Actually, you said: love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love.
It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.

--

When she continues staring to the left of his head, in the space between him and Youngbae, thirty seconds in, is when he realizes she’s kind of avoiding them. That it’s A Thing and not just that she has an incredibly long focus-time, and should maybe look up some good ophthalmologists. He can recommend some; he knows one just five miles away from the shoot location.

Not that he doesn't get the why of it. When everyone's waiting for a soundbyte on her playing the third-wheel in a Youngbae, Hyorin triangle and she'll have to publicly get over someone she never even had. He gets it. These days, he can't not get it. He’s the poster child for a twenty first century break-up.

The sun is in his eyes, it makes his head hurt. Or maybe that’s the scotch from last night. He shifts restlessly.

“Sunbae-deul,” she says politely, eventually, her head bowed, and he remembers all over again, the low register of her voice, at jarring dissonance with that high, slightly manic pitch her image demands, the one he’s heard so many times, accidentally, on variety, on music shows, in the space between picking up the remote and changing the channel.

He forgets, sometimes, most times, what she really sounds like. Or doesn’t think about it. Whichever.

He lets his eyes linger on her legs in the time she sneaks a glance at Youngbae when the other guy isn’t looking. It’s always amusing, this. Good thing he’s in the mood to be amused.

She’s getting better, he thinks, with a distant sense of pride, the kind he sometimes feels when he looks down at a paper, fingers smeared with ink, and doesn’t loathe the words penned down. Like she’s his personal creation. He’s been through years of her sneaking glances some forty degrees to his left, and she’s getting better. He almost wouldn’t have caught it if he wasn’t looking. Problem is, of course, they’re all looking.

She looks away quickly. He looks up slower. Traces the seams of her short shorts almost cutting into the smooth skin of her thighs. He wonders if they’ll leave a mark when she takes them off. Then feels vaguely dirty. He can’t remember right now exactly how old she is, but old enough, right? She’s been through a scandal, he remembers, and that was a while back. Definitely old enough. That’s okay, then.

She’s looking at him this time, when his eyes finally make their way to her face. For a moment, he feels oddly apologetic. He’s seen her around since she was fifteen or something, awkward and coltish and disturbingly cheerful, with a voice too big for a fifteen-year-old to hold. She’s older now. But still, weird.

The beginnings of a frown line mar the center of her forehead as she stares at him. His fingers itch to smooth it out, so he clenches them in a loose fist by his side. Imperfection disturbs him, disturbs him more in the sunlight. He stares back, waiting. He doesn’t exactly know what for. But, still, waiting. It kind of feels like he’s done nothing but ing wait the entire week, month. A ing lifetime. Wait for Kiko to just ing say so—

Then, her eyes wander down. A slow, deliberate once-over, matching his in scale. Her frame still poised in that polite half-supplication that defines her public relationship to them, her eyes defiant as they rise to meet his again.

He grins.

When he moves closer, just slightly intimidating, just slightly in persona, she stands her ground. He almost feels tall. She’s shorter than Kiko in her platforms. Why the did he just think that.

“Jieun-ah,” he begins cheerily, with a familiarity he knows he’s not entitled to. It makes it more fun.

Seunghyun, he knows, would call this his post break-up lust spiral, low, drawling. He doesn’t know why he even lets Seunghyun be the voice in his head. That was never a good idea. He’s not even attracted to her, not really. He’s all for cute, but scandal or no, she has too much of that infuriatingly virtuous, untouched vibe that gets to him, she wears too much white.

“Let’s do well,” he completes. Youngbae just smiles at her, holding himself with that unconscious stiffness that Jiyong remembers from their previous interactions. Youngbae has never quite known what to do with her. Her high energy, her starry-eyed enthusiasm, her open declarations of love. But he can’t shake off the feeling that there’s— something—about her that is more muted now. Less bright. Like she closed up something inside herself, locked in that openness. Jiyong doesn’t know if he likes it.

She nods her head in acknowledgment again, her forehead smoothening out. Then glances between them, like she’s already forgotten she’d decided on the avoidance route. He unclenches his fist.

“Yes, sunbaenim,” she says dutifully. It’s strange, when he looks closer, how she seems almost as restless as he feels.

She shuffles slightly to the left, moving her weight from one foot to the other, blocks out the sun.

-

Breaking up is hard to dooooo, Seungri’s taken to singing in the shower, because he’s an at the best of times.

“You’re going to get back together,” Daesung says, consoling. Not that Jiyong doesn’t get why, he does; they’ve been crying wolf too long. So loud, they made the headlines for the ending of a relationship that was never even supposed to have been. And maybe he’s stupidly hopeful, or just plain stupid, but he can’t find it in himself to set Daesung right on this one, even though he knows himself, and he knows Kiko, and they’re never ever getting back together. He can quote Taylor Swift on it.

“Is this the seventh time?” Seunghyun asks unhelpfully, without bothering to turn away from the mirror as he sets his hair, and Jiyong scowls at his back.

He takes to drinking a lot more than average, sitting on the ground, head resting against the wall, the blue glow of his laptop the only light in the room. It seems dramatic enough, in-character enough, till Youngbae, instead of discouraging him, decides to join him, and then he has to stop on principle because there’s a crazy high possibility that Youngbae may just burn the building down, all the while angrily insisting he’s not even drunk and why isn’t he ing getting drunk and why does he even drink if he doesn’t ing get drunk. And Jiyong’s too fast to live, yeah, but he’s still too young to die.

(“That was once,” Youngbae protests, when Daesung reminds him of the ashtray and the stove.

“You mean only once that Seungri actually told everyone about,” Daesung hints meaningfully.

Seunghyun just shakes his head.)

“How is IUUUU,” Seungri sing-songs, and Jiyong is just grateful to not be the center anymore. Grateful that Seungri sometimes takes his maknae role seriously enough for it to be a distraction just when he needs one. After all these years, he still can’t tell if it’s practiced. But he’s grateful anyway. “Is she jealous of Hyorin noona? Is Hyorin noona jealous of her? She recognized you in seconds, even with a mask on, huh?  Juuust  by the movement of your body. Those are my life goals, hyung. The nation’s little sister recognizing me just by the movement of my body.”

“Shut up,” Youngbae mutters, and Seungri lets out a hoot of laughter. Then turns to him.

“How does it feel to be the regular, neighborhood oppa for once, GD-ssi?” he asks, mock-seriously, in his best sports commentator tone, shaping his hand into a mike.

“Breaks my heart,” Jiyong answers, equally solemn.

Youngbae punches him on the side of his arm. It actually hurts a little. The routine calms something inside him. He bites back a smile.

After, Seungri stops deliberately riling him up, just to get him to do something, do anything. Switches to singing I Know in the shower, almost unconsciously.

(He’s worried, Daesung had said knowingly, before.

The snide not my problem was just on the tip of his tongue, but he’d stayed silent.)

That’s when he’d first started dating Kiko, Jiyong thinks, randomly, when their duet was released. Seungri and IU’s. IU’s cheeks were fuller then, that’s how he remembers her most times, all soft eyes and high, childish ponytails and embarrassed laughter and none of the guardedness he’s starting to sense now. And Kiko— Kiko was the most ing gorgeous creature on the face of the earth and he was so painfully in love sometimes he couldn’t breathe, and he’d made up his mind he was going to hold his breath for as long as possible, as long as it took.

Now I want to wake up every day with you, Seungri’s voice floats, loud, open. He sings all of Jie— IU’s— parts in this high falsetto that sounds nothing like him or her. Gri never makes any efforts to contain himself. It’s irritating, some days. Some days, it’s familiarity. Comfort before he knows he needs it.

Jiyong finds himself humming along, sometimes, these days, legs stretched out on the couch, hands clasped beneath his head. A magazine lying upside down on his stomach, forgotten, as he strains to remember the next verse, his eyes on the ceiling, mind blank. It’s catchy.

-

We can’t even understand each other, she’d said in broken Korean.

He’d shrugged, shoving his hands in his pockets. Words are unnecessary, he’d replied and kissed her, open-mouthed, reaching. His Japanese sounded rusty, even to him.

Kiko just shook her head, pulling back. Liar, she’d said in English. But she was smiling.

-

Hwang Kwanghee is genuinely a mystery to him. There are very few people he can’t get an immediate read on, but Kwanghee is one of them.

Kwanghee’s energy level rivals the head-rush he’d felt during the MADE tour. A performance high. Like he’s constantly on one. Constantly performing. He’s exhausting, Jiyong thinks on occasion, watching him; half-annoying half-intriguing. 

He remembers the low better. Post-performance. Crawling into his bed after a concert, the screams amplified in his mind, the sweat and glitter drying on his skin, and a hollow emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Like something had passed and he couldn’t go back to the moments before. This is the oldest he’s ever been. He would never be this young again.

(Is that so bad, Seungyun had said, when he’d knocked on his door, a bottle of wine in each hand.

Jiyong had locked the door in his face.)

“We’re going to win this,” Kwanghee says with determination, and there’s something about the other boy’s open adulation, his certainty that Jiyong will somehow pull through, that’s pure secondhand intoxication. An odd vacuum where he can’t feel it, but he remembers what it feels like.

“IU is our biggest competition,” Kwanghee mutters under his breath, and he looks over at the girl sitting on the other end of the room, her hands clasped together.

She’s drawing into herself, he notes vaguely, laughing at the right cues, never speaking unless spoken to, and thinks, in abrupt realization: she’s trying to be less. Everyone in the room is trying to be more, but she’s trying to be less than she is. He doesn’t even know what the that means.

He takes out his phone and discreetly opens Instagram instead. The Dreamers still the first thing on his page. The girl looks like Kiko, someone had said. Come on, someone else had written, have you even seen the movie, obviously nyongtory lives. Hours later, the comments still come faster than he can scroll, each drowned by the next. He doesn’t linger.

-

He first takes to watching her out of boredom. Infinity Challenge isn’t boring, exactly, it’s just…there are way too many people vying for the screen-time in the group meets, and he can either up his performance ante, and be ridiculously funny, ridiculously cool, ridiculously over-the-top desirable, the 3D animated version of himself, and get more than his share— or he can just sit back get the share he knows he’s going to get anyway because he’s G-Dragon of Big Bang.

It’s mildly interesting, in a low-key sort-of way, to watch her be the focal point of all the testosterone in the room. She’s uncomfortable with the attention, it’s easy to tell, she sits slightly hunched into herself, her legs tightly pressed together, with someone’s jacket modestly draped over her thighs, focused on her work, responding to all the reactions, the loud claps, the hooting, the intense scrutiny of everything she does with a variety smile and a distance so subtle, he wouldn’t have caught it if he wasn’t looking.

There are far too many things about her that are possible to miss if you’re not looking, he decides. For what it’s worth, he’s mostly looking, though.

Don’t get into a scandal, he imagines her CEO telling her. Zion T. Oh Hyuk. Kwanghee. Taeyang. GD. Maybe one of the older guys. He wouldn’t put it past JYP. So many potentials to make the gossip columns with. So many ways to lose the title. Don’t get into a scandal, Jieun-ah, you’ve been doing so well. Her CEO sounds like Seunghyun in his head. Everyone sounds like Seunghyun in his head.

“IU should challenge herself more,” Park Myungsoo is telling them, and he doesn’t know if he’ll get into trouble for this, but, whatever, he rolls his eyes anyway. PMS’s obsession with EDM is starting to border on the pathological, he almost says. Doesn’t, though. He doesn’t have cred enough to constantly act out, he knows. Not anymore. And he’s already taken one of his episodic cracks at PMS for this shoot.

“We all know you’re good at what you do,” Park Jinyoung accedes kindly, “the best. So this is your opportunity to show everyone what else you can do. Your song is excellent as it is, but I personally think the EDM makes it sound more festive. And since this is a festival—”

He thinks of the nights after night after night he’s spent with a beat in his head, trying to make it into something real, something beyond words strung together on paper to form readable sentences, every nerve exposed, scraping against rough surfaces of his room, the sharp edges of the expectations, the flow and the rhythm, trying to get it just ing right. That’s not challenge enough. It’s not up for public consumption.

There’s a lot of nodding around the room, a silent chorus of acquiesce on IU pushing herself. Don’t stick to what you already know. Where’s the variety in that?

Her smile falters. He traces the curve of her lips with his eyes, trying to get the angle right. Before the corners of lift up again, and she laughs in a determined sort of way and everyone smiles alongside, relieved that she gets it.

When she loses the voting, it’s not a surprise. He remains seated, as Youngbae and Kwanghee make their way to the other side. He runs a casual glance around his side. Oh Hyuk is half in love with her, he’s convinced, but he’s a damn good musician and it’s worth most of the others to have him on this side.

She struggles with the smile, but manages to keep it on somehow and he’s kind of impressed. But he’s heard she’s been doing well in dramas these days, so.

“I understand,” she says, to yet another member reassuring her that it wasn’t that her song wasn’t good, just maybe not good enough, bowing her head slightly. She’s also one of the youngest in this group, he realizes distantly, they treat her like a child, not a veteran.

He would have lashed out. Kiko would have lashed out. And they’d worn each other down eventually by always wanting whatever they wanted equally hard. They were more alike than they were different. Maybe that was always their problem.

“Definitely our IU,” Jaesuk sunbaenim says, giving her a thumbs up. She smiles, her long, straight hair half covering her face, as she bows again.

That’s why he likes girls with short hair; he thinks carelessly, they can hide less.

And, for an entire roomful of people focused on just her, he wonders how it feels to have everyone look through her.

He leans back. Shifts his gaze to the cameras instead.

-

(If you could stay like this forever, Kiko had asked, once, his head between her thighs, and he’d already said yes before she’d finished.Yes, ,yes.

If you could stay this way forever, she’d begun again, eyes dark. She was close he knew, he could read all her tells. If you couldn’t do anything else—couldn’t sing, compose, perform— just stay this way forever, would you?)

-

He catalogues all sorts of mundane facts, gestures, in his head. IU prefers being on the sides to the middle. She can’t dance. She can’t rap. She’s terrible at aegyo (he can’t figure that one out, he’s pretty certain her entire image is aegyo). She gets embarrassed easily. Her clothes belong to no label that he can recognize. She has a soft spot for indie acts. She wears thrift store shoes. She gets her way without letting anyone know she’s demanding anything at all. She’s good at keeping distance without making it obvious. She’s a good sport. She’s aggressively competitive. She sometimes forgets she’s on camera. She hates losing. She’s funny, in a smart, incisive, understated way, almost secretly. When she’s really laughing, she has an ahjumma laugh. She’s a wide range of contradictory facts and figures that still don’t add up to anything.

It’s fascinating. He’s wide open for fascination.

But still: she looks over at hi— Youngbae— sometimes, her eyes wandering over to their side— casually or fake-casually, he hasn’t yet figured out. He doesn’t know her that well— and flushes each time she gets caught. Not everything changes.

“Kwanghee says,” Youngbae will tell him in the evening, carefully casual— which is useless, because he doesn’t know IU, but he does know Youngbae— “that you should probably tone down on how much you look at IU-ssi.”

He pauses in the middle of folding his laundry. Then resumes.

“Kwanghee wants you to tell me that,” he says slowly. He’s pretty sure the black cups, tins & paddles shirt is Seunghyun’s, but he’s going to keep it anyway.

He can almost palpably feel Youngbae’s hesitation looming in the space between them.

“You’re—” Youngbae begins, then appears to rethink it. “Nothing.”

—projecting, he finishes, in his head. Getting yourself in too deep. Side-effects of too long an acquaintance. It s with you.

Youngbae has his headphones around neck, he’s humming Mapsosa. Without the accompaniment, the Bang Bang Bang legacy is even more obvious. Yang Hyun Suk made him write every night since he was twelve. He never stops writing, he’s never blocked. Nothing competes with habit.

All creation is part imitation; Daesung always says philosophically when he’s just a little buzzed. But here’s the truth; it doesn’t mean he’s writing anything good— he’s not creating at all, he’s recycling.

He unfolds the shirt— the edges are misaligned— then folds it again.

You should probably tone down on how much you look at IU-ssi, he thinks, Youngbae’s voice converting to Seunghyun’s in his head. He hadn’t realized he was obvious about it. He can’t bring himself to care.

The next time she looks over, he’s directly beside Youngbae. Like every single time before. He thinks, some days, it’s a deliberate production choice; he’s the buffer between them, the media distraction from the media distraction.

Her eyes meet his. He raises an eyebrow in a mock-question, feeling the corner of his mouth lift just slightly, genuinely entertained, as she quickly looks down. It’s so vanilla, it almost leaves an aftertaste in his mouth.

It’s odd, he’ll think later, that still, neither of them pretend they’re not looking.

-

The first whole-scale English sentences he’d broken his accent on were all cheesy, aegyo-filled, lines of love and longing, back when they were still trying to decide on a common ground of communication. Those were all he really needed to know anyway; for the fan-service, for her.

Kiko found it amusing.

“Weird, isn’t it?” she’d said, half-raising herself up on her elbows, legs covered in sand. The sea breeze was salty, it clung to his skin, to hers, he could taste it when he kissed her. “An entire language where you can’t do anything but love. You can never be angry, sad, disappointed, resentful. Never be anything other than happy, you have no words for anything but being in love.”

He’d his lips, dry from the salt, tasting grit on his tongue. “Sounds nice.”

She’d dug her toes into the sand. “Sounds contained.”

(I can’t ing do this anymore, he’d say four years later. No trace of a Korean accent.

Kiko was always a patient teacher.)

-

She catches up with him after the cameras stop rolling for the day. There’s a hesitant pull on his too-long sleeve and he can tell it’s her before he turns around. Her heels make a distinct sound on the smooth floor. It’s a weird thing to have noticed, but he likes being thorough.

Her eyes first focus on the left side of his neck, where the makeup’s beginning to come off, he knows. The VIII of his tattoo nearly visible. Almost as a reflex, he raises his jaw a little, and clenches his teeth, it stands out more that way.

It’s the gesture in response that seems to startle her. She takes a step back, her eyes widening. For a brief moment, he remembers her debut stage. He didn’t actually see it, he saw it much later on video, but he remembers it. Visibly nervous, gawky, no makings of an idol, a song too old for her, and a voice that had resonated in his head for days. He couldn’t add her up to anything finite, map her trajectory.

She’s more polished now, he can tell. He has a sudden urge to reach down and scrape it off of her. He’s clearly losing his goddamn mind.

He has a hoobae-friendly, inappropriate Jieunnie all ready, with a backslap maybe, he always wants to mess with her a little bit for some reason, maybe because she’s started looking so put-together, but something about the way she’s holding herself stops him.

There’s a long pause.

“Thank you,” she says sincerely. "For what you said. About the flow of the song."

He has no idea how to respond to sincerity.

“Too bad it wasn’t Taeyang, though, huh?” That comes out less playful than he intends. He doesn’t intend it at all in the first place. What the actual is he saying.

She makes a low, choked sound at the back of , and , if he made the Nation’s Little Sister ing cry, he’s so—

But when he looks down at her, her lip is caught between her bottom teeth; she’s trying not to laugh.

“Too bad,” she says agreeably. Then, again, “but thank you.”

He shuffles uncomfortably, and pulls his sleeves over his hands. “Whatever,” he mumbles, finally. The regret is almost immediate, though. That’s such a goddamn high school response he doesn’t even know what the hell he’s thinking. He’s G-Dragon. He’s about to turn twenty eight next month, not twelve.

She seems unfazed, though. Probably because she’s just out of high school herself, he thinks sardonically.

“How much did it hurt?” She asks. The non-sequitur makes him pause for a bit. She pauses too, like she regrets it too, like he’s not the only one saying things he doesn’t mean to.

He watches her link her fingers together in what he’s beginning to notice is a nervous gesture. What? He’s about to ask, but follows her gaze instead. It’s fixated on his neck again. Her lips parted slightly as she stares. He can feel the beginnings of a familiar heat curl low in his stomach, and can’t decide if he’s on the rebound, or just ing easy.

“Not at all,” he begins. Then changes his mind, drops the smirk. “Enough.” Sincerity.

She nods, turning away, one final absorbed glance at the inked skin.

“IU,” he calls after her. When she half-turns towards him, he figures he should have probably thought of something to say before doing that. He’s the leader, yeah, but he’s not the mentor type. He never has been. He’s the demanding type. And Big Bang is used to him demanding. To delivering on demand. For all that he never wanted to be part of a group, he got really lucky.

He doesn’t know whether he has that claim anymore, to demand, when he’s like this. “Don’t let anyone mess with your song.”

The smile she gives him is impish, real, her lips curving in a way that make him want to shape his mouth against the outline of hers. “I never do.”

He’s been misreading her, he realizes unexpectedly, as she walks away, heels loud, sure, against the white noise of the packing up. For all his assessing and categorizing and labelling, somehow, he’s been getting her wrong.

-

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