I'm hopelessly hopeful, 
that you're just hopeless enough.
 

--

Afterwards, when the stage smoke and the real dust and all the trash has cleared, been cleared, and the show's out of the prime-time Netizen Outrage Theatre, he wakes up in Japan and Mapsosa has already been knocked a place down by Leon two days in.

I had an affair, he finds himself humming sometimes, when he’s trying to sleep, and can’t. He thinks, inadvertently, of IU in her white dress, her limited movements, peripherally located in his memories. She doesn't take center stage because he can’t remember if he’d even looked at her, doesn’t know if she had looked at him because he wasn't looking, which would probably have made for a sub-par stage, in hindsight.

When he’ll have to be awake in lesser time than he has to fall asleep, he decides it’s pointless anyway. It’s a good thing his make-up artist is exceptional. And he’s a good canvas; the dark circles will barely show.

Mostly, though, he tries to remember how they’d sounded, together. In the moment he'd been too nostalgic for the first time, four years before, when everything that happened after hadn't happened. The articles say something about chemistry, so he watches an uploaded fancam on his phone in idle curiosity. That's three minutes less to sunrise.

Later, he puts his phone upside down on his chest. Clasps his hands over it.

I cheated. They sounded good, really good, just— just not good enough.

That wasn’t their song, he decides.

-

(She hadn’t either, he notes. Looked at him throughout. For reference’s sake.

Not that it matters either way.)

-

Till Daesung sends him the YouTube link, accompanied by a confusing, contradictory set of emojis that he doesn't even try to decipher.

It's a video of her, another fancam, which just seems a completely- random thing for Daesung to have sent him, unless he believes that their Infinity Challenge collaboration somehow turned Jiyong into a part-time Uaena or something. He opens it anyway, because there's no particular reason not to, he's exhausted and bored, and he can't sleep. It might be funny. She might have declared her undying love for Youngbae again. That's always funny.

It's when the chords open, and the crowd cheers off-camera, that he first understands, and thinks: .

He doesn't know what the stage is, and it's only halfway through the song, the beginning of the second if you- if it's not too late, that he registers that she sounds better than he ever did in his part, her voice low, weighted. The words- his words, razor-edged, so it would cut every time, the words he wrote for Kiko, to hurt her, hurt himself, he never figured that out- wrap around her tongue and melt. More beautiful than he ever meant them to be, he'd meant for them to be ugly, broken. They fit , somehow, he could barely swallow them down when he sang.

Can’t we make things a little easier? His hand is shaking, he notes with dull surprise, in some distant corner of his mind, as he shuts his laptop screen, the room plunging into darkness. ing ridiculous. He's ing ridiculous. 

He leans back, closes his eyes. It's too silent outside, the roads too muted. He can't hear the cars.

-

The next time he thinks of Kiko in verse, raw, unfiltered, unedited, the voice in his head sounds like her.

-

The thing is—

It festers for a while. Something at the back of his head that he unconsciously, broodingly picks at, in between concerts, in between photoshoot takes, shuttling between Japan and Korea and China for their concert tours. Like a scab, which it would just be better to let go of, but he's never been good at the letting go part. He always takes every bad idea and magnifies it into disaster.

When he knocks on his door, Yang Hyunsuk looks a little alarmed, and he runs the possibilities of the why through his head. He’s pretty sure Yang Daepyo is convinced that Jiyong’s dramatic enough to leave, that he’s exactly the kind of guy to make Kiko their Yoko Ono in the share price market. It’s amusing. Maybe he is. That guy. He stage-hesitates just to prolong the look for several long moments.

“…collaboration,” he finishes, eventually, and doesn’t miss the sigh, like the other man hadn’t even realized he was holding his breath.

He has her number, by now, but Yang Hyunsuk is the one to call Shin Wonsoo.

Which is just as well.

-

It’s not that he doesn’t get why it’s easier than it should be, why no one argues, even when he has no time, even when his schedule's full and he's already knee deep in prior album obligations. YG, all of YG, was waiting for a breakdown, something that makes the papers the next day, makes the papers for a week straight, and requires constant stock-price monitoring, full-scale damage control. And this? Is better than they could have imagined, he knows. If all he needs to get over his trigger point, his stupidly broken heart, is a song, a song with an artist who always scores higher than them on the digitals anyway, then, well, that’s a bullet averted.

-

When she first enters his recording studio, her manager throws him a glare like he maybe has intentions beyond just using her voice for his song. He’s noticed it before; her manager oppa does that a lot. A sort of oddly personal don’t hurt her look, like he’s her real oppa or something. Youngbae used to be the main target, they’d about it when they were bored. No longer, apparently.

Not that he doesn’t agree with it; he doesn’t exactly look like the poster child for respectability, he knows. His skin is far too stained with ink, his jeans are far too ripped in far too many places. If he didn’t know himself, he’d probably look at himself the same way most people do; the half side-ways glance questioning the bona fide of anything he’s planned. The dictionary definition of dysfunctional.

“Hyung,” he bows elaborately, though he doesn’t know the guy, and gets another, even more impressive glare for the act. He doesn’t help the situation he knows, he never learned anything but how to gravitate towards the inevitable, logical conclusion of whatever misunderstanding he's a part of.

“Subaenim,” IU says politely, and he shifts his gaze to hers. Her eyeliner is just the slightest bit unevenly applied, like she maybe did it herself, and he resists the urge to smudge it just a little bit more, because her jeans are so perfectly ironed, the creases so aligned, that it's getting under his skin.

So he reaches over and ruffles her hair, till his fingers can’t make their way through the tangles anymore. He doesn’t know what it is about him that always makes him want to step on any sign that says Do Not Enter, and enter anyway. Se7en sunbaenim had said, laughing, so many times, that he had authority issues. But sunbaenim isn’t even a part of his routine message checks, isn’t a part of YG any longer. And he— he’s nearly twenty eight, he is authority now, so he doesn’t even know what the that's supposed to mean anymore.

She stands her ground, still, slightly awkward, her feet facing left, like she’d planned on moving away, but couldn’t decide fast enough if it would be too impolite to.

“Jieun-ah,” he says. Her hair is impossibly soft under his hands.

It’s three minutes, fifty two seconds in that he’ll realize it’s the first three minutes, fifty two seconds in three months that he’s gone without thinking of Kiko.

-

(Here's the other thing: Everything about her tells him to not touch. Her poker straight hair, her perfectly creased jeans, her distant, polite, occasion-appropriate smiles.

So, of course.)

-

What he doesn’t understand, he thinks, watching her, is why they’d let her. He knows why he’d knocked on the door and asked, but he doesn’t get why they’d let her.

He’s overthinking, he concludes, when she enters the recording room, and picks up the headphones. She’s already sung a duet with Seungri, so clearly, in the list of messed up, he doesn’t gain any special traction ground.

(Maybe they didn’t let her, he’ll consider, later. Because she’s bigger than her company. It’s an open secret around this town. She does what she wants. Maybe she wanted to.

He’s still overthinking, maybe, probably, but for some reason, it makes him pause, still.)

-

They make the news. It starts with a cryptic picture on some paparazzi site where she’s just about to enter his house and a day of rabid speculation in the comments section about whether they’re sleeping together (they’re not), what sort of relationship they have (they don’t, any) and when they’re announcing a wedding (next June, she’ll begin to show by then, he writes as an anonymous commenter, and then can’t tell if he has too much time these days or not enough and he lost his mind in the rush without even realizing it.)

The joint statement about the collaboration is almost perfunctory the next day. They make the headlines, after. The photograph plastered all over the main pages is the same one all over, from their Infinity Challenge stage; he’s bowing to her, she’s bowing to him. Only barely. But still.

There's only one press conference, only those people who will make their lives a public hell if not called. They make the entertainment section of all the major news outlets. The business section of some. 

He hadn’t factored in the anticipation, he recognizes belatedly, after the twenty seventh time his alert rings in fifteen minutes. Hadn’t penned in an entire nation waiting for him— them— to blow their minds, and some days, it feels like drowning. Truth is; he never means to build up expectations.

The words from his ink are stuttered, muted.

-

“You get it, right?” he asks.

He’s polite, and she’s polite in return. They’re known for it in the industry after all.

“I think so,” she says, and something about the way her eyes flicker over the lines tells him that she probably gets it way more than he wants her to. He can’t expect her to have skipped the tabloids for the past few months. To not have heard the whole thing in sordid detail from someone who knows him. Knows Kiko. It's an uous business, everyone worth knowing knows everything about everyone worth knowing.

“It has to be right,” he says.

It comes off too tight, too desperate, too filled with urgency for what he's still pretending is a professional conversation. He tries to pass it off with a smile. Her gaze is uncomfortable on his. She never looks down first, he’s come to realize, which he'd have called uncharacteristic three days ago, but is probably the first thing he knows is real about her beyond the stage and waiting rooms and the five-seat-down distances at award shows. He doesn’t either, look down. In hindsight, that will be a mistake.

“It will be,” she says, simply.

What irritates him, he’ll decide later, is that he believes her. Just like that, he believes her.

-

"We can call it Instagram," he says, a week after.

She looks at him through hooded eyes, "sorry, sunbaenim?"

"The collaboration," he elaborates, "we can call it Instagram." He points a finger at her, "I," then points a finger at himself, drawing an invisible line between them, "G." Then snaps his fingers together.

He's a performer, on stage, and off. It's the only reason why he's lasted so long, why he's ever come back after every new scandal.

Her stance is uncertain, because, he can tell, she doesn't know him enough to be able to judge if he's kidding. Judge if he's not. How to react. It's becoming a favorite past-time of his— watching her try to navigate his fault lines. Move between them with careful footsteps, like she might actually be the only person in the world who knows the rules of Minesweeper.

He waits. It's an amusing diversion, he's almost distracted.

"The snapshot of a relationship," she says quietly, eventually, under her breath, her eyes coming to rest on the sheet music on his table.

And he knows, somehow, with unerring certainty, that she's not talking about the collaboration. He's never uploaded any of Kiko's pictures to Instagram, couldn't have anyway, not with who they are, and he had nothing to delete. A clean break, a surgical knife. No unnecessary blood.

IU's too sharp, a fast learner, he hadn't known this about her. It's pissing off. Each time, she reads lines he hasn't even ing written and it's just so ing—

God, he thinks. 

He picks up the sheet music, doesn't know why it makes him turn away.

They don't call it Instagram, obviously.

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