Arin’s old friends and extended family members were looking for her. From their perspective, she just disappeared off the face of the Earth the same day her idol, lover, and mother died.

Everyone assumed she was so troubled by what took place that she just ended her life, but they were still carefully watching her old social media accounts for any activity indicating that she was still alive somewhere. However, Arin was careful to stay away from every aspect of her old life. No matter how much she missed her friends and family, she didn’t want to be found.

After all, she knew all their names.

For fangirling purposes, she had to create new accounts with a completely new persona. Her name on the Internet was scoups4eva, and people called her Eva for short. It was through that identity that she was able to participate in her fandom community and be part of the rest of the world digitally, even if she couldn’t do it physically because of her curse.

Eva was very different from Arin. Arin was anxious and depressed, but Eva was always in the clouds, happy. Arin was weak-hearted, but Eva was strong. Arin was lonely, but Eva had thousands of followers who respected her dedication to Chilli and to S.Coups.

They also loved to read the stories she wrote.

It started when Arin developed a crush on the cute boy who worked at the convenience store. She often imagined scenarios between them in her head, and one day, she typed those stories down and called the boy Mingyu, Vernon, Wonwoo, or even S.Coups. She eventually posted these stories as fanfics.

Those fanfics made her happy, made her imagine love and feel it in ways she knew was not possible for her. They gave her a space to experience love in her head, as she couldn’t in real life. As she wrote and more of these fanfics, she gradually explored different kinds of passions. She explored the sweet kind, the deeply romantic kind, the sensual kind...

The fanfic-writing phase only lasted a few months though, because Arin had accidentally sent ~ a link to one of them, which meant that ~ could read all of them. Arin was so mortified and embarrassed, she stopped writing altogether.

-

As soon as her phone opened again after being charged, it began to spasm with all the new messages and notifications of missed calls from everyone that had tried to reach that day: ~, Jeonghan, and Woozi. Even Jun had already sent her a message.

She ignored them all; they overwhelmed her and she was already burnt out from all the human interaction she had that day. Instead, she checked for Chilli updates.

It had been nearly an entire day since her phone ran out of charge, so she had so much to catch up on, especially since Chilli had released more teasers for the upcoming comeback. She smiled as she stared at the released concept photo of Vernon. He looked amazing, and this would definitely be his era, she thought. S.Coups would be so proud to see how much s have grown and improved, and how well they carried Chilli’s legacy in his memory.

The fangirl emotions overcame her, and she began to cry, but they were not tears of pain. They were tears of pride and maybe even happiness.

She then chuckled at the absurdity of it all. Her life was falling apart, her boss was hospitalized, she quit her job, and she nearly committed suicide, but there she was was on her phone fangirling over Chilli. It was silly, but a good kind of silly, she thought. It made her determined to live long enough to at least listen to the album that her Chilli worked so hard to create. That meant two weeks. Two weeks of pain seemed bearable enough, and worth the bliss of listening to her boys’ voices singing new songs again.

While she was catching up with all the fandom talk, ~ called her.

Arin hesitated to answer. After everything that happened that day, Arin’s impression of ~ had changed. She had found out that ~ was paying Jeonghan to house and employ her, and that boy from MRS even accused her of not caring about her.

Eventually, she picked up the call. In spite of everything that she knew, she couldn’t just stop trusting her. There was no way that the past three years were all fake.

“Oh Ar, thank God. Where are you? I was worried sick!”

“I’m fine,” she answered. “I’m… I’m home.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m okay.”

“Jeonghan told me what happened… Arin, I’m so sorry.”

“You’ve been talking to Jeonghan behind my back this whole time, then?”

“The setup was all for you, Arrie. I arranged it to make you happier, because I knew how important it was for you to do your own work and make your own money.”

“Well I quit now.”

“Don’t quit. I’ll stop paying him, but I think Jeonghan would still want to keep you around. He would never admit it, but he relies on you to do the work in the building.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“He told me that you quit and that he wants to negotiate another offer with you. I think he wants to raise your salary and fix your working hours. I swear to you, Arin, I won’t pay him anymore. He’s keeping you because he wants you to work for him. I have nothing to do with it.”

“Well I don’t want to work for him anymore.”

“But where would you go?”

Arin did not think too much on that. She quit her job thinking she would fall to her death, but now that she no longer had the will to do that, there was nowhere for her to turn.

She then remembered that Jun had offered her somewhere to go, and something for her to do, with MRS. She couldn’t believe she was actually thinking about this, when it was very possible that this Jun person was just sent to lull her into a false sense of security so she could trust him, and she’d be met with torture and suffering when she actually met them.

“Ar?” ~ asked when Arin was quiet for too long.

Arin knew she hardly had a choice in the matter. There really was nowhere for her to go. She was stuck in this building if she wanted to live. “I’ll wait for Jeonghan to make me the offer,” she said.

“I’m sorry for disappointing you, but everything I’ve ever done, I’ve done with your best interest in mind. I hope you know that.”

Arin did believe that. No matter how many things seemed to challenge that, she couldn’t even begin to consider the possibility that everything ~ had done for her was fake or bred of impure intentions. It was all too genuine to be anything less than love.

“I love you, Arrie. I really, really love you.”

The sincerity of that profession made Arin want to cry. “I love you too,” Arin replied, meaning it. “I miss you.”

“I miss you too, Arrie. You must have such a hard day, and I wish I could be there with you to help you through it.”

“I’ll be okay on my own,” Arin responded. “You don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

There was silence, and Arin heard ~ sniffling on the other end of the line.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m just so upset and angry. MRS had taken away so much from me already, but taking away my ability to see you was just cruel.”

“What else did they take away from you?” Arin asked curiously.

“So much.”

“Tell me. I want to know.”

~ paused for a moment before saying, “they took away my mother.”

Arin had never heard that story, and ~ didn’t seem prepared to talk about it. ~ rarely ever talked about herself or her family to Arin, probably because that identity had always been tied to her name, to “Hyojung,” and ~ had wanted to keep Arin as far away from that as possible.

“I’m sorry,” Arin replied. “But if I can just ask... why did they take her?”

“She made one of them very angry, so they cursed her,” she said.

“What was the curse?”

“That she would be in pain forever. She couldn’t bear it, so she killed herself. I was only six.”

“Oh.”

“That’s a common trait among cursed people… to want to kill themselves.”

Arin went quiet. She was a victim of that dark desire just a few hours ago, so she knew exactly what ~ was talking about. Hearing that, Arin found she believed and trusted everything that ~ was saying whole-heartedly. If it was ~’s word against Jun’s, Arin believed ~.

“That’s why I dedicated my life to protecting cursed people,” ~ revealed. “I don’t want what happened to my mom to happen to anyone else…”

“Are you hiding from MRS now?” Arin asked.

“I’m trying, but everywhere I go, they seem to be one step ahead of me. I’m afraid they’ll finally find me one day.”

“What would they do to you?”

“I’m not sure, but it can’t be good. I think they want me dead. Why else would they carelessly make you learn my name?”

Arin fell silent as that dark prospect lingered in her mind and pierced her heart. If ~ were to die, this world would be far too cruel.

“Now enough about me. Tell me about you. What did you do today?”

Arin did so much that day, and it took her a long time before she could recall everything. She was forced to work for Woozi thinking he wanted to sleep with her, saved by a demonic Jeonghan who then wanted to hurt her himself, and later she helped rescue Jeonghan after he tried to jump off the building…

It was then that the realization hit her: Jeonghan tried to jump off the building, but he failed… just like she did. He fell backward instead of forward, just like she did. The only difference was that Woozi was there to break her fall, but Jeonghan crashed on cold hard ground.

She assumed that the fall was just an accident: he had probably tripped and hurt himself. Unlike him, her fall was not a result of a misstep; she fell because ~’s enchantment didn’t let her leave the building.

“Ar?” ~ asked when Arin was silent for too long.

“Sorry I was just… dozing off.”

“You must be sleepy.”

“I am.”

“Get some rest then. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

When she hung up the call, Arin tried to gather her thoughts and make sense of this strange coincidence. Did Jeonghan really just trip and fall by accident?

Or did the enchantment affect him too?