4 years ago...

The ambulance was not very far away from where her mother died. The area had tons of medical emergencies after the death of the pop star. One girl with asthma died because the shock at the concert was too much for her lungs. Three girls fainted. One girl tried to kill herself. There was also, of course, the fanboy that was found dead in the venue.

The ambulance took her mother away within minutes, assuming she was a fan and that her death was the result of the shock or trauma that everyone in the area was also suffering from.

Arin was one of these suffering people, but unlike the girl who attempted suicide, the ones that fainted, the and the girl with asthma, the symptoms of Arin’s shock were not deemed extreme enough for the attention of the various doctors, police, and social workers roaming that miserly site.

As far as everyone else was concerned, Arin was just a shocked fan aimlessly wandering the area with a distant, empty look in her eyes. She was not crying hysterically, not kneeling on the floor with her hand over her heart, not screaming as loud as she can. Unlike many other disturbed fangirls in the area, she did not need help, they thought.

Eventually, however, someone did offer to help her.

Amidst the chaos around the concert hall, only one person seemed to know what Arin had just experienced. A young woman with long jet black hair.

“Let me help you, Arin,” was the first thing that the stranger said.

-

With every passing minute, Arin’s curiosity grew. Who left the trash? Who orchestrated this wicked plan that led to Arin’s estrangement from her only friend?

MRS. That was what ~ suspected.

“They did this, Arrie. MRS doesn’t want me to stay with you. They separated us, because they don’t want me to protect you anymore.”

It was cruel, and it hurt Arin so much. It was the pain of loss reminiscent of what she felt when the people she loved had passed. It was only lulled with ~’s voice, which for Arin was like reassurance that ~ hadn’t completely left her the same way that her mother, Minghao, S.Coups, and Joshua had. The pain was severe, but it wasn’t crippling.

Where pain fell short, anger took over. Arin was furious at the person who took ~ away from her, furious at the way things had to turn out.

She could not just sit there and feel sorry for herself. She had to do something. Driven by this overwhelming urge to hold someone accountable, she rushed down to Jeonghan’s apartment and rung the doorbell.

“Who is it?” Jeonghan yelled.

“It’s Arin.”

“What do you want?” he groaned.

“I need to see the footage from the security cameras. I… I want to know who trashed the lobby.” It was only when she said it out loud that she realized how ridiculous she was being. Of course he wasn’t going to listen to her. Of course he wasn’t just going to show her the security footage just because she asked him to. Although she knew it was hopeless, she deeply prayed that he would for once relent and be kind enough to honor her request.

“You just do your job and leave chasing the delinquents to me. Now stop wasting my time and go away,” he yelled.

“Please, Jeonghan,” she begged. “Please. The person who did it took something away from me…” She trailed off, feeling dumb for over-sharing to someone who will probably just yell at her for it.

Indeed, Jeonghan didn’t even ask her was she meant by that, he just yelled at her about how she’s not allowed to see security footage and how she should stop crying at his doorstep and go do her job properly. The more she tried to beg, the louder he yelled and ruder he became. It was hopeless.

Arin was just about to give up on her impromptu mission to catch the culprit, when she received a text from the tenant named Woozi.

I just wanted to check up on you. You okay? I saw the mess and cleaned it all up before your boss could see. Hope Hyojung’s all right too.

Who was he?! Arin was going crazy. This guy just waltzed into her life, being excessively meddlesome, and bad things just started happening? And the message showed her that he knew more than he should. Like, how could he possibly know ~’s name and know she was in trouble? And how did he know there was trash?

He was so suspicious and Arin couldn’t take it. He was hiding something, and she knew it. Arin wasn’t thinking when she stormed down to the eighth floor, nostrils flaring, ready to attack him if she figured out that he had something to do with this.

She knocked on his door so hard that her knuckles were bruised and when he opened, she lunged at him, hitting him with her fists and asking him who he was.

He looked startled. He took her wrists to stop her from hitting him and said, “calm down please, Arin.”

“Who are you!?” she yelled, breath hitching up in .

“Woozi,” he answered. His glasses began to slip down his nose.

“Who do you work for?!”

“No one. I’m a freelancer,” he answered her calmly, staring straight into her eyes. “I don’t know who you think I am, but it’s not me.”

Arin pulled her arms away from his grip. “How did you know her name?”

“Are you talking about Hyojung?”

Arin hated hearing that name. It sent shivers down her spine and made her feel so bare, so unsafe. “Y… yes,” she answered.

“I saw the flyer,” he answered.

“But… but how did you know she was in trouble?”

“The flyer said ‘WANTED,’” he answered. “It was pretty clear…”

“But…” Arin trailed off. She didn’t know why she didn’t think of that immediately and jumped into conclusions.

“I went down to the lobby to take a walk,” he explained. “I saw the trash. Out of curiosity, I followed it up the stairs and saw the half filled trash bag. I came to the conclusion that you started cleaning up but couldn’t continue for whatever reason. Then I noticed the flyer with the familiar face, and I recognized your friend who almost killed me. It was not hard to put two and two together and guess that it was this flyer that upset you and made you stop cleaning.”

Arin let her guard down a little, and the guy seemed to sense that. He carefully let go of her wrists and she pulled her arms back.

“I cleaned it all up,” he continued, pushing his falling glasses up with the palm of his hand, “because I knew your boss would be an inconsiderate about it, and clearly you’re going through a hard time. I was trying to make it up to you after what I did the other day, bringing up the… um… the incident.”

Believing him, Arin felt like a fool for impulsively coming to his door like that, but more than that, she was frustrated. She wanted him to be guilty. She wanted him to be responsible for this torment, so she could hate him and direct all of that negative energy at him. Now, the negative energy remained trapped inside her, no one to throw it at, no one to hate. The stranger who was responsible for this had ruined one of the very few good things she had in her life, and Arin hated not knowing who was responsible.

The frustration brimmed through her eyes in the form of tears that she couldn’t control. She turned her back to him and wiped her eyes. Everything and Arin just wanted everything to end. Life without ~ did not seem like a life Arin wanted to live.

Arin remembered Chilli and Meemo, the other two good things in her life. She held onto those thoughts so that the dangerous urges go away.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She didn’t answer him.

“Look…” he said carefully. “After I finished cleaning up, I went up to talk to you, and I overheard you talking to your landlord about access to the security footage. I can… well… I can get that footage for you if you want. As a symbol of good faith.”

Arin’s turned to him and she glared at him.

“How?”

“I’m a cryptographer,” the guy shrugged. “I can hack into things. Easily. I can get you the footage in ten minutes tops if you want me to.”

“Do it,” Arin said.

“Sure,” he said with a nonchalant shrug, as if she had just asked him for the simplest favor. He took out a laptop from one of his boxes and opened it in front of her. When it started up, there programs open that Arin had never seen before: dark-interface programs covered with what seemed to be a completely different language of symbols, letters, and numbers in sharp, pixelated fonts.

Before he started typing, he pushed his glasses up with his palms. Then he began typing things, codes, a whole different language that he seemed to have mastered.

He fingers trampled over the keyboard lightening fast, eyes glued to the screen, pausing only for his computer to run commands. It was blatantly clear that his own mind was working so much faster than the computer was, and that this was something he had done hundreds, no, thousands, of times before.

It was a little frightening.

It only took about three minutes for him to pull up security footage of the lobby from that morning.

Arin’s mouth was wide open. The computer wasn’t even connected to anything, it just produced the footage out of thin air. It was like… magic.

After being exposed to the magic and mages, Arin thought nothing could faze her anymore, but this was something else entirely. She marvelled at this man’s abilities, it was like he had another kind of magic, one that was less angsty and a lot more like the white sparkles you see in Disney. Only instead of sparkles, it was zeroes and ones.

With just a few clicks on the keyboard, he fast-forwarded the video until they got to the footage they wanted.

The person who threw the trash was a young man who was able to make it through the front door after the old woman from the second floor used her fingerprint to get in. It seemed like the young man had been waiting outside until he found the perfect moment to enter. Even the front desk employee who was usually stationed there had gone to take a break, and so there was no one there to stop him.

All Arin could tell from the video was that the guy wore all black and had black hair. He had dragged a large black bag of trash, and he took that bag up the stairs as the old woman took the elevator.

He threw the trash everywhere, and Arin noticed that there were no purple flyers in that trash bag. The purple flyers came from a second bag he was holding, a tote bag he had carried over his shoulders. After he was done with the trash, he threw those flyers haphazardly around as well so that they blended in with the trash.

When the guy was done with the flyers, he rushed out as fast as he could, obviously afraid of being caught.

“Hold on a second; I’ll get the footage from outside. Maybe we can see his face clearer,” the hacker said as his fingers pounded on the keys of his keyboard. Within seconds, he found the footage from the security camera outside.

When the video opened on the screen and Arin saw, she gasped.

The tenant paused the video, which showed the culprit standing outside the door, but he was not alone. There was another person with him, a woman with thick black hair and large eyes. She donned a tight purple dress and held up her hair with a purple ribbon.

“You recognize her?” he asked, turning toward Arin curiously.

Of course Arin recognized her. That woman was the source of all her pain and the reason for her isolation. That woman was the witch who cursed her.

-

A/N: Sorry for the relatively late update. I was a little busy last week, but I'm all good now! Anyways, I really am enjoying writing this story. The romance is a bit slow and I know some parts drag on, but its all planned and will make sense later lol. anyways thanks to everyone who is reading and supporting. I read and appreciate all of the comments, even if I dont reply (I know I should reply, I'm sorry;; I'm going to start doing that though!)