for the territory, and she'd spent this whole trip trying to prove she could play in the same league when the league Yeji-unnie was playing in was trusting someone enough to say "my boobs are small" while he was inside her.

Thinking about Ryujin-unnie reaching for her, she opened her voicemail app. Something she was CONVINCED literally nobody used anymore because voicemail was for boomers like Lia-unnie and Shin Yuna communicated exclusively through 40-message text chains at 2 AM and unhinged DMs to Chaeryeong-unnie asking whether a man could survive her body, but there was one unread message from three weeks ago with Ryujin-unnie's name on it, timestamped the night the BLACKPINK tickets dropped, the night Yuna was at the afterparty riding a guy whose name she'd already forgotten while her phone blasted her own unreleased solo into the hotel pillow and seven missed calls from Ryujin-unnie piled up on the lock screen.

She'd been FURIOUS about those tickets, three days of composing revenge texts and screenshotting Ryujin-unnie's smug messages and making Pinterest boards about creative body disposal on tropical islands, because her brain defaulted to Pinterest for everything and she'd literally searched "how to hide a body on a beach" and gotten mood boards for coastal-themed weddings instead. Ryujin-unnie had two tickets, took Karina instead, and Yuna had decided it was personal, proof the maknae was expendable, proof that the girl who snapped her mic wire five years ago had gotten bored of her.

She pressed play.

Ryujin-unnie's voice came through the phone speaker, tinny and bored and very much her. "Maknae. Got two tickets to the BLACKPINK thing. Text me if you want one or I'm giving it to Jimin-unnie. You have until tomorrow."

The voicemail was eleven seconds long and Yuna played it twice because she couldn't believe her ears.

She was the first call.

The ticket was literally HERS, Ryujin-unnie had thought of her before Karina, before Jimin-unnie, before anyone, and had called SEVEN TIMES while Yuna was too busy getting fucked to check her phone, and when Yuna never texted back Ryujin-unnie gave the ticket to Karina and acted like an asshole about it because Shin Ryujin would rather eat glass than admit she'd reached for someone who didn't reach back.

Yuna set the phone face-down on the nightstand. The pink puppy case stared at the ceiling.

She came to Jeju to see BLACKPINK, to hook up with hot guys, to make happy memories with her unnies. The concert ticket was hers and she'd ignored it because she was riding a stranger. The only time she’d hooked up with someone had basically resulted in World War 3 between her unnies. The memories were wreckage she'd helped build by touching something between her unnie and the boy her unnie loved, trying to win a competition Yeji-unnie had never been competing in.

Her eyes were wet all of a sudden, and the tears sat on her face and she didn't wipe them because wiping them meant acknowledging they existed, and Shin Yuna didn't cry, Shin Yuna turned every emotion into content, every vulnerability into a bit, every feeling into a caption for a story she'd post and delete, and she was lying in the dark with tears on her cheeks and zero memes for any of it.

The mirror she'd angled two days ago caught her in the low light, the one she'd positioned for watching herself look hot while horizontal. A girl with wet cheeks and messy hair and a phone face-down on the nightstand stared back at her from the glass.

She looked so small in it.

She pulled the duvet over her head and curled into herself, knees to chest, fetal position, the "mature charm" girl hiding under blankets like she hadn't since she was a trainee scared of debuting. The sobbing started ugly and got worse, and her whole body shook and her breath caught in her throat and her face did things she'd be mortified about if anyone were watching, except nobody was watching Shin Yuna and for the first time in her life she didn't want them to.

The villa kept going above her and around her. Sex sounds and laughter and living, and she was a girl under a blanket in the dark with expired-Yakult blinds and silk sheets and a phone full of people telling her she was nice to look at and the sound of a mic wire clicking into place playing on loop behind her closed eyes.

The questions started racing through her mind.

Where am I?

Nah, she knew exactly where she was.

What am I?

Nah, her phone was full of strangers eager to tell her exactly what she was.

She let the edge of the duvet slip down to her nose.

"Who am I?" she whispered, looking past the sad pink blinds to find a scared, lonely girl in the angled mirror staring right back.

***

[RYUJIN - THIRD PERSON]

The frantic renovation noises from the second floor had finally wound down.

The jaw she'd been clenching since the terrace had finally unlocked in the water, and with that came the final piece of the memory of the dorm room floor from Chuseok eve years ago where Ryujin had stayed so that Yeji wouldn't have to spend it alone, chicken grease on her fingers, Yeji's dead weight on her shoulder, and the laptop playing something neither of them was watching until Yeji woke up right as Toy Story 3 was ending, scrubbing a sleep-crease from her cheek while the screen threw blue light across the cold chicken boxes.

They'd made it past the incinerator scene, past the four sniffles Ryujin would hold over her head for the next four years, right to the final shot of a college kid driving away while a toy cowboy watched him go from the porch.

"Are you seriously crying at cartoon toys now?" Ryujin had whispered incredulously, trying to preserve her cool-girl immunity to sentimentality as Yeji wiped her eyes again.

"You'd cry too if you actually paid attention," Yeji grumbled, her voice thick with sleep but fiercely defensive. "He almost got everyone burned alive trying to keep things the way they were. Almost took the whole gang down with him. And THEN he finally let go."

The heavy, bruised sky above the Jeju courtyard looked exactly like the ceiling of that empty dorm. She had spent the entire weekend playing the exact same desperate, screaming role as Woody. She had burned down a villa, thrown herself at Minho in a desperate attempt to show he wasn’t special, and weaponized her knowledge of her best friend against her just to prove she was still necessary, because if Yeji could build a house in the mountains and find someone softly holding her through the dark, then where the fuck did that leave Ryujin?

She stared up at the dark, open bedroom window, letting the turquoise glow wash over her face as she surrendered her claim to the girl who was busy building a new life inside.

"So long, partner," she whispered, remembering the final line of the one movie that had made her best friend cry.

***

The water had cooled past reasonable. Ryujin hauled herself out over the pool lip, arms shaking from the cold, and stood on the deck while her clothes dumped water in sheets onto the volcanic stone. The warm night air clung cold and heavy against soaking denim and a sports bra that retained half the pool.

She was standing in a spreading puddle of herself on the pool deck, and it was not the clearest decision she'd made on this trip, which, given the competition, was a meaningful statement.

She pushed the glass door open and stepped inside, leaving a trail of pool water across the tile as she headed for the stairs, heading for bed, heading for the end of whatever tonight had been.

Two shapes on the living room couch stopped her mid-stride.

They'd renovated their bedroom so hard they'd made it uninhabitable, and she almost laughed because of COURSE they had, of course Hwang Yeji and her off-limits boy had fucked their way through an entire floor of luxury Jeju real estate and ended up as refugees on the living room sofa. Yeji was draped across Minho's chest wearing what looked like one of his shirts, a dry duvet pulled over both of them, and they'd clearly fallen asleep mid-sentence because Yeji's mouth was slightly open and Minho's hand was still resting on her hair like he'd been stroking it when his body gave out. The pool glow from outside threw faint turquoise light across them through the glass.

Ryujin's chest turned over. This was a Yeji she hadn't seen since the bunk beds - slack and trusting, mouth open like she'd forgotten anyone might be watching.

She made it three steps toward the stairs before her body abandoned the plan and snapped her around.

Crossing the dark room on legs that had already decided, she stepped to the edge of the couch to wrap both arms around Yeji, pressing her soaking body into the dry duvet and the warm quiet of two people she had nearly destroyed.

Yeji sucked in a sharp gasp and whipped around to identify the intruder. The hit of cold pool water sent her rigid, locking up against the sudden panic of being grabbed in the dark. Ryujin's stomach turned, convinced she was building a second mess on top of the first one. But the moment Yeji's chin found the familiar groove of her neck, the tension shattered. Every locked muscle released as Yeji exhaled a wrecked syllable into the dark.

"Ryu..."

Yeji's hand found Ryujin's forearm and clamped down before her eyes adjusted to the room.

Ryujin pressed her mouth into Yeji's wet neck and whispered their promise.

"Ddaeng Ddong."

Without hesitation, Yeji breathed back the counter-sign the way she always had.

"Ddong Ddaeng."

They both exhaled simultaneously.

The pool water spread through the duvet, bleeding cold chlorine into the warm skin of the cozy world the two of them had decided to occupy for the night. Ryujin leaned harder into the ruin.

Minho's manufactured stillness gave him away. His arms had wrapped protectively around her, but the second Yeji murmured her name, he relaxed, vanishing into the cushions so Ryujin could occupy the space.

Thank you for holding her still.

Probably the first non-hostile thought she'd directed towards him in the six months since she'd learned of his existence.

The grip lasted until the freezing denim traded its shock for a shared warmth, binding them together while Ryujin's rough breathing synced to the steady pulse against her neck and her shoulders stopped shaking. She kept her face buried in the warm skin while hot tears mixed into the pool water running down her cheeks.

Pulling back with her jaw set and her eyes locked on the floor, she dragged her hand across Yeji's shoulder to linger a moment longer. She avoided Minho's face, deciding that this private truce belonged to the two girls while using his chest as a staging ground - a reality she promised to examine later and planned to bury forever.

Yeji's fingers trailed down her separating forearm, caught her wrist for an acknowledging second, and fell away, leaving Ryujin to cross the dark room and track wet footprints up every stair.

On the couch below, a boy and a girl lay still in the cold, soaking mess she'd pressed into them, and held on to each other through it.

Because for them, perhaps for the first time in five years, it was comfort.

Intro | Masterlist | Series Index Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | BTS: Ryujin

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“What is grief, if not love persevering?” - Vision, WandaVision (2021)

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Girls Will Be Girls interview with Korea Times, 2025

“We wanted to show that the world still has meaning if we’re together. It’s about unbreakable bonds - a friendship that gets stronger with time.” - Hwang Yeji “We poured our energy into capturing our identity as a group. The message is simple but powerful - when we’re together, nothing else matters. We’ll take your hand and move forward together.” - Shin Ryujin “Most of us are different when we’re not performing. On stage, we show this strong and charismatic image, but off stage, we’re just a group of girls who laugh, joke around and talk about everything. Those small moments are what make us stronger." - Shin Yuna “We move as one. We wanted to express that in the music, too.” - Choi Lia

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Real ITZY Lore Used in This Chapter

Yeji & Ryujin Formation Fight (2019 Asia Artist Awards)

Yeji Buttoning Ryujin's Shirt on VLive (October 2022)

Yeji & Ryujin as Roommates / Bunk Beds

Last Day as Roommates / Moving Out

ITZY Driving School (Not Shy Era, 2020)

Yeji's Failed Driving Exam

ITZY Cozy House (Jeju Island Reality Show, 2022)

Ddaeng Ddong Nickname Origin (2TZY: Hello 2021, Episode 4)

Ryujin Loving Jeju / Yeji Asking About Building a House

Chuseok at the Dorm (2019)

Finishing Each Other's Sentences on VLive

Ryujin smiling at Yuna first and fixing her mic

Yuna's "I'm just one of many 19-year-olds" confession

Yuna "Nice to look at" comment thread

Yeji's 3 chocolates a day habit

Yeji's disgusting mayo/bean sauce/mustard mix and watermelon addiction

"Can Ryujin stop making this kind of expression?" theqoo hate thread

Ryujin apologizing on behalf of the producer who told her to get Botox

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Author's note:

Right. Author's note, where I dump my writing process into the open...

I actually posted this chapter initially without one. I normally always include these, but to be completely honest, this chapter was so emotionally loaded that even I had to just sit back and stare at the wall for a couple of days to process what I'd just written before I could even begin to talk about it.

Let's start with the architecture. This whole chapter is built around a Chinese proverb: 苦海無邊，回頭是岸 . It translates roughly to: "The sea of bitterness has no bounds, turn your head to see the shore." In Western terms: Repent and ye shall be saved. That's Ryujin's complete arc here. She walks out into the dark, projecting all her pain outward, wading deeper and deeper into this sea of bitterness until she's literally standing ankle-deep in the freezing ocean. The realization she has to make isn't just about forgiving Yeji for abandoning her; it's about realizing that she's the one drowning herself, and the only way to survive is to turn around and run back to the people who love her.

To get her to that turning point, I needed to break down a character who has spent five years building bulletproof armor. How do you do that? You bypass the brain completely and hit the senses. Enter Chekhov's tangerine. Aside from tangerines being the single most Jeju thing in existence, smell is the strongest trigger for memory we have. That sharp hit of citrus oil short-circuits her defenses and drags her back to a time before she felt the need to perform her own aloofness and bravado.

Once that wall cracks, the memories don't come back cleanly or chronologically, they cascade. Emotional crises do that - your brain floods you with evidence of exactly what you're losing. And the Chuseok memory is the breaking point because it's the ultimate proof that her "I don't need anyone" persona is a lie. She threw away a train ticket home just so her friend wouldn't cry alone over burnt noodles. Her body has always known she's soft; her ego just finally caught up.

Speaking of bodies, the run up the hill is her physical metaphor. Ryujin isn't a cerebral character; she processes the world physically. I didn't want a quiet epiphany on the beach. She has to physically burn through the spite. The physical exhaustion forces the vulnerability. Only when her lungs are burning and her legs are failing is her ego too exhausted to put up a fight, letting her finally run toward something instead of walking away. Which, of course, worked out because ITZY has a song ("Bet On Me") that happens to literally be about running towards the freedom of believing in your true self.

Speaking of, music is the other engine here. "Nobody Like You" is an upbeat, bratty pop-rock song whose MV is literally a memory montage of ITZY having fun and being silly, but if you look at the translation of the lyrics, they're incredibly vulnerable - my hard frozen heart melting, why do I keep thinking of you. Having the algorithm feed her own song back to her forces her to translate her "cool girl" concept into actual honesty.

Then there's the "Kill Shot" transition. This is probably the cleverest technical transition I've managed in the series - an audio match cut. We go from the literal beat of the song pulsing in her ears (swish swish), right into the rhythmic, wet percussion of Minho and Yeji railing their poor hearts out in the outdoor shower. It's a cinematic technique usually reserved for film, but I really wanted you to hear it bleeding over into reality before she even realizes what's happening.

***

From a craft perspective, I went back and forth on whether the Yuna interstitial sequence belonged inside this chapter or if it needed its own dedicated '.5' chapter. Ultimately, putting it on its own would have felt adrift. Yuna's emotional wound is hopelessly tethered to Ryujin's.

They are part of a three-person chain of inherited trauma: Yeji's fear created Ryujin's unbothered armor, and Ryujin's armor created Yuna's hollow, validation-seeking performance. That's why I included the mic-fixing memory from both of their perspectives. You get to see them occupying the exact same timeline, but learning completely different and equally damaging lessons from each other. You could totally interpret this as a commentary on generational trauma especially in Asian culture - I'm not going to do it, but I'll happily read any yaps that you guys cook up about that connection!

If you got caught out by the tonal whiplash of Yuna suddenly spiraling into existential dread - I am SO sorry, but this was the plan from day one! Her arc was designed from the jump to echo the themes of the Barbie movie. That's exactly why Chapter 1.5 introduced her with that aggressively pink aesthetic set to Lizzo's "Pink." The plastic, hyper-sexualized perfection was always a deliberate setup for a "What Was I Made For?" collapse.

The biggest challenge here was the prose design. Yuna has a very specific, signature Gen-Z "hyperpop" narrative voice - it's usually loud, breathless, scattered, and deeply horny. Translating that into something sad and muted while ensuring she still sounded like Yuna required a very specific tonal shift.

I kept her exact sentence rhythm - the endless ADHD-coded sentences, the chronically online vocabulary, the fast observations - but I completely drained the saturation. Rather than her phone acting as a frantic slot machine dispensing dopamine, it becomes a cold monitor evaluating a product. I stripped out the exclamation points and the explosive sensory details, leaving behind this flat, clinical language. She still processes the world at lightspeed, but the machinery is running on empty.

***

And finally, we have the Shape of Water visual grammar. Since Chapter 2, water has been the core visual metaphor of this story. In Yuna's arc, falling into the pool was the start of Minho's metaphorical drowning. He was pulled under, gravity took over, and water became the site of temptation and boundary-breaking. In his Chapter 18 nightmare, that guilt manifested as black, viscous water - literally drowning his subconscious in the consequences of his actions. Then in Chapter 20, when he and Yeji reclaim the pool, it operates as a symbol of reclamation and washing off the sins as they turn a crime scene into a place for holding each other up.

When I call it the Shape of Water though, I mean it literally. In Guillermo del Toro's film, there's this gorgeous, haunting tableau of the main character floating suspended underwater, fully clothed, completely surrendered to the deep - that's the image of the girl in the red dress I embedded earlier. (I haven't watched it, but found the image when Googling 'underwater cinematography' and was struck by the composition.) That specific shot was my visual anchor for Ryujin's "baptism". She is a character who spends her life fighting gravity - holding her walls up, holding her team up, bracing against the world. For her to change, she couldn't have an active, fist-pumping epiphany. She had to sink, giving her weight over to the water and letting the soaked denim pull her to the ceramic floor is the only way she can find the quiet to drop the act and just stop fighting.

But here, with Ryujin, water is a symbol of rebirth. She steps into the freezing ocean, then plunges into the pool fully clothed, essentially baptizing herself into honesty. This is the final time water is used as a metaphor in the series, and it's not about washing away the old self, but rising into the new one. Soaking wet, she brings that pool water straight into their clean couch because the mess is part of the love.

When she finally arrives, there's no big sweeping speech. They just fall into their old rhythm, whispering Ddaeng Ddong - a nonsense phrase that holds half a decade of unconditional love. It's a wordless reconciliation because they've reached the end of what words can do. Only their presence matters now.

None of this reconciliation was originally planned this way. The initial outline had a much quieter ending. It was just going to be Ryujin walking back into the villa, glancing at Yeji on the couch, and sharing a silent, understanding nod from across the room. The soaking wet embrace and the whispered Ddaeng Ddong came later in the drafting process when I realized a nod simply wasn't going to cut it.

And then, as an absolute last-minute stroke of inspiration, I added the reveal of Toy Story 3 playing on the laptop to finish off the Chuseok eve. I cannot overstate how massive this late addition feels to me now. It completely recontextualizes the ending by paying off two separate setups at once: the unspecified movie Yeji put on to fall asleep to during the Chuseok eve memory, and Ryujin teasing Yeji for crying at the incinerator scene during the Cozy House flashback. But the absolute devastation of the reveal is why Yeji was crying. She wasn't crying about cartoon toys burning; she was crying about the cost of refusing to let go. Back in that 2019 dorm room, Yeji essentially narrated exactly what Ryujin was going to do to them this weekend in Jeju - almost taking the whole group down because she was too terrified to grow up. Having them finally fall back into each other's arms while that specific clairvoyant realization lands is such an incredible, full-circle moment that even I tear up just reading how perfectly it worked out. (And no, the tears aren't from remembering the Toy Story 3 ending. I don't cry at cartoon toys!)

Thanks for reading, and thanks for bearing with me while I figured this one out. It was a lot to carry, but we made it back to the shore.