(TW: Mentions Jiyong's 2011 scandal. Story kept in a respectful way and nothing really happens, but I wanted to make sure you know. This is a chapter I like, but it can eventually be skipped without ruining the plot for those who prefer to avoid the topic).

Seungri had tried not to pay too much attention to Jiyong's affairs until now. Especially when it was about girls, he preferred not to know. Of course, there were some gossip, some little stories that Seungri liked to tell on television or at the end of the concerts, to embarass the leader a bit and take revenge for all the times his bandmates had made fun of him in front of everyone.

But he really preferred not to know if Jiyong had a girlfriend or not, whether the stories that ran in the newspapers were true of false. He didn't care, or rather, he preferred to believe that he didn't care - but he cared. Probably, he told himself, it was because Jiyong had dated a lot of girls, and Seungri had dated only one, believing they were together while she was actually seeing someone else. Yeah, this was probably the reason why, the few times he really happened to see Jiyong with his current girlfriends, he felt like his heart was going to explode. He felt hurt, betrayed, for a reason that he really didn't understand. 

He couldn't simply be happy because his hyung was dating someone, he really couldn't. And he felt so bad because of that, he felt egoistic.

That's why he usually avoided the newspaper, expecially when it was about gossips or scaldals. Dating news seemed an embarassing or somewhat forbidden thing to him, and he preferred not to meddle.

But this time the news wasn't something he could overlook. Headlines were stamped on his pupils like a tattoo. Big Bang's G-Dragon caught smoking , the headline said, all capitalized, as if it were a shout.

Seungri had called Jiyong three times, but his phone was always busy. He had searched for the news on the phone for a while before realizing that he would find nothing but poisonous words. His head was buzzing. He felt like the world was turning upside down. Everything had already collapsed for the first time that summer, when Daesung had his most difficult time; how could it now fall a second time? And why?

Seungri had cried with disappointment and anger, partly because he couldn't believe the news was true, partly because that capitalized title under his eyes kept reminding him it happened for real. But why?

He had a brief phone call with T.O.P, who couldn't calm him down but rather left him more worried and confused than before.

At about nine in the evening he went out onto the street. A friend called him at the last minute to invite him for a drink. Usually, Seungri didn't particularly like drinking with friends who weren't his group mates. Of course, he had a lot of acquaintances outside the group, perhaps too many, but alcohol had always been their game first of all. It simply wasn't worth the same if there wasn't T.O.P commenting on the taste of the wine, GD hanging around behaving like a star, Daesung laughing like crazy, Taeyang getting angry because he wasn't drunk yet. And also he wasn't a bit afraid of getting drunk without the hyungs, knowing that they weren't there to take care of him.

Tonight, however, Seungri needed not to think.

---

The doorbell rang twice. It stayed silent for a moment, than it started ringing again, insistently, non-stop.

Jiyong wasn't sleeping, and his cat neither. The cat jumped out of the bed and meowed a couple of times, then, frightened by the trill that didn't seem to want to stop, hid in the darkness under the bed. Jiyong put down the cigarette that he held between his fingers, uncertain. To open? Not to open? Who could it be? What if it was journalists? What if it's the police who has questions for me again, he found himself think