Archive of Our Own

Woonhak had never thought of his eyebrows as a political issue until Weverse made them one.

This was the thing about the internet. It took a feature you had accepted as part of your face and turned it into folklore. One minute he was lying on the dorm couch after practice, scrolling in the peaceful, brain-rotted way of a man who had earned his bad decisions for the day. The next he was staring at a fan post that read, with the calm confidence of a curse being passed down through generations:

woonhak-ah, do you know in Indonesia people who lack eyebrows can see ghost?

Woonhak sat up so fast he nearly dropped his phone on his own nose.

First of all, rude.

Second, he did not lack eyebrows. He had eyebrows. They were simply not aggressive about it. They were understated. Minimalist. Sophisticated. They had the quiet confidence of a luxury brand logo that did not need to scream.

Third, why Indonesia specifically. Why was a whole country suddenly involved in slandering his face.

He stared at the post for another ten seconds, which in Kim Woonhak time counted as profound spiritual reflection, then immediately messaged Jihoon.

Woonhakie ☃️: jihoonie

Woonhakie ☃️: emergency

Woonhakie ☃️: do i look like i can see ghost

Jihoon, who was never asleep when decent society would have preferred him to be, replied almost instantly.

Jihoonie 🪼: you look like you would scream, point, and let somebody else investigate

Jihoonie 🪼: what happened

Woonhak sent the screenshot.

There was a pause. Then the typing bubble appeared, disappeared, and appeared again.

Finally:

Jihoonie 🪼: well

Jihoonie 🪼: i guess we need field research

That should have been the end of it. Woonhak was not a wiser man. Woonhak was affectionate, impulsive, very online, and fatally vulnerable to ideas that were stupid in a way that could become meaningful if enough people committed. He liked traditions, which were just group chaos with a better PR team.

By the time he had brushed his teeth, the idea had arrived in full.

Maknae initiation.

The youngest maknae in HYBE now was Kenneth from Santos Bravos. Mexican, sixteen, the designated youngest member of a five-member group under HYBE Latin America. Former child actor face, songwriter brain, and the kind of profile that made adults say "mature for his age," which Woonhak translated as: old enough to follow instructions, young enough to be manipulated by ceremony.

Woonhak messaged Jihoon again.

Woonhakie ☃️: jihoonie

Woonhakie ☃️: i have vision

This time Jihoon called.

"What now," Jihoon asked, and Woonhak could hear the smile already living in his voice. "Did your spiritual eyebrows receive a transmission."

"No, but listen. We need to do proper HYBE maknae initiation for Kenneth."

"Why do those words sound wrong even when you say them with confidence."

"Because you have no respect for tradition. The one we create tonight."

Jihoon laughed. "That is not tradition. That is branding."

"It can be two things. We bring Kenneth. We do ghost hunt. We say this is maknae initiation. We verify if my eyebrows have spiritual power."

There was silence.

Then Jihoon said, very thoughtfully, "One fresh maknae is not enough."

"Exactly."

"Bring Keonho too."

"Cortis Keonho?"

"Yes. For contrast. If this becomes paranormal eyebrow science, he’s your control group."

It was, infuriatingly, genius. Keonho’s eyebrows had presence. Structure. Density. They looked like they had emotional opinions and a legal team. Next to Woonhak’s elegant restraint, they always made Woonhak feel like he had wandered accidentally into a before-and-after ad campaign.

"Jihoonie," Woonhak said softly, hand over his heart. "You are an artist."

"I know. Go get your international child soldiers."

The universe, apparently, approved of stupidity, because when Woonhak messaged Kenneth, Kenneth answered almost immediately.

Woonhakie ☃️: kenneth

Woonhakie ☃️: are you in building

Kenneth 🔥: yes

Kenneth 🔥: why

Woonhak smiled the slow smile of a man confusing impulse with destiny.

Woonhakie ☃️: tonight

Woonhakie ☃️: you become real hybe maknae

The typing bubble appeared, vanished, then came back like Kenneth had briefly left his own body and returned unwillingly.

Kenneth 🔥: what does that mean

Woonhakie ☃️: ghost hunt

Kenneth’s reply came as a voice note, which was already a bad sign. Woonhak put it on speaker and listened to Kenneth’s alarmed English tumble into the room.

"Why ghost hunt? I am youngest, not sacrifice."

Woonhak laughed so hard he had to sit down.

"No sacrifice," he typed back, still grinning. "Only experience."

Kenneth 🔥: this is same thing in scary movies

Kenneth 🔥: older boys say trust me

Kenneth 🔥: then young one die first

There was intelligence there. Instinct. Survival. Unfortunately, none of those things had ever protected a younger idol from an older one with a bad plan and enough charm to sell it.

By the time Woonhak got back to HYBE, Jihoon was already there, sprawled in a chair by the entrance like a boy who had accidentally wandered into luxury architecture and claimed it through confidence alone.

"You somehow look less trustworthy than usual," Jihoon said.

"That’s leadership aura."

"That’s the face of a man about to explain nonsense in broken English."

Kenneth, beanie pulled low, came over from the security desk and looked at Woonhak with narrowed eyes.

"Woonhakie," he said, walking over quickly. "You text like cult leader."

Jihoon made a choking sound.

"That’s because I am welcoming you warmly," Woonhak said.

"That is not what warmly is."

Woonhak, wounded, put a hand to his chest. "Kenneth, tonight is special night."

"This sentence already sounds dangerous."

"It is cultural."

"It sounds fake culture."

"The funny part," Jihoon leaned back in his chair, openly delighted, "is he actually believes himself."

And then Keonho arrived.

He came down the lobby corridor in a hoodie with a canned coffee in one hand and gummies in the other, bright-eyed and soft-faced and profoundly unprepared for the nonsense waiting for him. He slowed when he saw the three of them together.

"I don’t know," he said, smiling already. "Why do you all look like exchange students about to get arrested."

"Keonho," Kenneth said after correcting himself with visible effort. "What’s happening."

Jihoon answered before Woonhak could. "Your eyebrows have been summoned for scientific comparison. We’re conducting paranormal eyebrow research."

Keonho blinked. "…What."

Woonhak pointed accusingly at his face. "Do you know what burden I carry in this building? People always tease me, no eyebrows, no eyebrows, like I’m sick Victorian child. But look at you. Your eyebrows are like national forest."

Keonho laughed so suddenly coffee nearly came out of his nose. "National forest?"

"Yes. Dense. Protected land. Very healthy ecosystem."

Kenneth failed spectacularly at trying not to laugh. "He’s right. Your eyebrows have infrastructure."

Keonho looked genuinely delighted by that. "Infrastructure?"

"This is bullying," Keonho said, still grinning.

"This is context," Jihoon corrected in crisp English. "The premise is that Woonhakie got spiritually profiled by a fan and now wants to drag Kenneth into a fake maknae initiation ghost hunt."

Kenneth lifted one hand. "Also he says this is maknae initiation. I think that part is fake."

"It is absolutely fake," Jihoon said. "But it is funny. So we’re honoring it."

Kenneth turned to Woonhak, visibly trying to organize both his thoughts and his second language at once. "Look. I can speak English. You can speak English. Why when we meet, no English."

Woonhak gasped. "I have many English."

"Where."

"In me."

"That is not answer."

"It is emotional answer."

Jihoon laughed. "This is what I mean. You two are mutually destructive. He says one broken sentence and your grammar gets embarrassed and leaves the building."

Kenneth threw a hand toward Jihoon like he had finally found legal representation. "Yes. Yes. Tell him."

Keonho, grinning so hard his whole face had gone soft, handed Kenneth the gummy packet. "Here. You’ll need emotional support sugar."

Woonhak clapped once before the conversation could dissolve fully into multilingual accusations. "Okay. Focus. Mission starts now."

"No, no. First we solve language," Kenneth insisted.

Jihoon raised one finger. "Easy. If something goes wrong, Kenneth and Woonhakie stop improvising. One of us translates."

Kenneth nodded with obvious relief. "Yes. Yes. This is smart."

Woonhak looked betrayed. "Why everyone act like my English is broken chair."

Jihoon tilted his head. "Because sometimes you speak like furniture falling downstairs."

Woonhak glared at all three of them, then pointed toward the elevator bank like a commander trying to recover authority in a war he had started for fun.

"Fine. We go now. Practice floor first."

"Why practice floor."

"Because people hear humming there when no music."

"That could be air conditioner," Jihoon said.

"That could be ghost air conditioner," Woonhak shot back.

Keonho made a small delighted noise. "Do we have equipment."

"We have phone flashlight. We have vibes."

"That’s worse," Kenneth said.

Jihoon stood, pocketing his phone. "Okay. Formation. The plan is simple. We check three spots. Practice floor [where the air is unnaturally cold]. Editing hallway [smelling faintly of stale coffee]. Elevator bank. If we see nothing, Woonhakie accepts his eyebrows are not supernatural. If we do see something, Kenneth gets official HYBE maknae haunting credentials."

Kenneth stared at him. "Why is that the reward."

"Because branding," Jihoon said.

Kenneth sighed the sigh of a sixteen-year-old realizing the older boys around him were not dangerous in the useful, cinematic way but in the much worse social way, where once they had decided you were included, there was no getting out without hurting everyone’s feelings.

"Okay," he said. "But if something touches me, I am suing all of you."

Woonhak slung an arm around Kenneth’s shoulders before the kid could reconsider and pointed with his free hand toward the elevators like a commander who had mistaken vibes for strategy.

"Let’s go."

Keonho fell into step on Woonhak’s other side automatically. "Hyung."

"What."

"If ghost really comes out, do you want me to protect you or record you."

Woonhak didn’t even hesitate. "Protect face, record body."

Jihoon doubled over laughing.

Kenneth made a helpless noise into his palm.

Keonho nodded solemnly. "Okay, hyung."

And like that the four of them headed toward the elevator bank, one with allegedly haunted minimalist eyebrows, one with spiritually overqualified forest infrastructure, one fluent enough to narrate the disaster properly, and one poor international maknae realizing too late that the true haunting in HYBE was not the dead.

It was older boys with free time.

The elevator ride up to Practice Room 2 had the atmosphere of a field trip planned by children and supervised by nobody.

Which, Woonhak thought as the doors slid shut behind them, was not technically inaccurate.

Jihoon leaned against the mirrored wall with all the lazy composure of a boy who had no intention of being useful unless the result would be funny. Kenneth stood beside him with his arms folded tight across his chest, trying to project suspicion and maturity and only mostly succeeding. Woonhak occupied the middle like this was his expedition and not a fake cultural event he had invented forty minutes ago because of a Weverse comment and his own unresolved relationship with facial hair distribution.

And then there was Keonho.

Keonho, who had joined this mission with the bright smile of a sweet-faced idiot and was now visibly reconsidering his life choices as the elevator climbed.

"I dunno," he said for the third time, voice already edging upward into complaint. "Should I get James-hyung? He has a singing bowl."

There was a beat of silence.

Jihoon turned his head very slowly.

Kenneth blinked. "He has what."

"A singing bowl," Keonho repeated, as if this were a normal emergency resource to mention in the middle of a ghost hunt. "Like for cleansing energy."

Woonhak stared at him. "Why does James have that."

Keonho looked offended by the question. "Why wouldn’t James-hyung have that."

That was, irritatingly, difficult to answer.

Because James did in fact have the exact kind of face and emotional weather that suggested he might own objects with phrases like energy cleansing and tonal reset attached to them. The idea of James, beautiful and dramatic and privately messy, tapping a little brass bowl in mood lighting while pretending this was about wellness and not aesthetics was so instantly believable that Woonhak hated everyone involved.

Kenneth looked between them, scandalized. "No, wait. Hold on. That is real? He really has ghost bowl?"

"It’s not a ghost bowl," Keonho said.

"It sounds very ghost bowl."

"It’s for vibes," Keonho insisted.

Jihoon laughed into his sleeve. "That is somehow worse."

Woonhak pointed accusingly at Keonho. "No calling James. This is maknae mission."

Keonho slumped against the rail. "But hyung, what if the energy is bad."

"That’s why we are here," Woonhak said. "To see it."

"That’s not how protection works."

"Your eyebrows protect you."

"My eyebrows are not weapon!"

Kenneth turned immediately. "No, actually, maybe they are. Bro has defensive brows."

Keonho made a wounded sound. "Why am I being objectified by forehead."

Jihoon was openly smiling now, eyes half-lidded with happiness, the way they always got when life handed him a scene so stupid he didn’t even need to improve it. "I need all of you to know that this is already worth coming out for. We haven’t even reached the haunted room yet and somehow James-hyung’s spiritual home goods have entered the chat."

Keonho brightened a little. "So I should text him."

"No," all three of them said at once.

The elevator dinged.

The doors opened onto the practice floor.

Even in a building full of nice floors, nice walls, and nice expensive corporate surfaces designed to reassure people with stock portfolios, the practice level at night felt different. Not evil. HYBE was too expensive to feel evil in a satisfying way. But odd, definitely. The lights here were dimmer, the hallways longer, the glass darker. The mirrors set into the studio doors gave back warped reflections that always made everyone look slightly more haunted than they had a second ago, as if the building believed in dramatic lighting and emotional damage as a shared operating principle.

Woonhak stepped out first and immediately lowered his voice.

This was ridiculous. He knew it was ridiculous. But it felt right.

"Okay," he whispered. "From now on, serious."

Kenneth narrowed his eyes. "You become more suspicious when you whisper."

"That’s because he thinks he sounds cinematic," Jihoon murmured.

"I do sound cinematic."

"You sound like a tour guide at a fake murder museum."

Practice Room 2 sat near the end of the hallway, all blank door and dark little observation window. During the day, it was just another practice room. Mirrors. Speakers. Wood floor. Schedules. Water bottles abandoned by tired dancers with no long-term planning skills. At night, though, it had acquired a reputation. Not from one person, which would have been manageable. From enough people that even Woonhak had started filing it away in the back of his brain under things to revisit when bored and emotionally under-supervised.

Minju had once said the room felt wrong after 1 a.m., like it was listening.

Sunoo had apparently declared it bad energy with the full confidence of someone whose instincts, in Woonhak’s opinion, should never be mocked because they were pretty and therefore probably spiritually expensive.

Ni-ki, which was what made it worst, had agreed. And Ni-ki agreeing with anything paranormal made a thing immediately more believable, because Ni-ki had the specific practical confidence of a boy who looked like he would rather fistfight a poltergeist than dramatize one. If he said a room was weird, then the room was weird. That was just science.

Woonhak stopped in front of the door and placed a hand flat against his chest.

"This," he said solemnly, "is the most haunted place in HYBE."

Kenneth stared at the sign on the wall.

"It says Practice Room 2."

"That’s how haunting works," Woonhak said. "It hides."

Jihoon leaned in and peered through the little window. "Looks empty."

"Ghost also look empty."

"That means nothing."

"It means atmosphere."

Keonho hovered two steps behind them, clutching his canned coffee like it had suddenly become an anchor to the material plane. "I really feel like James-hyung should be here."

Woonhak turned. "Why are you like this."

"Because what if there’s, like, bad thing."

"What bad thing."

Keonho blinked. "Ghost?"

Woonhak threw both hands up. "Then why come."

"I came for support," Keonho said, scandalized. "I thought this was group activity. I didn’t know it was actual haunting."

Kenneth pointed at him. "Yes. This. This is my issue too. Nobody explain the level."

Jihoon, enjoying himself far too much to qualify as a good person, crossed his arms and translated in a beautifully neutral tone, "Keonho is saying he assumed this was a fake ghost hunt, not a ghost hunt with possible operational consequences."

"That is exactly," Keonho said, relieved. "Thank you, hyung."

Kenneth nodded vigorously. "Yes. Same. I join for comedy. Not for demon."

"Who said demon," Woonhak said, offended. "Why everyone upgrade."

Kenneth looked at the dark window in the door. "Because this hallway has demon lighting."

That, Woonhak had to admit, was fair.

The overhead lights hummed faintly. Somewhere farther down the hall, an air vent kicked on with the exact kind of sigh that buildings made right before everyone in them became more superstitious than they had intended. The floor shone back their reflections in thin strips, making their sneakers look like they were hovering over black water. It was all very atmospheric in the way corporate spaces became when no one was around to insist on normality.

Woonhak reached for the door handle.

Keonho made a noise.

Not a scream. Not yet. More a distressed yelp from deep in the soul of a boy who regretted trusting older idols with free time.

"No, wait," Keonho said. "Should we knock."

Woonhak paused.

Jihoon put a hand over his mouth.

Kenneth turned to him with genuine horror. "Knock for what."

Keonho’s ears went pink. "I don’t know. Manners."

"For ghost?"

"What if it’s someone else."

"In empty locked haunted room at one a.m."

Keonho looked wounded. "Why are you making me sound dumb."

"You are doing that with raw material," Jihoon said.

"Hyung."

Jihoon laughed and stepped forward, effortless and calm in a way that made everything worse because it suggested nothing bad was going to happen, which was exactly the attitude horror movies punished first. "Okay. New rule. We’re not knocking, we’re not calling James-hyung and his spiritual percussion, and we’re definitely not escalating to demon before we’ve even entered the room."

Kenneth immediately lifted a hand. "I support this rule."

"I oppose it," Keonho said.

"No one asked."

"That’s not democracy."

"This is not democracy," Woonhak said, and pushed the door open.

The room was dark.

Not pitch-black. HYBE did not believe in pitch-black. There was always some expensive ambient bleed from the hallway, some faint emergency glow, some tiny red light from electronics waiting patiently to be useful. But it was dark enough that the mirrored wall across from them just looked like a deeper rectangle of shadow, like another room had been cut into this one and then forgotten.

Nobody moved for half a second.

Then Jihoon stepped in first, because of course he did. He was never stupid in a panicked way. Only in a deliberate, calibrated way that let him enjoy things longer.

He flicked on his phone flashlight.

The beam sliced across polished floorboards, caught the speaker in the corner, the stack of folded practice chairs, the mirrored wall, and finally the far end of the room.

Everything was exactly where it should be.

Which was, in haunted places, the first problem.

Kenneth stopped just inside the doorway and whispered, "Why does normal look so suspicious at night."

Woonhak, who had wanted comedy and maybe a little vindication and had not expected the room to feel quite this still, answered without thinking. "Because daytime has witnesses."

Jihoon turned and looked at him with one eyebrow lifted. "That was annoyingly good."

"Thank you."

Keonho remained in the doorway, visibly unwilling to commit his entire body to the room. "I’m serious. We should get James-hyung."

Woonhak spun around. "For the last time, no."

"But what if he can cleanse."

"With what. A bowl."

"Yes."

"That’s not strategy."

"That’s literally strategy."

Kenneth pointed at Keonho. "I’m with him now. At least bowl has plan."

Jihoon let out the kind of laugh that escaped when he was trying hard not to make noise in a space that suddenly felt too quiet for loose volume. "I’m obsessed with this. We came to a haunted practice room and within thirty seconds half the team has pivoted to wanting James-hyung to do sound therapy at the ghost."

"No, because think about it," Keonho said, warming to his own fear. "What if it doesn’t like metal frequency."

Woonhak stared at him. "Why are you acting like you have fought one before."

"I haven’t," Keonho said, scandalized. "I’m brainstorming."

"This is not good brainstorming."

Kenneth took one more step into the room and looked around with the over-serious concentration of a teenager trying not to admit he was scared. "Okay. Fine. We do no bowl. What now."

Woonhak lifted his chin and tried to recover authority. "Now we inspect."

"Inspect what."

"The energy."

"That is not object."

"It can be."

Jihoon flashed his light slowly across the mirrors again. "Great. We’re inspecting non-specific haunting with two boys whose English gets worse under pressure. This is exactly how professionals work."

"Jihoonie," Woonhak said, offended. "My English under pressure is powerful."

"It’s something."

Keonho finally stepped all the way into the room, though he stayed conspicuously close to the door as if preserving an evacuation route for his soul. He looked around, lower lip caught briefly between his teeth, and then said, very softly, "Did you hear that."

Everybody froze.

Woonhak’s shoulders locked.

Kenneth’s whole face sharpened.

Jihoon lowered the flashlight a fraction.

"What," Jihoon said.

Keonho pointed vaguely toward the mirrored wall. "I dunno. Like… humming."

And there it was.

Faint.

Not music exactly. Not quite mechanical either. Just a low, thin sound under the silence, easy to miss if you weren’t already listening for trouble.

Woonhak felt every hair on his arms rise at once.

Kenneth whispered, "No, no, no. I hate this."

Jihoon turned his head slowly, listening.

Keonho looked ready to burst into tears and text James a location pin.

The humming came again.

Soft.

Near the back of the room.

Woonhak swallowed. "Okay," he said, voice suddenly much quieter than he would have liked. "Nobody panic."

Kenneth turned to him with genuine outrage. "You say this after the sound? That’s not preventive. That’s reaction."

"That still counts."

"That counts badly."

Keonho grabbed Woonhak’s sleeve. "Hyung."

Woonhak looked down at the hand on his arm, then up at Keonho’s face, and had the deeply inconvenient thought that fear made Keonho look about six years younger and twice as sweet. Which was not useful. Which was, in fact, making leadership harder.

"What."

"Please let me text James-hyung."

"No."

"Hyung."

"No."

"What if the bowl would work."

"The bowl is not military backup."

Jihoon, to his credit, was still listening rather than laughing, though his mouth twitched once at bowl is not military backup. He swept the flashlight again toward the far corner.

The humming stopped.

That was worse.

Kenneth made a tiny sign of the cross again and then, possibly because adrenaline had now started chewing on all his second-language wiring, said in a rush, "Bro, if something ugly little run out, I am doing violence and prayer together."

Woonhak turned to him immediately. "Violence and prayer together is crazy sentence."

"It is honest sentence."

Keonho squeezed Woonhak’s sleeve harder. "Hyung."

Jihoon took three slow steps toward the back of the room. "Nobody move."

"Nobody move?" Kenneth repeated. "That is the worst movie instruction."

"It’s also the smartest one currently available."

Woonhak did not love that Jihoon had become the competent one. Woonhak had started this. Woonhak should have remained spiritually in charge. But there was something about the room now, something about the way the mirrored wall swallowed the weak hall light and gave back their reflections in pieces, something about the air that felt held too tightly, as if the room itself had inhaled and forgotten to exhale.

Jihoon reached the far corner.

He angled the flashlight down.

There was a beat.

Then another.

And then Jihoon burst out laughing.

Not a polite laugh either. A real one. Sharp and helpless and instantly contagious in the wake of too much tension.

Woonhak’s fear converted directly into offense. "What."

Jihoon pointed at the floor.

Everyone crowded in close despite every self-preserving instinct they had claimed ten seconds earlier.

A phone.

Someone had left a phone half-buried under one of the folded practice mats, connected to a portable charger, screen still lit with a meditation app that had apparently been running for hours.

The source of the humming sat there in smug little waves.

For a second nobody spoke.

Then Kenneth bent double so abruptly his beanie almost fell off. "No," he wheezed. "No, because this is so stupid."

Keonho let go of Woonhak’s sleeve and covered his face with both hands. "I was going to get James-hyung for a bowl over somebody’s sleep playlist."

Jihoon crouched down, picked up the phone, glanced at the screen, and immediately started laughing again. "Oh my god. It’s not even a playlist. It’s healing frequencies."

Woonhak stared at the ceiling.

Of course it was healing frequencies.

Of course the most haunted room in HYBE had turned out to be haunted by wellness content.

Kenneth clutched at Jihoon’s shoulder for balance. "Who leaves chakra phone in haunted room."

"An idol," Jihoon said. "This building is full of them."

Keonho looked personally betrayed by the universe. "Can we still get James-hyung."

Woonhak turned on him in disbelief. "Why."

"So he can identify the frequency."

That broke the last of Woonhak’s dignity. He laughed so hard he had to lean against the mirror, one hand over his eyes, shoulders shaking with the relief of surviving something embarrassing rather than supernatural.

"You are unbelievable," he said.

Keonho pointed at the phone on the floor. "No, but I was spiritually right."

Jihoon nodded. "He does, unfortunately, have a case."

Kenneth took a long breath and straightened, still smiling in that shell-shocked way people did after almost being frightened into another language. "Okay. Fine. This room not haunted by ghost. It haunted by one very stressed idol with expensive feelings."

"That," Jihoon said, holding up the glowing phone like evidence in court, "is the most HYBE sentence anybody has said tonight."

Woonhak pushed himself off the mirror and looked around the room again. Same floor. Same mirrors. Same weird expensive stillness. But now that the humming had been unmasked as an abandoned spiritual app, the room felt less like a threat and more like a joke somebody richer than all of them had told badly.

He folded his arms, trying to reclaim some authority from the ruins.

"Okay," he said. "We count this as partial success."

Kenneth stared. "For who."

"For me."

"How."

"Because the room was weird."

"It was weird because somebody left mindfulness in corner."

"That still weird."

Jihoon grinned. "He’s not wrong."

Keonho looked down at the meditation app and sighed with renewed sincerity. "I still think James-hyung would have known."

Woonhak put both hands over his face. "I’m never letting you live this bowl thing down."

Behind him, the abandoned phone let out one last gentle hum from its cracked speaker like it, too, had decided the night was not over and none of them deserved peace.

Jihoon held James’s phone up like a sacred object recovered from the site of a minor but meaningful disaster.

"It’s just been aggressively curated," he said.

That landed so cleanly the room went quiet for half a heartbeat.

Kenneth made a weak, horrified noise into both hands. "That is the most HYBE sentence in the world."

And then the phone began to ring.

Not a normal ring.

Not a text ping. Not a little vibration. Not anything human and manageable.

The sound tore through Practice Room 2 like a mechanical demon had just woken up under the floorboards. Loud. Sharp. Alien. The full Find My iPhone alert, exploding out of the speaker with the kind of urgency that suggested the phone itself was reporting a kidnapping.

All four of them screamed.

Not elegantly.

Not even in sequence.

Woonhak lurched backward so hard he smacked into the mirror with both palms flat against the glass.

Keonho made a strangled, high-pitched noise and dropped immediately into a crouch like his legs had filed for separation from the rest of him.

Jihoon actually flinched so violently he almost threw the phone across the room.

Kenneth, who had already been teetering on the edge of his own sanity for the better part of the evening, snapped cleanly into Spanish.

"¡Mierda! ¡No, no, no, no! ¿Qué carajos es eso? ¡Apágalo, apágalo, apágalo!"

The room froze around him.

Because Kenneth did not sound cute when he swore in Spanish.

He sounded fast. Alarmed. Deeply, sincerely done with everyone.

Woonhak stared at him from the mirror, one hand still over his chest. "Oh my god."

Keonho looked up from the floor, eyes huge. "Was that… bad-bad?"

Jihoon, still clutching the screaming phone at arm’s length like it was actively poisonous, laughed once in sheer disbelief. "That was definitely not podcast Spanish."

Kenneth whipped around, scandalized and furious and one hundred percent finished pretending this was still funny in a manageable way. "Because the phone is yelling like ambulance from hell!"

The ringtone kept shrieking.

Jihoon fumbled with the screen. "Why is this so loud?"

"Because Find My wants shame," Woonhak gasped.

Keonho pointed at the phone with full betrayal in his face. "Hyung found us."

"That is not how Find My works," Jihoon said, though weakly, because at this point it did feel personal.

Kenneth was pacing now, hands in his hair, Spanish and English colliding in real time under stress. "No, this is evil. This is so evil. Primero ghost frequency, then demon Apple sound, what next, huh? The mirror starts singing BTS?"

Woonhak folded in half laughing and panic at the same time. "Why are you funnier when terrified."

"I am not trying to be funny!"

"That’s why it’s working!"

Jihoon finally managed to stab the screen hard enough to silence the alarm.

The room dropped back into stillness so fast it felt fake.

For two full seconds nobody moved.

Then Keonho said, in a tiny wounded voice, "James-hyung is hunting us."

Jihoon bent at the waist and laughed straight into his knees.

Kenneth pointed at him in outrage. "No, because you are fluent. Do something useful."

"I did," Jihoon said, wiping at one eye. "I stopped the wrath of Apple."

"You almost threw it!"

"I adapted under pressure."

Woonhak pushed himself off the mirror and looked at the phone in Jihoon’s hand with renewed suspicion, like it had revealed itself to be not just haunted but classically manipulative.

"No, but this is actually worse," he said. "This means James-hyung didn’t even text. He just used Find My from his other phone like some rich supervillain."

Keonho made another soft, injured sound. "He has two phones and still left one in the haunted room."

"That," Jihoon said, straightening up, "is because beauty does not guarantee organization."

Kenneth pointed furiously at the device. "No. No more app. No more frequencies. No more eagle recovery. We put it down and walk away."

Woonhak blinked. "Eagle recovery."

Kenneth jabbed a finger at the lockscreen contact icon where James 🦅 still sat like a threat issued by expensive cheekbones. "Yes. Eagle. Evil eagle. Haunted eagle."

Keonho, despite everything, let out a tiny laugh.

Woonhak turned on him instantly. "Why are you smiling."

"Because," Keonho said, face pink with lingering fright, "haunted eagle is kind of accurate."

Jihoon lost it again.

Kenneth looked between all of them with the exhausted rage of a boy who had been lured into a fake maknae tradition and was now being asked to survive both paranormal ambiance and Apple ecosystem abuse in a language that was no longer cooperating with him.

"I hate this building," he declared.

Woonhak clutched his own heart. "No you don’t. You’re bonding."

"This is not bonding. This is trauma with fluorescent lighting."

Jihoon nodded thoughtfully. "That’s also HYBE culture."

Kenneth glared at him. "I knew the initiation was fake."

"It was fake," Jihoon said. "The suffering is authentic."

Keonho, still half on the floor, looked up at Jihoon with fresh alarm. "What if he makes it ring again."

That shut everyone up.

All four of them stared at the phone.

Silent.

Glowing.

Patient.

Like it knew perfectly well it had the upper hand.

Then Kenneth said, very quietly and very sincerely, "If that thing screams one more time, I am throwing it into the Han River."

And for once, nobody laughed immediately, because that sounded less like a joke and more like a policy proposal.

Woonhak was, to everyone’s growing despair, not ready to admit defeat.

This was less because he believed in ghosts with any stable intellectual integrity and more because he had already built too much emotional architecture around the bit to let it collapse now. A whole premise had been established. A fake tradition had been declared. Kenneth had been lured into a cross-label trauma bond. James’s phone had screamed at them like a possessed luxury appliance. To go home now would be cowardice.

Also, and this was important, they still had not actually seen a ghost.

That mattered to him.

He folded his arms and lifted his chin with the solemn dignity of a man who had just survived public embarrassment and mistaken it for destiny. "Okay," he said. "We continue."

Kenneth stared at him.

Jihoon stared at him.

Keonho, still half crouched on the floor like a deer that had recently discovered rent, stared at him with an expression of pure personal betrayal.

"Continue what," Jihoon asked, though he knew perfectly well.

"The hunt."

Kenneth made a sound like somebody had stepped on his soul. "No."

"Yes."

"No," Kenneth repeated, stronger this time. "No, bro. The room already did one demon Apple scream. We finish."

"We don’t finish," Woonhak said. "Because that was not ghost. That was James-hyung’s evil eagle technology. Different category."

Jihoon leaned one shoulder against the mirror, smiling that dangerous little smile he got when he sensed a fresh layer of stupidity opening underneath the one they had just survived. "I’m listening. Explain the distinction."

Woonhak pointed at the floor as if evidence still lived there in a legally useful way. "Phone is human mistake. Ghost is supernatural event. We have not got supernatural event yet."

Kenneth threw both hands into the air. "Why do you want upgrade."

"It’s not upgrade," Woonhak said, offended. "It’s completion."

"That is same thing in horror movie."

Keonho finally pushed himself up from the floor with the air of someone being forced back into history against his will. "I dunno, hyung."

Woonhak turned. "What."

Keonho brushed imaginary dust off his hoodie and said, with the cautious seriousness of a person introducing a fact he expected to be respected, "Normally ghosts come out after midnight."

There was a beat.

Jihoon’s mouth twitched.

Kenneth looked between them. "Wait. This is true or fake true."

Keonho shrugged, bright-eyed and earnest. "No, I mean, that’s what people say, right? Midnight. Witching hour. Devil o’clock. We’re early."

Woonhak stared at him. "Devil o’clock."

Keonho nodded once, completely sincere. "It’s not even nine yet."

That landed with the force of a slap.

For a full second nobody spoke, because the room was still full of adrenaline and wellness debris and the fact itself was too stupid to process immediately.

Then Jihoon made a noise into his sleeve.

Kenneth turned to the digital clock by the mirrored wall so fast his whole body followed. The red numbers glowed back at them with calm, humiliating clarity.

8:47 p.m.

The silence that followed had texture.

Not reverent texture. Not haunted texture.

The texture of four boys realizing they had somehow generated one-thirty-in-the-morning levels of stupidity before the working evening had technically finished.

Woonhak blinked once.

Twice.

Then he said, with quiet outrage, "Why does it feel like midnight."

Jihoon folded over laughing.

Not politely. Not with restraint. Full-body, helpless laughter, his forehead hitting the mirror as his shoulders shook. "Because," he managed, "you’ve been acting like a Victorian medium since dinner."

Kenneth spun back around, face lit with fresh scandal. "No. No, this is actually offensive. We are doing all this and it’s not even nine."

Keonho, who had apparently committed to his own logic completely now that he’d heard it aloud, lifted one finger like a student offering a fatal correction in class. "That’s why I said maybe we should get James-hyung. He has things for vibes, but also he knows time."

Woonhak stared at him in disbelief. "What does that mean."

Keonho hesitated. "I don’t know. But he feels scheduled."

That broke Kenneth so completely he had to sit down on the floor.

"He feels scheduled," Kenneth repeated weakly, one hand over his eyes. "Bro, what does that mean."

"It means," Jihoon said, still laughing, "that James-hyung has the energy of a person who would not start haunting logistics before midnight."

Woonhak pointed wildly at all of them. "No, because now everyone is saying nonsense and I’m somehow the irrational one."

"You are still the irrational one," Jihoon said at once.

Kenneth nodded from the floor. "Very much."

Keonho, traitorously, nodded too. "A little, hyung."

Woonhak’s mouth dropped open. "A little?"

"A lot," Jihoon corrected.

That should have ended it.

Any normal human being, after discovering he had dragged three other people into a ghost hunt before the ghost business day had even properly begun, would have accepted the loss and gone to get iced americanos or inconvenience somebody prettier. Woonhak, however, was operating under the much more dangerous principle that humiliation could still be converted into narrative if you refused to stop moving.

So instead of surrendering, he doubled down.

"Fine," he said. "Then we wait."

The room went still again.

Jihoon lowered his sleeve slowly. "Wait for what."

Woonhak spread his arms. "For ghost hours."

Kenneth made a strangled noise of outrage. "No. Absolutely no. I was tricked into fake initiation, not full shift work."

"It’s only three hours."

"Only three hours," Kenneth repeated, scandalized into a higher octave. "Bro, that is movie length plus director’s cut."

Keonho looked genuinely distressed now. "Hyung. No. I have skincare."

Jihoon straightened up enough to look properly impressed. "You somehow found a worse plan."

"It’s not worse. It’s more correct."

Kenneth got to his feet with the grim dignity of a child actor who had just remembered he had unions in his blood. "No. Listen. We can come back later. We can make appointment with ghost. We do not sit in room like employees."

Woonhak pointed at him triumphantly. "See. You also want completion."

"That is not what I said."

"That is emotionally what you said."

"That means nothing!"

Keonho looked at the red clock again, then back at Woonhak, and because he was sweet and doomed and had not yet learned the value of leaving a bad idea untouched, he tried reason.

"Hyung, even if ghosts come after midnight, wouldn’t they be, like… annoyed if we’re here too early."

Woonhak blinked. "Annoyed."

"Yeah. Like showing up before the party starts."

Kenneth lit up instantly. "Yes. Yes. Exactly. We are haunting them."

Jihoon leaned back against the mirror with the pleased, lethal expression of a boy watching nonsense evolve into art. "That’s actually the best argument so far. We’re not being haunted. We’re being rude."

For one brief, dangerous moment, Woonhak wavered.

It was a strong point. Social etiquette, after all, applied across many boundaries. He himself hated when people arrived too early and forced him to become emotionally present before he had consented.

Then his pride reassembled itself.

"Okay," he said. "Then we don’t wait in room. We scout other places until proper ghost time."

Kenneth stared at him in open disbelief. "No, because every answer you have creates more work."

"That’s leadership."

"That’s corporate illness."

Keonho let out a tiny, doomed sigh and looked at Jihoon the way younger boys looked at older ones when they were hoping someone with better language skills could stop destiny. "Jihoon-hyung."

Jihoon considered this appeal carefully, visibly enjoying the power.

Then he smiled.

"Honestly," he said, "I think he has a point."

All three of them turned on him with the same betrayed expression.

Jihoon lifted both hands in surrender, still smiling. "Not about the ghosts. About the bit. We can’t end on ‘James-hyung left his emotional support eagle frequencies in Practice Room 2 before nine p.m.’ That’s not an ending. That’s just one chapter in a moral decline."

Kenneth pointed at him in outrage. "You are supposed to be the reasonable one."

"No, I’m supposed to be the fluent one. Different job."

Woonhak beamed instantly, vindicated. "Jihoonie understands narrative."

"Jihoonie is sick," Kenneth snapped.

Keonho sighed and rubbed at his forehead as though checking whether his own excellent brows could protect him from the consequences of friendship. "I really think James-hyung would have shut this down."

Woonhak swung toward him. "Stop trying to summon management."

"He’s not management."

"He is emotionally management."

Jihoon nodded thoughtfully. "That’s true."

Kenneth looked up at the ceiling like he was asking every available saint for patience in a country that clearly did not have enough of it. "Okay. Fine. If we continue, there has to be rules."

Woonhak brightened. "Yes."

"No screaming if phone scream again."

"That’s impossible," Jihoon said.

Kenneth ignored him. "No touching weird things."

"That sounds anti-curiosity," Woonhak objected.

"It sounds anti-death," Kenneth shot back.

Keonho raised one finger. "No mirrors."

All three of them looked at him.

Keonho swallowed. "I don’t know. Mirrors are where things get creative."

That was such a sincere sentence that nobody mocked him for a whole two seconds.

Then Jihoon nodded and said, "Accepted. Anti-creativity mirror policy."

Woonhak rolled his eyes but accepted this with a wave of the hand. "Fine. Rules. Good. See? Real tradition."

Kenneth looked dead inside. "You keep calling it tradition like that makes it legal."

"It makes it memorable."

"Same problem."

The phone in Jihoon’s hand stayed silent now, but it felt watchful anyway, like James’s eagle emoji alone had altered the room’s moral temperature. Outside, the hallway lights still glowed too bright for haunting and somehow too dim for dignity. The clock still read 8:49. Ghosts, if any were unionized properly, had not yet even clocked in.

And still Woonhak pushed off the mirror and headed for the door with the terrible confidence of a boy who had survived being wrong and decided it merely meant the universe wanted a second attempt.

"Okay," he said. "Next location."

Kenneth groaned.

Keonho made the sign of the cross and then immediately looked guilty about it.

Jihoon slipped James’s phone into his own hoodie pocket with all the calm wickedness of a person who knew this would become somebody else’s problem later and was willing to let time do the work.

And behind them Practice Room 2 sat quiet and perfectly ordinary again, no ghost in sight, just one abandoned wellness ecosystem and the lingering evidence that the most dangerous thing in HYBE before nine p.m. was not the supernatural.

It was still teenage boys.

At 8:53 p.m., three different managers in three different parts of the building had the exact same unpleasant realization.

The children were not where they were supposed to be.

This happened first on the BOYNEXTDOOR side, where Sungho looked up from his phone, frowned at the empty seat beside him, and asked the room with the tired authority of someone who already knew the answer would be stupid, "Where’s Woonhak."

There was a brief silence.

Jaehyun, leader by title and eldest brother by suffering, looked around the practice room as if Woonhak might materialize if observed with enough disappointment. "Wasn’t he with Jihoon."

"Whose Jihoon," Taesan asked immediately, because in HYBE this was not a clarifying question but a taxonomic necessity.

"Not ours."

"That doesn’t help."

Their manager, who had already been ambushed by two styling revisions and one minor content delay that day, looked up from his tablet. "He said he was staying in the building to do Weverse Live."

The room went still.

Sungho frowned. "With who."

The manager blinked. "I assumed with you."

"No," said Sungho.

"No," said Jaehyun.

"No," said everyone else, in the collective tone of people who knew immediately that Woonhak had weaponized vague wording again.

At the exact same time, two floors up, Shinyu was having a nearly identical conversation.

"Jihoon’s not here," he said, which was not panic yet but was absolutely the shape panic took before it found a chair.

Dohoon looked up. "Didn’t he say he was doing a live."

"With who," asked Youngjae.

Shinyu turned to their manager.

Their manager, who had the face of a man who had trusted a teenager once too often, pinched the bridge of his nose. "He told me BOYNEXTDOOR asked him to help Woonhak with a company live."

There was a pause.

Then Hanjin said, in gentle, excellent Korean that somehow made the line even funnier, "But there was no notification."

Everyone looked at him.

Hanjin held up his phone.

The Weverse app sat there open and innocent and empty as a priest’s browser history in a church pamphlet.

No pre-live alert. No teaser. No post. No thumbnail. Nothing.

Shinyu stared at the screen for one second longer than was medically encouraging. "So what you’re telling me," he said at last, very calmly, "is that he left the room using another group’s maknae as a forged document."

Meanwhile, in CORTIS territory, James had already noticed Keonho was missing three full minutes before anyone else did, which was how everyone knew he was in his unfortunately competent mood.

"Where’s Keonho."

Juhoon looked up from the couch, because he had in fact already noticed but believed strongly in letting people arrive at disaster in their own time. "Not here."

Seonghyeon, who was sprawled across the floor like a man committed to looking relaxed even while mentally tracking every movement in the building, tilted his head. "He said he was going downstairs."

Martin looked up immediately. "With who."

James’s eyes narrowed. "That was also my next question."

Their manager glanced up from his messages and said the words that now, elsewhere in the building, were already ruining multiple adults’ evenings. "He told me TWS needed him for a Weverse Live setup."

James went very still.

Martin blinked. "TWS."

"Yes."

Juhoon extended one arm toward the coffee table where his phone sat. "No live notification."

There was a beat.

Then James turned his own phone around to show the Weverse feed, still blank.

Nothing.

No live.

No teaser.

No countdown.

Just the app’s usual feed, glowing back at them with the deeply unhelpful serenity of a machine uninvolved in the crime.

James exhaled once through his nose. "Interesting."

Martin, who still retained enough innocence to be emotionally damaged by coordinated lying, looked genuinely hurt. "He used content as an alibi."

Seonghyeon sat up. "Honestly, that’s growth."

And then, over on the Santos Bravos side of the building, Drew was learning that the words "company live" apparently translated across continents as "don’t verify anything."

He had been looking for Kenneth with the specific low-grade concern of a leader who knew his maknae was smart enough to survive most situations and young enough to actively wander into them anyway.

"Alejandro, have you seen Kenneth?"

Alejandro, who was fully horizontal across the sofa and clearly not interested in helping unless comedy became involved, shook his head. "He said he had content."

Drew turned to their manager.

Their manager nodded once, far too casually for a man about to worsen the situation. "He told me one of the Korean groups invited him to join a Weverse Live at the company."

Drew blinked.

"A Weverse Live."

"Yes."

"Which group."

The manager hesitated.

That was all Drew needed to know.

"Did you ask."

"I assumed," the manager said with the doomed dignity of a man who now knew assumption had been a tactical error, "that another manager had approved it."

Drew closed his eyes.

Slowly.

When he opened them again, he already had his phone out.

No Weverse notification.

No cross-group live.

No official content calendar update.

Nothing.

He looked up at the ceiling with the quiet, spiritual fatigue of an eldest member discovering that teenage boys, regardless of language or continent, were apparently all raised by the same trickster deity.

By 9:01 p.m. the managers had found each other.

Not physically at first. Through messages. Then calls. Then, as dignity continued to erode, in person, standing in a small operational cluster near the elevators like men who had arrived separately at the same car accident.

BOYNEXTDOOR’s manager got there first.

TWS’s manager arrived second, already holding his phone out like evidence.

CORTIS’s manager walked in with the expression of a man trying not to say I told you so about all minors in general.

Santos Bravos’ manager came last and immediately understood from the look on everyone’s faces that this was no longer his private problem.

For a moment they simply stared at one another in the quiet, bureaucratic brotherhood of adults who had all been outplayed by children.

Then BOYNEXTDOOR’s manager said, "Woonhak said TWS knew."

TWS’s manager replied, "Jihoon said BOYNEXTDOOR asked."

CORTIS’s manager said, "Keonho said TWS needed him."

Santos Bravos’ manager added, after a tiny tragic pause, "Kenneth said there was a company live."

Silence.

One of them opened Weverse again as if the app might finally confess under pressure.

Still nothing.

The complete absence of notification had, by this point, become insulting.

James arrived before anyone had formally decided to involve artists, because of course he did.

He stepped into the manager huddle with the calm, polished air of someone who looked too elegant to be irritated and therefore always seemed much more irritated than anybody else.

"No live?"

Four managers looked at him.

Four managers, all at once, shook their heads.

James nodded once. "Great."

That one word carried enough quiet menace to make three of them stand up straighter.

A few seconds later Shinyu appeared from the other corridor, still composed, still leader-shaped, but with that particular stillness some people got when they were one inconvenience away from saying something so cutting it would need legal review.

"Jihoon is with Woonhak."

James glanced at him. "Keonho is with them too."

Before either of them could continue, Martin hurried up from behind James in a hoodie and indoor slippers, because if a missing maknae problem existed anywhere in HYBE, Martin was eventually going to arrive with his whole heart in his hands whether or not anybody had requested that service.

"Did anyone find Kenneth?"

James turned his head slowly. "Kenneth is also missing."

Martin stopped walking.

Then his expression changed into one of genuine, almost reverent disbelief.

"Oh," he said.

And then, because Martin had the instincts of a very affectionate disaster, he added, "They coordinated."

"Thank you, Martin," James said. "That was the emotionally devastating detail we were missing."

Shinyu was already typing.

Shinyu: Where are you.

Shinyu: Answer in the next thirty seconds.

Shinyu: This is not a joke.

James, meanwhile, did not use the group chat.

James texted Keonho directly because James understood hierarchy, pressure, and the effectiveness of choosing one specific victim.

James 🦅: location

Martin, for his part, opened a blank message to Keonho and typed, then deleted, then typed again, because Martin believed strongly in not sounding too scary when children were in trouble, even if the children were technically only a year or two younger than him and had almost certainly organized their own disappearance for fun.

Across the lobby, Drew from Santos Bravos arrived with the kind of smile very nice people got when they were actively preventing themselves from becoming frightening.

"Has anyone told me yet why my maknae thinks he had a live tonight."

No one answered.

That was answer enough.

For one perfect second, James, Shinyu, Martin, and Drew all stood there together in a little square of shared eldest-member stress while around them the managers compared notes like detectives in the world’s least dignified procedural.

Then one of the managers said, very slowly, "There is one more thing."

Everyone turned.

He lifted his phone.

"No Weverse notification."

James stared at him. "Yes. We’ve established this."

"No," the manager said, almost apologetically. "I mean I checked room bookings too."

Another pause.

Nothing booked.

Not the live room.

Not a practice room.

Not a content suite.

Nothing.

Martin whispered, with the awe of a boy witnessing true criminal imagination for the first time, "They went rogue."

James closed his eyes.

Shinyu inhaled once.

Drew looked at the ceiling as if asking every available higher power why international expansion had brought him here.

And somewhere else in the building, four missing maknaes were apparently still unsupervised, unbooked, off schedule, and moving freely through HYBE on the strength of one fake live that had never existed.

Which, frankly, was impressive.

Infuriating.

But impressive.

They should not, by any responsible standard, have been allowed near the HYBE rooftop garden.

This was true for several reasons.

First, they were already unsupervised.

Second, at least two separate leadership structures were now almost certainly looking for them with increasing emotional intensity.

Third, Woonhak had the look in his eyes that meant he had stopped making decisions and had instead started obeying the internal logic of a story.

That was always when things got worse.

It was Jihoon, perversely enough, who first said the word rooftop.

Not because he wanted safety. Not because he wanted fresh air. Not even because he thought the garden would calm them down, which it would not. He said it because the group had reached that extremely specific stage of bad idea where every option was already poor, and therefore one might as well choose the one with the best scenery.

"We need altitude," he announced.

Kenneth, who was still recovering from James’s phone screaming at them like a tiny luxury banshee, looked up from where he had been glaring at the floor. "Why."

Jihoon pushed off the mirrored wall with the lazy confidence of someone who had never once confused danger with a reason to leave. "Because if every leader and every manager in the building is now comparing notes about the fake live, the lower floors are compromised."

Woonhak’s face lit up. "Compromised."

"Don’t encourage the vocabulary," Kenneth said sharply. "He gets worse with mission words."

Keonho, still clutching his canned coffee as if caffeine might protect him from consequences, blinked between them. "I dunno. Rooftop sounds… exposed."

"That," Jihoon said, "is what makes it strategic."

Kenneth put both hands over his face. "No. No, this is not strategic. This is boys making crime sound pretty."

Woonhak pointed at him, delighted. "Exactly. You understand narrative now."

"I understand we are going to die in a very expensive building."

"That’s growth."

It took less than twenty seconds to become the plan.

That was the thing about all four of them together. No one decision, on its own, was fatal. It was the collective speed of mutual reinforcement that made them unmanageable. Woonhak liked momentum. Kenneth objected in ways that still somehow counted as participation. Keonho, despite being the one most likely to see a cautionary sign and say maybe not, was also too sweet to abandon a group activity once he’d been emotionally included. And Jihoon, who should have known better, believed too strongly in comedy as a social principle to interfere if the result might become legendary.

Which was how they found themselves heading for the elevator corridor again, James’s haunted eagle phone still in Jihoon’s pocket, their sneakers whispering over the polished floor like they were about to make a much classier mistake than the one they had just made in Practice Room 2.

The hallway leading to the rooftop elevator lobby had its own atmosphere.

Not sinister, exactly.

More… administratively eerie.

The lights here were lower, warmer, expensive in a way that made every shadow seem curated. The glass ahead framed the little vestibule that held the two famous HYBE elevators opposite each other, the ones every employee and artist had, at some point, developed feelings about. The ones that sometimes arrived too fast, sometimes too slow, and always under the impression that human urgency was a tacky emotion best ignored.

The stickers were visible from halfway down the corridor.

Kenneth saw them first and stopped dead. "No."

Woonhak followed his gaze and immediately grinned. "Oh, the rules."

Keonho came up beside them and squinted. "I don’t know. Why is the no heart one always so funny."

It was true. The stickers were ridiculous in a way that became funnier the more serious the environment around them was. No touching. No food. No heart. No biological nonsense. A whole moral philosophy for enclosed vertical travel, printed in tiny authoritarian pictograms like HYBE had once watched one incident happen in an elevator and then overcorrected with the intensity of a traumatized kingdom.

Jihoon stepped up beside the glass and looked at the little crossed-out heart with the same fondness other people reserved for old family photos. "No love."

Kenneth narrowed his eyes. "That one is insane. Why is romance banned in elevator."

Woonhak folded his arms. "Because this building knows itself."

"That is not policy. That is confession."

Keonho leaned closer, smiling despite himself. "Maybe people kept getting too emotional between floors."

"Too emotional," Jihoon repeated. "What a diplomatic way to describe making out."

Kenneth looked from one sticker to the next, increasingly scandalized. "No, but seriously. No food, okay. No touching, weird, but okay. No heart? Who wrote this. Who got hurt."

"Everyone," Woonhak said at once.

That was when it happened.

Through the glass walls of the little elevator room, all four of them saw movement from the corridor on the far side.

A few female staff.

Three, maybe four.

Moving briskly in conversation, lanyards catching the light, one of them balancing a tablet under her arm. Perfectly ordinary. Perfectly real. The sort of thing that should have made the space feel less creepy and more corporate, except for the fact that all of them instinctively fell silent the moment they saw them, because after a certain point in a bad night every new witness felt like an accusation.

"Oh good," Kenneth said under his breath. "Normal people."

Jihoon straightened. "Stay chill."

"Who is not chill," Woonhak whispered.

"You."

"That’s rude."

The women reached the glass vestibule first.

One of them pressed the button. The two elevator doors opposite each other remained closed for a beat, polished and silent and reflecting everyone back in long expensive slices.

Then the staff stepped fully into the vestibule.

All four boys saw it.

All four boys registered it.

They were right there.

Keonho even lowered his coffee a little in automatic politeness, as though preparing to greet them if eye contact happened through the glass.

Then the four boys crossed the remaining distance, reached the vestibule entrance, and stepped inside.

And both elevator doors opened at the same time.

The room was empty.

Not mostly empty.

Not "the staff moved to the corner you didn’t notice" empty.

Empty in the full, impossible way that made the air inside the glass box suddenly feel much colder than it had any right to.

No women.

No tablet.

No lanyards.

No footsteps retreating.

Nothing.

Just the mirrored interior of both elevators glowing open at them, one on each side, like two jaws politely offering choices.

Nobody moved.

For a long, terrible second all four of them simply stood there and let the fact of it settle into their bones.

Kenneth was the first to react.

He snapped cleanly into Spanish.

"¡No, hombre, no! ¡No, no, no! ¿Dónde están? ¡Las vimos entrar! ¡Las vimos!"

The walls of the glass room threw his voice back at them too clearly, making the panic sound even sharper.

Woonhak grabbed his own forearm so hard he left little white crescent marks in the sleeve. "No, because yes. Yes. We literally saw."

Keonho’s eyes had gone huge in a way that made him look heartbreakingly young. "I dunno," he said faintly. "I hate this."

Jihoon, to his credit, did not scream.

What he did do was take one full step backward until his shoulders hit the glass wall and then say in a voice so calm it became worse than panic, "Okay. That’s actually bad."

Kenneth whipped around. "Actually bad? Actually bad? What was before. Decorative bad?"

"No, that was situational bad," Jihoon said, still staring into the left elevator as if a missing staff member might materialize out of professionalism. "This is different."

Both elevator doors remained open.

Empty.

Patient.

Inviting.

The stickered rules on the glass behind them suddenly felt less funny.

No touching.

No food.

No heart.

No witnesses, apparently.

Woonhak pointed a shaking finger at the open cars. "No. No, because this is exactly the beginning of things."

"Things," Kenneth echoed in outrage. "What things. Name one good thing."

"There are no good things."

"Great."

Keonho, who had somehow backed himself into the exact center of the little room as if equal distance from both elevators would protect him through geometry, looked from one car to the other and swallowed hard. "Should I get James-hyung now."

Nobody even laughed.

That was how bad it was.

Jihoon turned his head very slowly. "You still think a singing bowl can fix this."

Keonho looked personally offended. "At minimum it would make me feel supported."

Kenneth pointed at him wildly. "No, now I am with him. Bring the bowl. Bring all the bowls. Bring church."

Woonhak’s own adrenaline had reached the point where fear and offense were beginning to overlap. "Where did they go."

"That," Jihoon said, "is unfortunately the exact question I would prefer not to be asking in a glass box between two empty elevators."

One of the doors began to slide shut.

Just one.

The right-side elevator.

It closed with a smooth whisper, leaving the left one still open and glowing at them.

Kenneth made a sound so appalled it barely qualified as language.

"Why one."

"I don’t know!"

"That makes it worse!"

Keonho clutched at Woonhak’s sleeve now, the same way he had earlier in Practice Room 2, soft hand tight with instinctive trust. "Hyung."

Woonhak looked at the hand, then at Keonho’s face, then at the open elevator.

Something hot and stupid and loyal rose up in him all at once. Fear, yes. But also the unbearable need not to be the first one to break in front of the others. That was the problem with being dramatic. Once everyone decided you were the dramatic one, sometimes you had to keep performing courage out of sheer stubbornness.

"We saw them," he said, more to himself than anyone else.

"We all saw them," Jihoon said.

"So that means…"

"It means don’t finish that sentence," Jihoon snapped.

Kenneth had one hand over his mouth now, eyes flicking between the open car and the corridor outside like he was trying to decide whether running was still socially available. "No me gusta. No me gusta this room. This room has tricks."

The left elevator gave a soft chime.

All four of them jumped.

The screen above the door lit up with a polite little arrow pointing up, as if none of this was strange at all, as if the building had not just swallowed several actual staff members in front of four escalating teenagers and then offered them a ride with the serene confidence of a predator setting a table.

Keonho shook Woonhak’s sleeve. "Hyung. Hyung. Hyung."

"What."

"What if they were never staff."

The room went dead still.

Kenneth stared at Keonho with full betrayal. "Why would you say that. Why would you use your mouth for that."

"I just thought it."

"You should have kept it."

Jihoon shut his eyes for one brief second like a man trying to fold his own soul small enough to fit in a pocket. "Okay," he said at last. "Nobody is saying phantom admin. Nobody is saying office lady ghosts. Nobody is saying anything that makes this harder."

Woonhak looked at the crossed-out heart sticker again.

Then at the open elevator.

Then back at the others.

And because there was something fundamentally wrong with him, because his pride was an undiagnosed condition, because the universe had now placed an obvious horror-movie fork in front of them and he could not bear to leave the scene without choosing something dramatic, he said the worst possible words.

"…Rooftop is still up."

Kenneth let his head fall back against the glass and laughed once in sheer disbelief. It was not a happy laugh. It was the laugh of a boy discovering, too late, that courage and foolishness used the same shoes.

"No," he whispered. "No, bro. You are actually insane."

Keonho tightened his grip on Woonhak’s sleeve. "I really think James-hyung should be here."

Jihoon opened his eyes and looked at the open elevator again, then at the three of them. His face had gone very still in the way it always did when he was frightened enough to become meaner as a survival instinct.

"Okay," he said. "New rule."

Nobody argued.

He pointed at the still-open car.

"If we are doing this, nobody speaks to anything that is not visibly one of us."

Kenneth nodded instantly. "Yes."

Keonho nodded too. "Yes."

Woonhak hesitated half a second too long, then nodded with less enthusiasm.

Jihoon continued. "If one of us sees staff again, we do not assume. We verify. With names. Full names. Blood type if needed."

Kenneth pointed at him. "This is smart. More of this."

Jihoon ignored the compliment and took one slow breath. "And if that elevator closes by itself while we’re still standing here, I am going home and letting every manager in this building find us through fate."

The left elevator remained open.

Waiting.

Woonhak looked at it with the exhausted defiance of a boy whose own bad idea had now become larger than him and therefore impossible to abandon without losing face.

Then he squared his shoulders.

"Okay," he said. "We go up."

"Dios mío," Kenneth muttered.

Keonho crossed himself again so quickly it looked involuntary.

Jihoon stepped into the elevator first with the dead-eyed bravery of somebody who knew full well this was how all the best and worst stories began.

And behind them, on the glass wall, the little stickers watched in silence.

No touching.

No food.

No heart.

No common sense, apparently.

The rooftop garden lasted even less time this version.

Not because they got caught immediately. That would have been cleaner, and HYBE as a building had never once shown any interest in being clean when it could instead be weird. No, what sent them back down was the fact that COMB, with all its birch trees and designer calm and expensive ideas about mental wellness, had decided to be wrong in a very specific way.

The elevator opened onto beauty first.

That was the trap.

The rooftop garden stretched out before them in pale trunks and soft uplighting, birch trees standing everywhere in elegant little clusters like somebody had taken a Scandinavian grief metaphor and given it a corporate budget. Beyond them, Seoul glittered in the distance. The Han River cut a dark line through the city. Namsan glowed further off. The air was cooler here, touched with that clean rooftop breeze that was supposed to make people feel restored and productive and less likely to send passive-aggressive emails before bedtime.

For one second, it worked.

For one second, all four of them just stood there and stared.

Then Kenneth said, in a voice full of personal offense, "No."

Woonhak turned. "What."

Kenneth pointed into the birch grove. "This is not calming. This is where elegant dead people wait."

Jihoon laughed immediately.

Keonho, still hanging too close to the elevator for dignity, peered past them and said in a small voice, "I dunno. It’s pretty."

"It’s suspiciously pretty," Kenneth corrected.

That was the thing about COMB. It had clearly been made to soothe people. You could feel the intention in it. Every path curved gently. Every light was warm but not dim. Every tree had been placed like a sentence in a brochure about healing. It should have felt peaceful.

Instead, tonight, it felt like a place trying too hard to look innocent.

Woonhak stepped out first.

His sneakers clicked softly on the path. The birch trunks rose around him in white vertical lines, too many of them, too pale, too still. Behind him the others followed more slowly, Kenneth visibly unwilling, Jihoon curious in the exact way that got people into trouble, and Keonho moving like his body wanted to remain emotionally attached to the elevator.

"No, because why is it like this," Kenneth muttered. "Who makes rooftop forest. This is not roof behavior."

"HYBE," Jihoon said.

"That is not explanation. That is diagnosis."

The breeze moved across the garden.

Or it should have.

That was when Keonho stopped.

Not dramatically. Just all at once, like something in him had reached forward and tugged hard on the thread between instinct and speech.

"Hyung," he said.

Woonhak looked back. "What."

Keonho pointed.

At first Woonhak didn’t understand what he meant. The trees were there. The path was there. The little lights at the base of the trunks were there. The city was still glittering beyond them with the rude indifference of something too large to care what happened to individual teenage idiots.

Then he saw it.

The leaves were moving one way.

The trunks, faintly, were moving another.

Not enough to be obvious if you weren’t already staring too hard. But enough. A soft push in opposite directions, like the wind had chosen one choreography and the trees had chosen another and neither cared about matching.

For one stupid second Woonhak tried to tell himself it was perspective.

Then Kenneth said, very quietly, "No."

Nobody laughed.

Jihoon took two steps forward, squinting now.

The breeze crossed his face from left to right.

The silver leaves above them shivered from right to left.

"No," he said after a beat. "That’s…"

He didn’t finish.

He did not need to.

Keonho had already moved closer to Woonhak without meaning to. "I dunno," he whispered. "I really don’t like this."

That was when Woonhak looked down.

Their shadows were wrong too.

Long, far too long for the lighting, stretched over the path in directions they should not have been able to go. The uplights at the bases of the birch trunks should have thrown clean, short shapes. Instead the shadows reached out thin and distant, cutting across the ground at angles that made no sense, crossing each other in places they shouldn’t. Even worse, some of the tree shadows leaned opposite the trunks themselves, like the light had one opinion and the dark had another.

Kenneth stepped back so fast he almost bumped into Jihoon. "No, bro. No. The shadows are lying."

Woonhak looked from one pool of light to the next and felt his skin go tight all over.

Because Kenneth was right.

The shadows were lying.

There was no other phrase for it. They were too long, facing wrong, pulled in directions the actual light could not possibly be making them go. One birch trunk stood in pale perfect stillness and its shadow on the stone path leaned away from it like it had somewhere else to be.

Jihoon, for once, did not sound amused.

"That’s not a perspective issue."

"No," Kenneth snapped. "Thank you. Thank you. Finally. Not perspective. Evil."

Keonho made a soft, wounded noise into Woonhak’s shoulder area and then, because panic had apparently stripped him back to pure instinct, said, "Should I get James-hyung."

Nobody laughed.

Not even a little.

Because now, absurdly, the singing bowl had become the most comforting idea in the world.

Woonhak swallowed. "No."

But it came out thin.

Weak.

Not the voice of a man leading a mission anymore. The voice of a man realizing the mission had developed independent sentience.

Jihoon turned in a slow circle, taking in the trees, the shadows, the movement.

The breeze brushed across them again.

This time Woonhak watched the leaves carefully.

They trembled with it.

And then, half a beat later, the trunks shifted the other way.

A delayed disagreement.

A correction from something that had not accepted the wind’s terms.

Kenneth snapped cleanly into Spanish. Fast, sharp, furious Spanish, the kind that sounded like prayer and swearing had been forced into the same elevator and told to work it out.

"¡No, no, no! ¡Esto está mal! ¡Mira eso! ¡Mira las sombras! ¿Por qué están así? ¡No están bien!"

Jihoon stared at him. "That sounds extremely not good."

"It is not good," Kenneth shot back in English. "It is very much super not good."

Keonho pointed now too, because if he had to suffer he was at least going to be specific. "Hyung. That one."

They all looked.

One of the birch shadows had moved.

Not huge. Not cinematic. Not enough for proof in a court of law or even in a well-lit group chat. But it had definitely moved. A subtle lengthening over the path while the trunk itself remained where it was. Like the dark had leaned closer before the tree did.

Woonhak’s stomach dropped.

"No," he said under his breath.

Jihoon took a step backward toward the elevator.

"This is bad," he said.

Kenneth rounded on him immediately. "That’s what I said on the roof. Then you all made me sound dramatic."

"You are dramatic."

"I am correct."

"You’re both," Jihoon snapped, eyes still on the trees.

Keonho grabbed Woonhak’s sleeve. Hard.

Not delicately. Not as a joke. A real grip, soft hand locked in with frightened certainty, the kind younger boys only used when they had given up pretending not to need grounding.

"Hyung."

Woonhak looked down at the hand on his sleeve, then up at Keonho’s face.

Keonho had gone pale under the soft rooftop lights. His eyes looked huge.

"I don’t know," Keonho whispered. "I think the trees are watching wrong."

That was such a terrible sentence that for one second Woonhak actually hated him for saying it.

Then Jihoon said, very quietly, "Guys."

They all turned.

Down the rooftop path, near the dark line of the FORUM building, voices.

Faint at first. Then clearer. Adult voices. More than one. Moving closer.

Managers.

Or leaders.

Or both.

The words themselves were still too blurred by distance to make out, but the shape of them was unmistakable. Searching voices. Human voices. Real voices. Which should have been comforting except for the fact that none of them wanted to explain this moment to any adult alive.

Kenneth’s whole body jolted with relief. "People. Okay. Good. We go to people."

Woonhak looked toward the voices, then back at the birches, where the leaves still moved one way and the trunks seemed to hold back on another time entirely.

One of the long shadows crossed the path a little farther than it should have.

That made the decision for him.

"Cafeteria," he said.

Jihoon turned. "What."

"Cafeteria. Now."

That was all it took.

No debate. No fake leadership speech. No mission language.

The four of them moved at once, all pretense gone.

Kenneth was first, because fear made him fast and because he had apparently decided at some point that if he survived Korea it would not be because he died politely. Jihoon was right behind him, one hand already going to his hoodie pocket to keep James’s phone from bouncing loose and screaming at them in the middle of the therapeutic demon forest. Woonhak pulled Keonho with him by the wrist this time, because if Keonho was going to cling then fine, they would cling at speed.

Behind them, the adult voices got louder.

Ahead of them, the elevator vestibule gleamed with all the warm, false hospitality of a building trying not to admit what lived in its corners.

Kenneth hit the glass room first and jabbed the call button so hard it should have qualified as assault.

"No more roof," he said. "No more trees. No more stylish haunting."

The doors opened immediately.

Too immediately.

All four boys recoiled on instinct.

Then, because the corridor behind them now held unmistakable approaching footsteps and one voice that was definitely a manager saying a name in that sharp clipped way adults only used when they had upgraded from concern to consequence, they made the collective decision that suspicious elevator timing was still preferable to birch-tree betrayal.

They piled inside.

The doors began to close.

Just before they shut, Woonhak looked back one last time through the glass.

The rooftop garden lay there in soft light and pale trunks and impossible shadows, perfect and expensive and deeply wrong. The leaves stirred gently in the breeze.

The trunks did not follow.

Then the doors sealed them away.

The ride down was silence, but not the comedic kind they’d had before. This was real silence. Pressed thin by adrenaline. Kenneth breathing fast through his nose. Keonho still gripping Woonhak’s wrist like he had not yet received confirmation that the material world was behaving. Jihoon staring straight ahead with that unusually blank expression he got when something had scared him badly enough to sand down his sarcasm for a minute.

Only when they reached the cafeteria level and the doors opened onto fluorescent light and tile and the deeply unsexy smell of soup and industrial cleaning fluid did anyone start breathing like a person again.

Kenneth stepped out first and pointed back at the elevator with all the fury of a boy personally wronged by architecture. "No. See. This is what I want. Ugly light. Trays. Sad rice. Normal things."

Keonho let go of Woonhak at last and looked around the cafeteria like it was a church.

"I never thought I’d be happy to see side dishes," he said.

Jihoon exhaled long and slow, then finally said, "Okay. New official position. The roof can keep whatever that was."

Woonhak looked back once over his shoulder toward where the elevators waited, smooth and polished and as innocent as liars.

Then he turned toward the cafeteria proper, where voices were louder now, human now, and the promise of being caught had somehow become preferable to another second of beautiful wrongness upstairs.

"Yeah," he said.

And for once, nobody argued.

The cafeteria had never looked so beautiful.

This was not because it was beautiful.

It was a HYBE cafeteria at night. The lighting was too bright in the practical places and too dim in the decorative ones. The tables sat in their neat little rows with the sterile patience of furniture that had seen too much. The refrigerators hummed. Somewhere a ventilation system sighed like it had already accepted defeat. It smelled like old rice steam, industrial cleaner, and the lingering ghost of a hundred idols making terrible dietary choices under pressure.

It was hideous.

It was perfect.

Kenneth stepped out of the elevator first and looked around with the expression of a man arriving at a holy site. "Yes," he said, voice shaking with relief. "This. I want this. Ugly light. Human soup. Normal suffering."

"I never thought I’d be happy to see trays," Keonho whispered.

Jihoon put one hand over his heart and looked out over the cafeteria like he was returning from war. "The fluorescent lights of civilization."

Woonhak did not say anything immediately.

He was still too full of rooftop wrongness. The birch trunks. The shadows. The way the wind and the trees had disagreed with each other like they were living in separate versions of the same night. Even now, down here, with the air dry and the tiles square and the room aggressively ordinary, some part of him still felt out of alignment. Like if he turned too quickly he might catch the wrong shadow following.

Then he saw the adults.

And the ordinary comfort of the cafeteria vanished in one elegant, terrible second.

They were all there.

Not every leader in HYBE, because that would have made the scene unmanageable and probably illegal, but enough of the relevant ones to make the point land like an executive summary.

Martin stood near the end of the table cluster in a hoodie and house slippers like he had come downstairs too fast to care what he looked like. The moment he saw them, his whole face changed. Relief flooded through him so visibly it was almost violent. He didn’t run, because Martin was trying very hard lately to be dignified in public when feelings happened too suddenly. But his shoulders dropped all at once, and his mouth did that tiny trembling thing it only ever did when he had been scared enough to almost cry and was now trying not to let anyone see that he had been scared at all.

James stood beside him with one hand in his pocket and the other resting lightly around his own phone, the expression on his face composed and beautiful and deeply, deeply entertained. Not happy, exactly. Not forgiving. But amused in the precise way older boys were when younger boys had created a level of chaos so stupid it looped back around into elegance.

Shinyu stood a little apart from them.

If Martin looked like relief, Shinyu looked like a thunderstorm that had put itself in expensive clothing and was trying to behave in public. He was calm, yes. He was still. Beautifully still. Which was the problem. Shinyu’s anger was never loud when it was real. It became quieter and more polished and somehow much more dangerous, like weather deciding whether or not to become a national problem.

And yet.

The weird part, the truly strange part, was that even with Jihoon missing for the better part of an hour and Woonhak found half-haunted and fully guilty and managers clearly ready to kill paperwork over this, Shinyu did not seem fully anchored in his own fury. His eyes kept cutting back to Martin in these brief, involuntary glances that made no sense if one was committed to emotional coherence. Not long enough to be caught by anyone but a room already sharpened by fear. Not soft enough to be called tenderness. But there. Distracted. Mesmerized, almost, in the stupid helpless way some people were when their feelings arrived before their judgment did and then simply refused to leave.

Jihoon clocked it instantly, because of course he did.

He clocked everything instantly when the room was bad enough.

Drew stood with Santos Bravos’ manager near the far table, arms folded, the very picture of elder-brother disappointment with international range. His face had gone past irritation and into that firm, disappointed stillness that somehow felt much worse. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just the unmistakable expression of a leader who had trusted his maknae to be somewhere reasonable and was now discovering that "company content" apparently translated across continents as "wandering around Seoul headquarters in a fake ritual."

And then there was Myungjae.

He had apparently arrived late enough to hear the story but early enough to do the emotional part properly, which was unfortunately very on brand.

The moment Woonhak stepped fully into the cafeteria, Myungjae let out a noise so wounded and relieved it was almost operatic, crossed the distance in three fast strides, and threw himself onto Woonhak’s shoulder with both hands clutching at his hoodie.

"My baby," he said in full tragic sincerity. "My baby is alive."

Woonhak, who had not known until that second that he needed precisely this degree of overreaction to regulate his own nervous system, immediately softened. "Hyung."

"You disappeared."

"I was in building."

"That is not a sentence you give people after disappearing."

Beside them Riwoo stood with his arms folded, looking amused in the very dry, private way he always did when chaos stopped being immediately dangerous and became socially survivable again. He tilted his head, took in Myungjae hanging off Woonhak like a melodramatic decorative sash, and said, "At least now we know who’d cry first in a hostage situation."

"Myungjae-hyung," Jihoon said.

"Absolutely," Riwoo replied.

And then, because apparently fate was committed to making the night stranger rather than merely worse, Woonhak noticed something else.

The ahjumma was still there.

The cafeteria ahjumma.

Still behind the counter. Still armed with a ladle and a level of emotional authority no executive in HYBE would ever truly match. She had apparently decided that, whatever nonsense idol boys and their managers were doing out in the seating area, none of it superseded her own priorities. Tonight, those priorities were tteokbokki.

Not soup. Not leftovers. Not the usual sparse late-night scraps of institutional mercy.

Tteokbokki.

Red, glossy, steaming in the tray behind the glass like the gods had chosen carbohydrates as their instrument of reconciliation.

For a second, absurdly, that felt more surreal than the rooftop.

Jihoon saw it too and whispered, "No way."

Kenneth turned so fast he nearly got whiplash. "What."

Jihoon pointed like he had just seen an apparition.

"There’s tteokbokki."

Kenneth looked at the tray. Then at the ahjumma. Then back at the tray again with stunned respect. "This country does not know how to be normal."

The ahjumma looked up, clocked the entire cluster of anxious leaders, exhausted managers, almost-crying younger boys, and one melodramatic Myungjae wrapped around Woonhak’s shoulder, and did not blink once.

Instead, she called out in the practical, unsentimental tone of a woman who had seen prettier disasters and fed them too, "If you’re all going to stand there, at least eat while you get scolded."

The room paused.

Then Martin actually made a helpless noise and laughed once through what was very obviously the tail end of almost-crying.

Which was how the emotional seal broke.

He crossed the distance first, because Martin was Martin and once he knew the children were physically safe his body immediately reoriented toward warmth before consequence. He did not hug Woonhak or Jihoon or Kenneth right away, because there were too many adults around and Martin had learned at least a little restraint. But he grabbed Keonho by both shoulders and looked him over with such naked relief it was almost painful to witness.

"You’re okay."

Keonho, who was still carrying fear and embarrassment and James-related spiritual damage in equal measure, blinked up at him. "I’m okay."

Martin nodded once, mouth tightening for a second like he really had come closer to crying than anybody in the room had guessed. "Good," he said, voice soft and wrecked at the edges. "Good."

Shinyu watched that.

Only for a second.

But Jihoon saw it. Woonhak saw it too, because Woonhak always noticed where the emotional heat in a room was hiding. Shinyu’s thunderstorm stillness flickered just once around the edges when Martin touched Keonho’s shoulders, when Martin’s relief came out all bright and unfiltered and tender in public without shame.

Then Shinyu looked back at Jihoon and the storm reset itself.

"You," he said.

Jihoon smiled automatically. "Me."

Shinyu did not smile back.

Not because he couldn’t. Because he was choosing violence in a more elegant font.

"You lied to your manager, used another group’s maknae as cover, and disappeared with BOYNEXTDOOR and CORTIS minors into the building for over an hour."

Jihoon nodded once. "When you say it like that, it does sound less whimsical."

Woonhak had to bite the inside of his cheek not to laugh.

Drew stepped forward then, and Kenneth straightened on instinct with the full-body reaction of a younger member whose leader did not need to raise his voice to ruin his evening.

"You told me there was content."

Kenneth immediately put both hands up. "In my defense, there was a concept."

"That is not content."

"It was becoming content."

"That is not better."

Riwoo made a tiny sound into his sleeve. Myungjae, still half on Woonhak’s shoulder, nodded solemnly as if Kenneth were delivering serious legal testimony instead of gibberish shaped like regret.

James, meanwhile, had not moved much at all.

He only tilted his head slightly and looked at Jihoon. Then Woonhak. Then finally Keonho.

"Did you enjoy your evening."

Keonho’s whole face went pink again. "Hyung."

"That is not an answer."

"It became complicated."

"It was already complicated," Jihoon muttered.

James’s mouth twitched.

Not enough to count as mercy. Just enough to prove he was enjoying this more than any morally upright person should.

The managers, who had clearly had enough of the emotional preliminaries and now wanted either confession or paperwork, stepped in as one.

"Since all of you were apparently so committed to doing a company live tonight," one of them said, voice flat with the authority of an exhausted god, "go ahead."

The four boys froze.

Kenneth’s head snapped up first. "What."

Woonhak blinked. "No."

Jihoon lifted one hand. "Counterpoint."

Keonho simply looked like his soul was trying to leave the building again.

Martin, to his eternal betrayal of youth, looked almost delighted by the idea now that the crying part had passed. Not in a cruel way. In a warm, sparkling way, like he could already see the shape of the story and had decided it would be survivable because it was funny.

"That’s fair," he said.

"Martin," Jihoon said, scandalized.

"What," Martin replied. "You guys wanted a live so badly you invented one. That’s actually kind of impressive."

Shinyu turned his head toward him.

And again, that tiny strange pause.

That distracted little second where his attention slipped from anger into something else entirely, some helpless fascination with Martin’s earnestness like he could not help being briefly wrecked by how sincerely Martin meant everything he said.

Then he looked back at Jihoon and said, more sharply, "It’s not impressive."

Martin folded his lips inward like he was trying not to smile. "Okay. A little impressive."

Drew did not indulge Kenneth the same way. "You’re going live."

Kenneth looked betrayed down to the bone. "Across labels?"

"Yes."

"With them?"

"Yes."

"That feels like international punishment."

"That," Drew said, "is because it is."

Before the protest could grow legs, the managers changed tactic.

They were, after all, professionals. And professionals in buildings full of teenagers learned early that punishment alone was inefficient. You needed leverage. Carrot and stick. Mostly stick, but shaped briefly like a carrot to keep morale from starting a union.

"Milkis," said one manager.

Woonhak’s head turned so fast it almost blurred.

Another manager added, with deeper strategic evil, "Bunggeoppang."

That got everyone.

All four boys, instantly, visibly, spiritually.

Even Kenneth, who had entered this night without the proper cultural reverence for fish-shaped pastry and had somehow acquired it through sheer proximity to Korean idol life, looked tempted.

And then the ahjumma, who had apparently decided the adults were taking too long and the children were too dramatic, lifted her ladle and entered negotiations herself.

"Tteokbokki too," she said.

The cafeteria went silent.

Jihoon looked at her with something very close to reverence. "Auntie."

"Don’t call me auntie when you’ve been running wild in the building."

"Yes, ma’am."

"Live first," she said. "Then snack."

Kenneth turned slowly to Drew. "This is coercion."

Drew nodded. "Yes."

Myungjae, still clinging to Woonhak, whispered, "But loving coercion."

"Hyung," Woonhak said weakly.

Riwoo looked between the tteokbokki, the Milkis offer, the bunggeoppang bribe, and the four increasingly shaken faces of the fugitives and said, with dry satisfaction, "Honestly, if you’re going to get arrested by management, this is the nicest menu possible."

Keonho looked at James with the eyes of someone making peace with consequence through sugar.

"Hyung."

James raised one eyebrow.

"If I do the live…"

"You still have to explain why my phone was on a rooftop-adjacent ghost mission, yes."

Keonho nearly folded in half.

Martin, seeing that and being unable to stop himself, reached over and patted Keonho once between the shoulder blades like a golden retriever in a human body trying to keep everyone from collapsing from shame.

Shinyu saw that too.

Again.

That same impossible little pull of attention.

Jihoon, despite being seconds from punishment, almost wanted to laugh. Because even now, even in the middle of manager wrath and fake-live fallout and Kenneth getting internationally sentenced to content, Shinyu still looked fractionally derailed every time Martin moved with that bright, earnest tenderness of his.

What a stupid building, Jihoon thought. What a stupid ecosystem. Everyone in it was infected by beauty and trying to call it professionalism.

The ahjumma tapped the tteokbokki tray with her ladle.

The smell hit all four boys at once.

Sweet. Spicy. Hot and immediate and real in the way almost nothing tonight had been.

Woonhak closed his eyes. "This is evil."

"No," Jihoon said softly. "This is management."

Kenneth looked between the adults, the snacks, the ahjumma, and the leaders waiting with varying degrees of love and disappointment.

Then he sighed with the tragic dignity of a boy accepting his fate.

"Fine," he said. "But if I’m doing fake live made real, I want two Milkis."

The room cracked.

Even Drew laughed then, short and helpless, disappointment losing a little of its structure around the edges because of course Kenneth would negotiate beverage quantity in the face of cross-label humiliation.

Woonhak straightened instantly. "Actually yes. Same."

Jihoon lifted one finger. "And bunggeoppang each, not split."

Keonho, voice still tiny, added, "Can tteokbokki be waiting."

The ahjumma snorted. "If you finish quickly."

And just like that, bribed with carbonation, fish-shaped pastry, and the unholy promise of late-night tteokbokki, the four fugitives were marched toward the live room under leader supervision.

Martin fell into step near Keonho, still glancing at him every few seconds like he was reassuring himself the youngest one was truly intact.

James walked on Keonho’s other side with dangerous elegance, amused enough to be frightening.

Shinyu moved beside Jihoon with all the energy of beautiful thunder trying to behave in public while being strangely, unwillingly, distracted every time Martin laughed at something behind them.

Drew guided Kenneth forward with the quiet sternness of a man who would absolutely forgive later and would absolutely not soften now.

Behind them, Myungjae made one last dramatic sound into Woonhak’s shoulder before Riwoo physically peeled him away.

And back in the cafeteria, under the fluorescent lights of civilization, the ahjumma kept serving tteokbokki as if this, too, was just another weekday in a building full of overdramatic children and their increasingly doomed elders.

They did the live.

This was how consequences worked in HYBE. Not as punishment in the dramatic, operatic sense. No one chained them to a chair. No one made them write apology statements in fountain pen. The building simply took the lie they had told, gave it budget, assigned lighting, and turned it into content.

Twenty-three minutes later, the four of them were seated behind a low table under the bright, flattering violence of company-approved live broadcast lights, with snacks placed strategically in frame to imply spontaneity and not bribery. Off camera, the leaders and managers hovered in varying states of exhaustion. On camera, everyone had to pretend this had always been the plan.

Fans, tragically, loved it immediately.

The moment the notification went out and the screen filled with Woonhak, Jihoon, Keonho, and Kenneth sitting together in one weird little row of cross-label maknae damage, the comments started moving so fast they became weather.

ONEDOORS screamed. 42s lost their minds. COERS, who did not miss a chance to weaponize any CORTIS detail into instant lore, began clocking dynamics at the speed of light. Santos Bravos fans, some of whom had clearly arrived with no context whatsoever, were already typing in all caps about Kenneth’s face and asking why he looked like he’d just survived a minor haunting.

Which, Woonhak thought, was deeply unfair, because Kenneth had survived a minor haunting and Woonhak himself had done so while being cyberbullied about his eyebrows.

Worse, the seating arrangement had betrayed him personally.

He was in the middle.

On one side sat Jihoon, infuriatingly relaxed, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee beneath the table like he had not spent the past two hours participating in fake ritual kidnapping and rooftop shadow trauma. On the other side sat Keonho, smiling shyly at the screen with his giant tragic eyes and his offensively healthy eyebrows, which under the studio lights looked even more criminally dense than usual.

This did not go unnoticed.

The comments were immediate.

NOOOO Woonhak between Jihoon and Keonho is crazy lineup 😭

KEONHO BROWS SO STRONG omg

woonhakie next to him is taking psychic damage

brow contrast is actually diabolical

COERS/ONEDOORS UNITED OVER THIS EYEBROW SITUATION

Woonhak kept smiling for the camera with the heroic calm of a man being disrespected in real time.

"Hello," he said brightly, because professionalism was about resilience under fire. "Today is very special surprise live."

Kenneth, beside Keonho at the far end, muttered, "This is still kidnapping with ring light."

Jihoon laughed immediately.

Fans lost their minds again.

The comments moved even faster.

KENNETH LMAOOOO

why does this feel illegal

jihoon laughing already means disaster

Woonhak looks like he’s still processing

Keonho is so pretty help

That last one Woonhak did not appreciate either. Not because Keonho wasn’t pretty. Keonho was painfully pretty. That was part of the administrative burden of existing near him. But there was only so much a man could endure in one evening when his own eyebrows were apparently public property and his seatmate’s looked like they had been granted government funding.

Under the table, Woonhak’s phone buzzed once.

He glanced down just enough to look natural.

Jihoon.

Of course.

Jihoonie 🪼: shin-hyung type apparently was wasians?

Jihoonie 🪼: should we tell him that martin’s not available?

Woonhak nearly choked on nothing.

He did not look up immediately. That would have been suicidal. Because right there, off-camera but still visible enough in the background blur of the live room, sat Martin.

Martin with James.

Martin without Juhoon for once, which should not have mattered nearly as much as it did and yet somehow did, because it left Martin socially unoccupied in a way Woonhak’s eyes found impossible to ignore. He was sitting a little behind the main camera line with a can of Milkis in one hand, his body angled toward James but his face turned slightly toward the room, bright and attentive and unfairly easy to look at.

And yes, Woonhak noticed the eyebrows.

Blonde now, or close enough under the lights to count. Softer than before. Lighter. Still expressive, still very Martin, but pale enough to make his whole face look somehow younger and sharper at once. Woonhak looked once, then looked away, then looked back with all the furtive shame of a man who would absolutely insist he was being discreet and was technically correct because discreet was not the same thing as over it.

He was not insane.

He was just, unfortunately, not over it.

That was different.

He typed back under the table with the concentration of someone diffusing a bomb.

Woonhakie ☃️: Myungjae hyung is here

Woonhakie ☃️: he’ll take care of shin-hyung

This was, in fact, not just a joke.

Because Myungjae was also there.

Naturally he was.

Myungjae had inserted himself into the supervision cluster like a very pretty emotional hazard in designer clothing, which meant he had already made Martin turn red twice before the live even properly began. Nothing unbearable. Nothing technically crossing lines. Just that warm, shamelessly affectionate style of his, all easy smiles and direct eye contact and the kind of casual verbal touch that made Martin short-circuit in the most visible way possible.

Woonhak, who should have found this irritating and instead found it soothing in a deeply complicated way, watched from behind his camera smile as Myungjae leaned down toward Martin now and said something that made Martin duck his face into his can for a second like carbonation might save him.

James saw it too.

James, being James, looked delighted.

Because of course he did. Martin flustered in public was, to the right kind of older boy, practically a recreational activity.

And Shinyu.

Shinyu was doing a truly terrible job of pretending not to be affected by Martin’s existence tonight.

He stood just off to the side with his leader posture on and his face arranged in that beautiful thunder expression of his, all composed frustration and polished restraint, but every now and then his attention drifted. One glance too many. One beat too long. Not enough for fans to catch through the camera framing, but more than enough for Jihoon, Woonhak, James, and probably half the management team to clock if they had any visual literacy at all.

Woonhak had been right.

He always was, annoyingly enough, when it came to this building’s emotional traffic patterns.

And because fate loved him just enough to be funny, Myungjae apparently clocked it too.

It happened in stages.

First he finished making Martin sufficiently red with some compliment that involved the words "very cute" and "leader nim" in a tone that should have been illegal in shared company property. Then, when Martin actually looked away in that helpless bright embarrassed way of his, Myungjae straightened up, glanced toward Shinyu, smiled very slightly to himself, and pivoted.

Not subtly.

Aggressively.

He went to Drew first.

Woonhak almost respected the strategy. Drew, stern and unimpressed and visibly still recovering from Kenneth’s involvement in the evening’s crimes, was exactly the kind of target Myungjae enjoyed destabilizing when he was in a generous mood. He stepped into Drew’s space with that easy sunshine confidence of his and said something Woonhak couldn’t hear over the live room audio, but the effect was visible enough.

Drew blinked. Actually blinked.

Then Myungjae touched his own chest like he had been personally wounded by whatever Drew said back, laughed, and turned to Shinyu with the exact same bright shameless energy.

Jihoon’s phone buzzed again under the table.

This time Woonhak didn’t even need to look to know the message would be unbearable.

Still, he did.

Jihoonie 🪼: omg

Jihoonie 🪼: he’s crowd-controlling with flirting

Woonhak bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling into the live.

Because yes.

That was exactly what Myungjae was doing.

He had apparently decided that if Martin was becoming a visual problem for Shinyu, then the easiest solution was to become an even more immediate visual problem himself. It was sort of heroic, in a deranged way. Within thirty seconds Shinyu no longer looked distracted by Martin at all, because he was too busy being politely attacked by Myungjae’s undivided attention.

And Drew, who had somehow also been dragged into the blast radius, now looked like a man discovering too late that good posture did not in fact protect you from extroverts.

It was excellent.

On camera, meanwhile, the live had become exactly what everyone should have expected: a complete disaster in three languages.

Not orderly chaos either. Not neat, idol-friendly multilingual charm. Real chaos. The kind that happened when four boys with overlapping but uneven communication systems all committed at once to making a thing work through force of personality rather than planning.

Woonhak’s Korean came easily and his English came in bursts of confidence that got less grammatical the more animated he became. Kenneth’s English was perfectly functional right up until Woonhak looked directly at him, at which point it immediately fell apart and started borrowing from Spanish out of self-defense. Jihoon and Keonho, both unfortunately fluent, spent half the live translating and the other half making things worse by enjoying themselves too much.

It started harmlessly enough.

Woonhak explained, in broad emotional strokes and highly selective truth, that they had all happened to be in the building and decided it would be "fun and meaningful" to do a surprise cross-group live.

Kenneth, sitting beside him with the expression of a boy who had signed no such statement, muttered, "This is revisionist history."

Jihoon translated with saintly calm, "Kenneth says he’s very happy to be here."

Fans screamed.

JIHOON EVIL

KENNETH’S FACE LMAOOOO

they’re all lying i can feel it

Keonho trying not to laugh help

Woonhak looks like he’s one eyebrow comment away from violence

That last one earned the camera his brightest smile and absolutely nothing else.

Keonho got asked about how he ended up there and accidentally told too much in the sweet, doomed way he always did.

"I dunno," he said, smiling because smiling was how he cushioned impact. "Woonhak-hyung said there was… tradition."

Kenneth turned to the camera at once. "Fake tradition."

Jihoon nodded solemnly. "Fake tradition. Important distinction."

Woonhak threw both hands up. "No, no, no. It can still become real if we repeat."

"That’s how cult starts," Kenneth said.

"That’s how fandom starts too," Jihoon replied.

Fans went insane again.

There was so much joy in the comments now that even Woonhak, salty and tired and still vaguely suspicious of any room with dramatic lighting, had to admit the chemistry was working. ONEDOORS were already adopting Kenneth outright. COERS were clipping Keonho’s soft little laugh into probable future edits. Santos Bravos fans were losing their minds over Drew standing in the back looking like he regretted every international decision HYBE had ever made. TWS fans had, naturally, already begun zooming in on Shinyu in the background only to find him being aggressively occupied by Myungjae, which seemed to be generating its own entirely separate discourse in real time.

And still, under the table, Jihoon kept texting.

Jihoonie 🪼: drew-hyung is trying so hard not to smile

Jihoonie 🪼: myungjae-hyung is insane

Jihoonie 🪼: martin’s brows are kind of good blonde

Woonhak looked at that last one for one second too long.

Then typed back:

Woonhakie ☃️: shut up

He did not elaborate.

He did not need to.

Because yes, they were good blonde. Softer. More visible somehow because they were lighter. Woonhak could clock that from three meters away and then immediately hate himself for clocking it with that level of precision.

But Martin was sitting there laughing now at something James had said, one hand over his mouth, eyes bright, brows pale under the lights, and Woonhak was only human. A disappointed human, maybe. A compromised human. But still human.

He looked away before it became anything unseemly.

Myungjae caught Martin’s attention again almost at once, thank God, and then when Martin turned pink for the third time in one evening, Myungjae finally drifted back toward Shinyu and Drew with the breezy confidence of somebody setting small controlled fires for community benefit.

Woonhak texted Jihoon again.

Woonhakie ☃️: told you

Woonhakie ☃️: myungjae hyung got it

Jihoon glanced down, then up toward the background, where Myungjae had somehow managed to say something to Shinyu that made him go perfectly still for half a second and Drew look like he wanted to resign from emotional complexity entirely.

Jihoon texted back:

Jihoonie 🪼: yeah

Jihoonie 🪼: he’s doing crowd control with face card

That was so correct Woonhak almost smiled into camera again.

The live itself continued to unravel beautifully.

Kenneth tried to explain, in English, that he had not agreed to "ghost thing" and immediately derailed because Woonhak interrupted him, which caused Kenneth to switch to Spanish in self-defense, which caused Woonhak to answer in English with Korean sentence rhythm, which caused both Jihoon and Keonho to collapse laughing while trying to translate the emotional gist for the audience.

"Wait, wait," Jihoon said, tears in his eyes. "No, okay. Kenneth is saying he was deceived."

"I was," Kenneth insisted.

"Woonhakie is saying it was for friendship."

"It was."

"Keonho is saying he didn’t know the level of haunting."

"I really didn’t," Keonho said, smiling apologetically into the camera like that would help his legal standing. "I thought it would be, like, cute scary. Not… full building."

"Full building is not a phrase," Kenneth said.

"It is now," Jihoon replied.

By the twenty-minute mark the fans were feral.

They wanted this unit again. They wanted the full story. They wanted translations. They wanted managers to release the security footage. They wanted Kenneth and Woonhak left alone in a room with subtitles for the public good. They wanted Keonho’s skincare routine. They wanted Jihoon arrested.

And then, because he was Jihoon and because no good live should be allowed to end at merely successful chaos when it could instead become memorable chaos, he leaned back in his chair, looked at the other three with that bright wicked glint in his eye, and said, "Okay."

Woonhak felt it immediately.

That tone.

That exact tone.

The one that meant Jihoon had found a way to make tomorrow everybody else’s problem.

"Since this is cross-group peace summit," Jihoon went on, smiling into the camera, "I think we need one final mission."

Kenneth narrowed his eyes. "No."

Keonho laughed weakly. "Hyung."

Woonhak just stared. "Why do you say mission like this."

Jihoon ignored all three of them and looked into the camera with complete seriousness.

"A waacking contest."

The room behind the camera went silent for half a second.

Then Martin made the most helpless delighted noise Woonhak had ever heard from a person with legal responsibilities.

James laughed.

Myungjae clapped once in pure approval. Drew looked offended on behalf of structure. Shinyu, despite himself, smiled. Riwoo somewhere in the back muttered, "This building deserves whatever happens next."

On camera, the comments exploded so hard they became almost unreadable.

WAAACKING CONTEST????

OH MY GOD YES

KENNETH PLEASE

KEONHO WOULD EAT

WOONHAK VS JIHOON PLEASE

this is the best live of my life

MANAGERS LET IT HAPPEN

Kenneth looked at Jihoon like he had just suggested ritual combat in a parking lot. "Why is that your ending."

"Because," Jihoon said, smile widening, "you’ve all already survived the haunted building. Might as well leave with dignity."

"That is not dignity."

"That is content."

And somewhere off camera, despite every plan management had made for a short, controlled, consequence-themed live, nobody said no quickly enough.

They moved the chairs back first.

That was how all terrible ideas became official in HYBE. Not with approval. Not with structure. With furniture shifting.

The live camera angle widened a little as Jihoon and Kenneth stood up from behind the table and started dragging their chairs out of frame. Keonho followed, still smiling in that soft, doomed way of his, while Woonhak rose with the full-body awareness of a man whose pride had already been involved in too many public incidents for one evening and yet was somehow still available for more.

The comments exploded.

Of course they did.

The second the fans realized the live was no longer ending politely and had instead developed into some kind of cross-label dance challenge with all the warning signs of a future clip compilation, the chat ceased being language and became force.

OH MY GOD THEY’RE MOVING TABLES

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

WAAACKING??? FOR REAL???

JAMES IN THE BACK LMAO

MARTIN DO SOMETHING

WOONHAK WIN THIS FOR THE BROWS

That last one Woonhak wished he had not seen.

Then, from off camera, James’s voice rang out bright and amused and entirely too invested for a man who had spent the evening acting superior.

"Martin, play the beat!"

There was a tiny beat of silence.

Then Martin’s voice, warm and instant and completely game, came back from the supervision section. "Okay!"

Woonhak should not have looked.

He did anyway.

That was his first mistake.

Martin was already fumbling his phone out with that bright, eager little smile he got when somebody asked him to do something and he was happy to be useful. He leaned in over the screen, blonde brows pale under the light, mouth parted slightly in concentration. Then he looked up once, quick and shining, as if making sure everyone was ready.

Under the harsh overhead room lights he’d already been pretty. That was annoying enough. But now, as he cued the track and the phone glow lit him from below, he should have looked ridiculous.

He did not.

That was the true violence of Martin. He almost never used his face on purpose, and the universe still insisted on making him luminous like a personal insult.

The beat dropped.

It was not normal.

It was not reasonable.

It was not, Woonhak felt, what anyone had the right to call a fair competitive environment.

Martin had not simply put on Boogie Wonderland. He had put on some deranged remix of it, all chopped-up disco glitter and harder percussion, the bass dragged meaner and stranger underneath the original brightness until the whole thing sounded like Studio 54 had been possessed by a dance practice room at 2 a.m.

The room screamed.

Not metaphorically.

Jihoon screamed. Keonho clapped both hands over his mouth and then immediately started laughing. Kenneth shouted, "No! No, that is crazy!" James cackled off camera in a way that suggested he had expected exactly this and was still pleased by the execution.

Martin, holding the phone and grinning like he had personally invented serotonin, looked impossibly pleased with himself.

This did not help Woonhak move on.

This also did not help derail Shinyu’s attention, because Woonhak was not the only one with eyes. Across the room, Shinyu had gone visibly still again, gaze pulled toward Martin with that same stupid, helpless, not-even-subtle-enough-to-be-respectable fixation that had been haunting him all night. Martin under phone light, blonde brows, remixing disco from sheer instinctive chaos. Apparently that was enough to make a man forget his own weather pattern.

Woonhak hated this building.

Kenneth went first.

He insisted on this loudly and with the overcompensation of somebody who had realized too late that saying no would make things worse. "I go first," he declared, pointing at the open floor. "Because if I die, then everybody know level immediately."

"That’s not confidence," Jihoon said.

"That’s leadership," Woonhak replied automatically.

Kenneth gave them both a filthy look and stepped into the cleared space.

And then, unfairly, he was good.

Of course he was.

Former child actor, performer instincts, enough natural confidence to survive this building at sixteen, and now apparently a dramatic sense of line too. He hit the beat with that loose, sharp, shoulder-led quality that made waacking look halfway between argument and magic. Fans lost their minds. The comments flew by too fast to read. Drew, from the back, looked visibly like he had not agreed to this and was nevertheless being forced to accept that his maknae could absolutely weaponize a hand line when needed.

"Okay!" Martin yelled, delighted.

Kenneth pointed two fingers at the camera at the end, spun out of it cleanly, and then returned to his seat with the air of someone pretending not to care whether he’d eaten. He had.

Keonho went second and immediately turned the whole thing emotional by accident.

That was just his gift. Everything he did had the air of somebody who was not entirely sure how he’d gotten here but was determined to be sweet about it anyway. His waacking was less sharp than Kenneth’s, less precise than Jihoon’s was always going to be, but it had a softness inside the rhythm that made the room unexpectedly fond of him. Even James shouted "Keonho!" from off camera with enough enthusiasm to make Keonho blush clear to the ears and miss one beat because he smiled too hard.

Woonhak saw that and thought, not for the first time, that beauty in HYBE really was a public health hazard.

Jihoon went third and was, unfortunately, a menace.

He had style in the way some boys had knives. Deliberately. With theatre. Every arm line looked like it knew exactly what it was doing to the room. He hit angles like he was drafting legal threats in air. Fans, naturally, lost whatever remained of their composure. Somewhere in the background Shinyu made the tiniest long-suffering sound of a leader who had predicted this from birth.

Then it was Woonhak’s turn.

He stepped forward to immediate screaming from the comments and enough real-life noise in the room to make his chest lift with adrenaline. This, at least, he knew how to do. Performance was easy. Bodies made sense. Music made sense. You listened, you moved, you trusted the line and the beat and the way your limbs knew more than your brain ever would.

He rolled his shoulders once, feeling the remix throb through the floor.

Then, over the music, because the universe had singled him out specifically for further character development, he heard Myungjae’s voice.

"That wallpaper is so cool!"

It came from behind and to the left, near where Martin still stood with James and the phone.

Woonhak did not mean to hear Martin’s answer.

He heard it anyway.

Clear as a bell.

"Thanks, hyung! Juhoonie took it!"

Softest voice imaginable.

Not loud. Not for the room. Not for the audience. Just that stupid fond little warmth Martin got when he said Juhoon’s name, like the syllables themselves deserved gentler handling than other words.

Woonhak did not know if heartbreak made your hearing better or if he had, in fact, developed some kind of superpower out of emotional necessity. He only knew that he caught every single part of the sentence over a room full of noise and disco violence and his own pulse.

Juhoonie took it.

Of course he did.

Of course Martin’s wallpaper would be some domestic, quietly devastating thing Juhoon had taken. Of course Martin would answer like that, voice gone all soft and loyal and sunlight-touched without even realizing he was committing manslaughter in public.

Something in Woonhak’s body gave up on mercy.

He moved.

It was not what he had planned. He was not even sure he had planned anything after that. He just knew the beat hit, his limbs followed, and the next thing his body did was meaner, faster, and much more committed than safety required. He spun into the line with all the force of a man trying to turn humiliation into geometry, hit the arm sequence harder than intended, and then, because apparently grief improved risk appetite, he let the momentum keep going.

He slid.

Too far.

Far enough that every sane part of his body should have hit the brakes.

Instead he dropped cleanly into a split and landed on his ass with a force so shocking that for half a beat the entire room forgot how to react.

It looked insane.

More importantly, it looked intentional.

That was the miracle.

For one breathless second Woonhak just stayed there, split blown wide, one hand braced back, chin up, face set in the exact expression of a man who had absolutely meant to do that and would kill anyone who suggested otherwise.

Then the room erupted.

The comments exploded. Kenneth screamed. Jihoon physically folded over. Keonho looked like he might leave his body from admiration. James shouted something unrepeatably thrilled from off camera. Even Drew clapped once, because excellence was excellence and adults were still weak to spectacle. Martin made the kind of shocked delighted noise that would carry Woonhak through at least two future bad days.

"Woonhakie!" Myungjae yelled.

"Are you okay?" Martin shouted at the exact same time, which was much less useful to Woonhak’s recovery than it should have been.

He was not okay.

His ass hurt with immediate and democratic sincerity. His heart hurt in the older, pettier way. His pride, however, had survived and was currently doing victory laps.

So Woonhak smiled.

Not a pain smile. Not a grimace. A proper stage smile, bright and almost smug, as if dropping into a split hard enough to meet God through your tailbone had been his intention from the start.

He lifted one hand toward the camera and flicked his wrist at the final beat like he had just concluded a choreographic argument and won.

The room lost its mind.

Jihoon, useless with laughter, slapped the table hard enough to make the Milkis cans jump. Kenneth was half standing, shouting in English and Spanish at once. Keonho looked at Woonhak like he’d just witnessed a saint. Myungjae was clapping over his head like he was at a festival. Martin’s face had gone full bright, both hands over his mouth now, blonde brows lifted high in astonished delight.

Shinyu, who had been getting derailed by Martin all evening, did in fact look away from him at last.

Only because Woonhak had just concussed himself into victory.

Worth it, probably.

Woonhak rose with as much dignity as a man could manage while every relevant bone in his lower body was filing a complaint. He got to his feet, nodded once like this happened to him all the time, and returned to his place to screams of triumph from fans who had no idea they were watching real pain transfigured into accidental art.

Jihoon leaned in immediately, still laughing so hard his voice came out shredded. "You psycho."

Woonhak sat down slowly, every nerve from hip to spine trying to assassinate him, and smiled at the camera with the dead-eyed grace of a professional.

"I won," he said.

"You did," Kenneth admitted, appalled.

Keonho was still staring. "Hyung, that was crazy."

"That," Jihoon said, wiping at his eyes, "was either incredible improvisation or emotional self-harm."

Woonhak kept smiling, because cameras were still on and because if he stopped smiling he might actually have to acknowledge the exact amount of pain currently blooming in two different regions of his life.

His ass was one kind of agony. His heart was another.

But the room was still buzzing with his win, Martin was still looking at him like that had been the coolest thing in the world, and somewhere in the comments ONEDOORS were probably already calling it legendary.

So really, he thought, straightening just a little despite the ache, human suffering had once again produced excellent content.

By the time the live ended for real, the building had started winding itself back down.

Not peacefully. HYBE never did anything as clean as peace. But the edges were softening. Managers had gone from active crisis mode to logistical triage. Staff who did not live with their idols had begun reclaiming the shape of their own evenings, gathering clipboards, phones, tote bags, and the shreds of their patience with the weary dignity of people who had not chosen this career for the overtime but had accepted it as the tax on proximity to beautiful idiots. The children, meanwhile, were being sorted back into their proper ecosystems.

Collected.

That was the word for it.

The maknaes had been collected.

Jihoon by TWS. Keonho by CORTIS. Kenneth by Santos Bravos. Woonhak by BOYNEXTDOOR, though "by" suggested a level of obedience that felt flattering under the circumstances.

There was a strange tenderness to it, Woonhak thought, watching the room loosen after the performance high had burned through. The fake live had become a real live, the punishment had become content, the content had become fan joy, and now everything was shrinking back to size. The chairs were being pushed in. The comments were still moving fast on the replay screen. Managers were starting to make the little herding motions adults made when teenagers had run out of sanctioned chaos and needed to be redistributed before they found more.

Some managers, unlike others, would now actually get to go home.

That part felt almost holy.

You could tell who they were by the lightness in their shoulders. The staff who did not live in dorms with idols moved through cleanup with the soft, disbelieving speed of people already imagining their own couches. Their own bathrooms. Their own silence. Their own fridges full of food not labeled by nutritionists and teenage greed.

Woonhak respected them on a spiritual level.

The dorm managers, of course, looked no such relief. Their work had not ended. It had simply changed buildings.

Which was how you got scenes like this one, where BOYNEXTDOOR’s manager was already standing near the door with the posture of a man counting heads internally, while Shinyu’s manager looked resigned to driving one of his members home with a lecture still warm in the chamber, and CORTIS’s manager had entered that eerily calm state that meant Keonho’s real consequences had not yet begun.

Woonhak should have been paying attention to his own exit route.

Instead he was looking at Martin.

This was, unfortunately, a pattern.

Now that the adrenaline had worn off enough to make room for observational suffering again, Woonhak noticed the small things with startling clarity. Martin’s hair had gotten longer. That was the first thing. Longer and permed in a way that made it sit around his face more softly, the texture catching light and movement differently now, giving him a more grown-in sort of brightness than before. Not polished exactly. Martin never looked manufactured. He looked lived in. Warm. But there was a new shape to him.

And his body.

That was ruder.

He looked longer somehow. Not just taller, though Woonhak was almost certain he was taller too, which felt unfair because Martin had already been tall enough to be emotionally disruptive on a structural level. But longer. Limbs stretched into themselves. Frame sharpened while somehow still looking open and kind. The sort of physical change that made a person seem like they had been pulled gently upward by time and good lighting.

Woonhak hated puberty in other people.

Or late-adolescent finishing, or whatever the proper scientific phrase was for somebody becoming more of themselves in a way that made onlookers miserable.

He was not staring.

He was observing with pain.

That was different.

Martin, oblivious as always to the scale of his own impact, was standing with one hand wrapped around a half-finished Milkis and the other tucked into his hoodie pocket, laughing at something James had just said. His blonde brows caught the room light faintly. His new hair moved when he turned. And then, because the universe had not yet exhausted its supply of personal attacks against Woonhak, Shinyu stepped closer to him.

Woonhak heard the line by accident.

So did everyone within a ten-foot radius, because Shinyu, having apparently spent the entire evening being emotionally rewired by Martin’s existence and Myungjae’s tactical crowd-control flirting, chose that exact moment to say the most unoriginal pick-up line ever crafted by a man who had clearly never needed one before.

"Are you a skyscraper?" Shinyu said, with a level of sincerity that should have triggered safety alarms. "Because I can see my heart race to the top."

Silence hit the room like a dropped tray.

Not full silence. James snorted immediately, which ruined it in the best way. But for one golden beat the world held still around the sheer breathtaking mediocrity of the line.

Martin blinked.

Once.

Twice.

Then went red so fast it was almost charitable.

Jihoon, who had been half in the process of standing and half in the process of dying from residual waacking laughter already, grabbed the edge of the table with both hands like he needed stabilization from the material world.

"Oh my god," he said. "He is never not shy and suddenly he says cheesy stuff like this?"

That was the thing.

If Shinyu had always been smooth, the line would have been embarrassing in an ordinary way. But Shinyu, beautiful thunder that he was, did not usually launch himself into open-book, skyline-themed nonsense in front of other people. Which meant Martin had, in fact, derailed him so thoroughly that he was now using stock rom-com material in public like a man being piloted by a substitute personality.

Apparently Martin could change men’s personalities.

Apparently that was one of his powers too.

Woonhak wanted that stricken and entered into the public record.

James heard Jihoon, looked at Shinyu, looked at Martin, and then snorted so hard it should have disqualified him from elegance permanently.

It did not.

That was the terrible part.

Even that made him more attractive. The open amusement, the cheekbones catching when he laughed, the unfair line of his mouth as he looked away like the room had become too embarrassing even for him. Woonhak saw it and felt, with full spiritual exhaustion, that this building really was just a machine for making already handsome people more unbearable.

Martin, still red, said something too soft for Woonhak to catch. Shinyu looked like he wanted the ground to open and spare him the aftermath. Myungjae, naturally, was delighted beyond reason. Drew looked like his disappointment in one teenager had now spread to adjacent demographics. Riwoo had both hands in his pockets and the expression of a man who had paid nothing for tonight’s entertainment and still gotten premium seating.

Woonhak, for his part, had reached the end of his own emotional resources.

He wanted, very suddenly and very specifically, to run directly into Myungjae-hyung’s open arms and be soothed until sleep. That was not metaphor. That was not exaggeration. He could practically picture it: Myungjae dramatic and warm and making offended little noises on his behalf while Woonhak folded himself into a hoodie that smelled like expensive detergent and emotional availability. It felt medically necessary.

He was halfway through deciding whether this was dignified enough to attempt when another voice stopped him.

"Here."

It was the cafeteria ahjumma.

Of course it was.

She stood behind the counter still, somehow unchanged by the hour, by the idols, by the managers, by the emotional debris of the evening. She had the air of someone older than nonsense and therefore immune to its glamour. In one hand she held a napkin-wrapped fish-shaped pastry.

An extra bunggeoppang.

She looked directly at him and extended it across the counter with the matter-of-fact generosity of a woman who had assessed the room and identified the child most in need of carbohydrate intervention.

"You look like you need one."

Woonhak blinked.

Then, because he was still nineteen and puppy-hearted under all his performance instincts, he went at once.

He took the warm bundle from her with both hands. "Thank you."

She looked at his face.

Not at the performance of it. Not at the camera self. Just at his face. At the actual boy under the evening.

And then she added, in the kindest, strangest tone, like a grandma making up wisdom straight from the middle of her own heart and not particularly caring whether grammar or logic approved, "Don’t worry about your eyebrows. It makes your heart softer when it healed."

It was not supposed to make sense.

It did not make sense.

The sentence had the dreamlike structure of something true in a language nobody had standardized properly yet.

But Woonhak felt it land anyway.

Straight in the chest.

Something in him, sore and salty and overextended, gave way all at once. Not into crying, exactly. Not here. Not under these lights and these eyes. But into that sudden, almost painful swelling that happened when kindness found you right in the place you’d been performing around all night.

His heart swelled two sizes despite itself.

"Ahjumma," he said, and even to his own ears his voice sounded younger.

She waved him off instantly. "Eat before it gets cold."

That, too, felt like wisdom.

When he turned back toward the others, bun still warm in his hands, the room had thinned a little more. Jihoon was being reclaimed by TWS in stages, though he was still looking over his shoulder in active disbelief at Shinyu’s skyscraper line. Keonho had been pulled close enough to James to know he was entering the dangerous post-amusement zone. Kenneth was with Drew, looking chastened but fed, which was probably the healthiest possible outcome for the night.

Martin looked up and saw the pastry.

His whole face softened. "Oh. You got extra."

Woonhak lifted it a little. "Ahjumma said I look like I need one."

Martin, because he could never help being sincere at the exact worst possible moment, smiled like that made perfect sense. "You did."

That should have hurt.

Strangely, with the warmth of the pastry in his hands and the ahjumma’s impossible blessing still sitting in his chest, it didn’t. Or not in the same sharp way.

It just made him feel tired.

Tired in the way that came after too much adrenaline and too much feeling and too many pretty people under bad lighting. Tired enough that going home suddenly sounded less like defeat and more like mercy.

He took one bite of the bunggeoppang.

Still warm.

Sweet bean filling. Crisp edges. Real and ordinary and exactly what it was supposed to be.

Behind him, someone laughed again. Ahead of him, managers resumed gathering children. Around him, HYBE slowly returned to its default state of expensive exhaustion.

And standing there in the cafeteria under ugly human light, pastry in hand, heart still weirdly tender from a sentence that made no sense at all, Woonhak thought that maybe healing really did work like that sometimes.

Just warm, a little late, and handed over by someone who had already decided you deserved it.

EPILOGUE

The next afternoon, under brighter light and vastly worse emotional conditions, they came back to the cafeteria to say thank you.

This had not been Woonhak’s idea.

Woonhak, if consulted honestly, would have preferred to let the previous night dissolve into group chats, fandom edits, and selective denial. He had already suffered enough. His body still remembered the split. His pride still remembered the eyebrow comments. His heart still remembered Martin saying, in that soft stupid fond voice, Thanks, hyung. Juhoonie took it. A man could only be expected to survive so much in one fiscal quarter.

But Jihoon, apparently possessed by the dangerous combination of guilt and curiosity, had texted the group that morning:

Jihoonie 🪼: we should thank the cafeteria staff

Jihoonie 🪼: and also verify some things before i decide whether i’m hallucinating

Kenneth, who should have refused on principle, immediately agreed because he too had reached the stage of fear where administrative clarity felt holy.

Keonho had only replied:

Keonho 🐶: i dunno

Keonho 🐶: i also want to know about the ahjumma

So now here they were again. The same four boys, minus the managers and hyungs and audience and soundtrack, standing in the daylight-bright cafeteria like defendants returning to the scene of a beautifully stupid crime.

Everything looked worse in the day.

Not creepier. Just more ordinary. The trays were stacked. The counters were clean. The fluorescent light flattened every mystery into an HR-compliant surface. It was, Woonhak thought bitterly, much easier to feel brave in a place once all the lighting had stopped trying to kill you.

The cafeteria head was near the register station, going over something on a clipboard with the detached dignity of a man who had definitely not spent last night supervising a cross-label emotional incident involving tteokbokki diplomacy and fake Weverse Live consequences.

Jihoon stepped forward first, because when things needed to begin in a socially acceptable way, Jihoon could usually force his face into something approximating it.

"Excuse me," he said politely. "We just wanted to thank the cafeteria for yesterday."

The man looked up.

"Yesterday?"

"Yes," Jihoon said. "For staying open late. And for the extra food."

There was a pause.

Not a dramatic one.

Not yet.

Just a slight stillness in the cafeteria head’s face, like his brain had reached for a file and found the folder empty.

"Late?"

Woonhak stepped in, because this was clearly a misunderstanding and Woonhak had always believed misunderstandings could be fixed if enough sincerity was thrown at them fast enough. "Yes, yesterday night. After eight. There was tteokbokki. And bunggeoppang. The ahjumma stayed."

The cafeteria head blinked.

Then he looked genuinely confused.

"We closed at seven yesterday."

The room went still.

Not fully. The cafeteria still hummed around them with daytime normality. Somewhere a tray clinked. Somewhere a vending machine compressor kicked in. Somewhere two staff from a different department laughed at something on a phone. But inside the little square of air the four boys occupied, the temperature changed.

Jihoon smiled.

Too quickly.

The smile of a boy whose body had decided to look pleasant while his soul started climbing a wall.

"Closed at seven," he repeated.

The cafeteria head nodded. "Yes. No one seemed to be taking overtime in the building, and no rooms were booked. We shut on schedule."

Kenneth stared at him.

"No rooms?"

"No."

Keonho made a tiny sound.

Woonhak’s fingers, without permission, tightened around the strap of his bag.

Jihoon tried again, voice still calm, still polite, which was deeply alarming now that Woonhak knew what Jihoon sounded like when panic had gone indoors. "Sorry. I think maybe we’re talking about the wrong person. The ahjumma. She gave us extra bunggeoppang."

The cafeteria head frowned.

"There’s no one here like that."

Woonhak laughed once.

Not because anything was funny.

Because sometimes the body tried to escape through the wrong exit.

"No, there is," he said. "She was serving. She said if we’re all going to stand there, at least eat while we get scolded."

Jihoon turned to look at him.

Kenneth turned too.

Keonho had gone very pale.

The cafeteria head shook his head slowly. "We haven’t had any older women on the late shift in years. HYBE doesn’t allow overtime for staff over fifty-five."

A silence with teeth closed around them.

"And," he went on, because apparently mercy was not included in the meal plan, "we haven’t served tteokbokki here for a few years now. Not after the Yongsan one got popular. Nobody ordered it anymore."

Woonhak felt his stomach drop so hard it was almost physical.

Not a metaphorical drop. Not a poetic drop. A real, body-first, horrible little lurch.

Because he remembered the tteokbokki.

The steam. The red gloss of it. The ahjumma’s ladle tapping the metal tray. Kenneth’s face when he saw it. Jihoon’s whisper of No way. The smell.

You could not all hallucinate steam.

Kenneth spoke first.

That alone told Woonhak exactly how bad this was, because Kenneth had, over the course of one night in HYBE, developed a robust instinct for silence whenever things became spiritually expensive.

"No," Kenneth said softly. "No, bro."

The cafeteria head looked at him, puzzled.

Jihoon stepped in fast. Too fast. "There were at least fourteen people there."

The man blinked.

"What?"

"Us," Jihoon said. "Our managers. Leaders. Hyungs. There were at least fourteen people who saw her. Who got served."

That was the worst part. Not the pastry. Not even the impossible tteokbokki menu resurrection.

The witnesses.

Martin had seen her. James had heard her. Shinyu, Drew, Myungjae, Riwoo, the managers. All of them. This was not one tired idol boy making a folklore problem for himself. This was a documented incident with cross-label exposure.

The cafeteria head looked increasingly uncomfortable now in the way adults did when younger people insisted on something impossible and the adult had to decide whether this was a prank, a misunderstanding, or the first page of a report they did not want to write.

"I don’t know what to tell you," he said at last. "There was no one here."

Keonho took one tiny step backward.

"I dunno," he whispered, and then stopped, because there was nowhere to go with that sentence that didn’t end in religion.

Woonhak stared at the counter.

At the polished metal. At the normal trays. At the dry, boring, aggressively current reality of it all.

No tteokbokki. No ahjumma. No overtime. No reason for anything last night to have happened the way it did.

Which meant the bunggeoppang had happened anyway.

The extra one.

The warm one in his hands.

The one she’d given only to him.

And the words.

Don’t worry about your eyebrows. It makes your heart softer when it healed.

It still did not make sense.

The sentence was grammatically haunted. Emotionally true and structurally impossible. It sounded less like something a person said and more like something the building had translated badly on behalf of mercy.

His heart swelled anyway, just remembering it.

Jihoon broke the silence first, because that was his role in disasters. Not preventing them. Naming them before they got ideas.

"So."

Kenneth looked at him with open hostility. "Don’t ‘so’ this."

Jihoon swallowed once. "So it’s not just the rooftop."

"That is not helping."

"It’s also not not helping."

Keonho, still pale, looked at Woonhak with an expression that was weirdly soft around the fear. "Hyung."

Woonhak turned.

Keonho glanced at his eyebrows.

Then, because apparently the universe had decided it was still committed to thematic consistency, he smiled just a little.

"I guess," he said quietly, "it wasn’t only people with minimum eyebrows."

Jihoon let out one brittle laugh. Kenneth made a strangled sound that was either agreement or despair. Woonhak himself should have been offended by minimum eyebrows. On any other day, in any other room, he would have been.

Instead he stood there and thought about the extra fish-shaped pastry wrapped in napkin warmth.

About the soft impossible sentence. About how kindness had found him specifically. About how maybe whatever had served them all last night had seen four frightened boys and a room full of exhausted older kids and adults and decided hunger came before logic.

And him.

It had seen him.

Not because his eyebrows were weak. Not because they were cursed. Not because some Weverse user had launched a folk belief into his evening and gotten lucky.

Because his heart had been broken enough to be noticeable.

Because defeat was a kind of openness. Because soft things, once hurt, sometimes became easier for strange mercies to find.

The thought sat in his chest like a small warm thing with nowhere useful to go.

Kenneth looked at the cafeteria head one last time and said, with impeccable dignity under impossible circumstances, "Thank you for your… lack of help."

"Kenneth," Jihoon hissed.

"No, what. I’m being honest."

Keonho let out a tiny helpless laugh. Even now. Even here.

The cafeteria head watched them leave with the wary expression of a man who had begun his day in food service and had, without consent, wandered into folklore management.

The four of them made it halfway to the elevator bank before anyone spoke again.

Then Jihoon said, very flatly, "I’m never making fun of your ghost eyebrows again."

Woonhak looked at him.

"That’s not an apology."

"It’s a lifestyle revision."

Kenneth shuddered. "No more fake traditions. No more rooftop. No more healing frequencies. No more stylish old women appearing with food. I am done with Korean supernatural hospitality."

Keonho, walking a little closer than usual to the others, glanced at Woonhak again and said softly, "She liked you, hyung."

Woonhak looked down.

At nothing, really. At the floor. At his own sneakers. At the place where the extra pastry had been in his hands the night before.

"She said your heart softer when it healed," Keonho continued. "I think maybe… she meant it kindly."

It was such a Keonho sentence. A sentence with the exact shape of his sweetness. Earnest, slightly broken, and somehow landing cleaner because of it.

Woonhak wanted to laugh.

Instead he swallowed.

"Yeah," he said.

And then, because he could not help himself, because some parts of him were still a little boy no matter how many stage outfits and camera angles had happened since, he reached up and touched one eyebrow lightly with two fingers.

Kenneth saw.

"No," Kenneth said at once. "Don’t start."

Jihoon was already smiling again, weak and bright and doomed. "Too late. He’s entering his healing arc."

"This is not healing arc," Woonhak protested.

"It is," said Keonho.

"It’s literally eyebrow grief recovery," Jihoon added.

"That’s not a thing."

Kenneth looked at him sidelong. "Bro. After last night, I think many things are a thing."

That shut him up for a second.

Because yes.

That was the trouble now.

The world had widened by one impossible ahjumma and a tray of tteokbokki nobody had served in years.

And maybe, Woonhak thought as they reached the elevators and instinctively all checked the stickers first, that was the real ending.

Not that he had seen a ghost.

Not even that a ghost had maybe seen him back.

But that in a building full of glass and ambition and pretty people trying not to bleed on each other, when his heart had been at its stupidest and sorest and most defeated, something kind had handed him one extra warm thing and said, in nonsense words that still worked somehow:

Don’t worry. It makes your heart softer when it healed.

Which was not supposed to make sense.

It did anyway.

Which, to Woonhak’s great annoyance, felt a little like being okay.

And that was bad news for his self-pity, but pretty good news for the rest of him.