A Late-Blooming Flower
"Yeah. I figured as much."
[Jang Seon-woo Incident Summary (File Size Warning)]
After carefully reading every line of the post, Hyerim muttered under her breath with a face sharp enough to cut glass. The thought that their oppas had been forced to swallow bucketfuls of abuse they never should have heard—all because of that lunatic—made her blood boil.
Of all times. In the middle of voting, of all moments, he had tried to torpedo their reputation. Unforgivable. If Han-hee's ranking dropped because of this, she was not going to let it go.
"Is this really how you want to live?"
As a member of a generation that understood better than anyone how other people's attention turned into money, Hyerim was finely tuned to the current of the times. She clicked her tongue. Even to her young eyes, the thin vanity of someone who tried to prop up his own ego by making a sacrifice of others was painfully obvious.
"That kind of thing doesn't work anymore…"
Reading the post only confirmed it: the guy had been rotten from the start, and his eye for business "concepts" was just as trash. Hyerim shook her head and hit the back button. She didn't even want to add a comment. Just another piece of garbage destined to be forgotten.
What mattered far more was Episode 13, about to air.
"Don't get your hopes up too high."
People who had already gone to the live taping had been screaming "legend of legends" so hard that her heart was already fluttering. But high expectations only made for bigger disappointments—that was the rule.
"I just want to hope a little. Moderately."
Hyerim couldn't quite smother the balloon of anticipation swelling in her chest. Maybe the moment you told yourself not to expect anything, you had already lost.
Even so, Episode 13 more than repaid every scrap of that hope. Watching the Violet Team's stage, Hyerim found herself stamping her feet without realizing it.
"Aah! Ack! What do I do?!"
The boards had been calling them foxy left and right, and they really were pure foxes. Hyerim's bias was still solidly Lee Han-hee, but somewhere along the way the circle had started to expand, bit by bit. Now Kwon Do-ha was her oppa too.
"Are you kidding me?!"
Hyerim, who dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, clutched at her thrashing heart as she stared at their stage outfits. Harnesses were a familiar staple on idol stages—they always showed up at least once—but the moment Kwon Do-ha put one over a clean all-black look, her eyes refused to leave him.
Probably because the model was that good.
Was fashion completed by the face or by the body? The debate never died, but Hyerim declared her verdict on the spot: in this moment, body completed the fashion. Though honestly the face was doing its job too. No—still, those muscles…
Anyway. I have to save this.
From the very first performance they were already making her hunger for the high-quality gifs that would drop later. She had been startled once by the special guest judges before the stages even began, twice by the costumes, and three times by the sheer quality of the performances themselves.
And when the Rose Team's turn came, she finally hit her knees.
The overall white palette of the costumes gave the opening an almost pure, innocent feel. Blue lights glittering over it made her think, at first, that it was a fresh, refreshing concept.
"This feels good."
Every angle cut landed like a photograph—a knife-edge group formation seared into memory. So that was why people had loved it. Just as she started to wonder if it was a little light, a savage high note tore through the track and flipped the entire song on its head. Who was that? Had someone this good at singing even been on the show?
She never got the chance to place the voice. In a blink the stage flooded red; Han Sang-jin spun, his white jacket flaring open, and through the white straps underneath the clean lines of his back muscles flashed into view. Everything else vanished from her mind. No wonder he had been wearing one extra layer alone.
"Backless?"
Staring at the flash of bare skin that punched straight into her vision, Hyerim clapped a hand over her mouth. She had no confidence she could hold back a scream.
Camouflage. True to the title, even as the stage careened past in a blur, every time the camera caught those sharply defined back muscles something like a sob threatened to climb her throat. Was she even allowed to just… look at this?
Friend. I was blind.
When a friend had once said Han Sang-jin's thick lateral muscles looked good the way athletes' did, Hyerim had nonsense-replied that it would make him look sluggish. She now apologized to herself.
"I love this so much…"
The outer jacket had slipped down and caught on his arms, half-hiding and half-revealing him, and the teasing glimpse only made her want more. Those shoulders were insane. Was this kind of direction even legal? And why was his dancing this good on top of it?
"More! No—stay like that? No…"
If they had just shown everything outright, it might not have hit this hard. While she wrestled with the chaos in her chest, the stage ended. A performance that could knock the soul clean out of a person.
She had been KO'd before Lee Han-hee even came out.
She rushed onto the official board and found it flooded—everyone's tear ducts had clearly given out at once. For this single moment, every fan was of one heart and one mind.
And at that same hour, while the communities burned hot with reactions to Episode 13's stages, a strange tension was running through the practice room where evening rehearsal was underway.
"One more time."
Lee Jae-jin stared at the mirror with open dissatisfaction and called for another run. Several faces twisted noticeably, but no one objected; they simply reset the formation.
Main and sub positions took their places. The track poured out. The intro began—and then, abruptly, someone standing at the edge of the formation peeled away.
"Where are you going?"
"…"
No answer came back to Jae-jin's question.
Excluding Jang Seon-woo, Alpha Team had thirteen members. Even among the subs, people like Yu Min-seong—who held a Pass and was already locked into the finals—Yu Sang-hyeon, who had climbed into the top twenty-one and had a real shot at advancing, and Nam Hye-seong, who was starving for improvement, all still tried to keep up with a practice that centered hard on the mains.
But the three who had once clustered around Jang Seon-woo had been grinding and creaking a little more each day over the past week. The one who had just walked off was one of them.
Jae-jin sighed at the silent retreating back. He didn't try to stop him. He understood the subs' discontent well enough.
After that, two more who had been watching the room carefully slipped out as well, but practice continued without real trouble. The positions had been built expecting exactly this. With the people who had been disrupting the formation from the edges gone, it almost felt smoother.
They ran it several more times without the missing members, then took a short break. In the past they would have kept drilling through break time, but this time Jae-jin quietly sat against the wall and leaned back. When it was time to rest, you rested.
"I'm going to work hard."
Jae-jin was leaning against the wall, wetting his throat, when Yu Sang-hyeon dropped down beside him and muttered it. His eyes were fixed straight ahead. Suddenly Jae-jin put into words the question he had carried since team selection. It felt like he could ask it now. He had wanted to from the beginning; the timing had only just lined up.
"Why did you pick Alpha Team?"
Yu Sang-hyeon was clinging by a thread to the front of the sub positions. In the last round, on the Rose Team, he had put in a solid showing. That made him one of the contestants with a real chance of landing inside the top twenty-one at tomorrow's ranking announcement and seizing a main spot.
But looking at Alpha Team as it stood—packed with ranks one through ten—even if Sang-hyeon stayed inside the top twenty-one and avoided elimination, as long as he remained on Alpha he would never get a meaningful role. Unless someone dropped out, he would stay a sub forever.
Contestants in a similar range who could already see the upper ranks had all fled to Gamma Team for exactly that reason: so that even if they earned a position late, they could adapt fast.
Against that obvious logic, Yu Sang-hyeon had been the only one to choose Alpha. At a glance, the call looked almost foolish.
"Isn't Alpha a loss for you?"
Sang-hyeon turned to meet his eyes and smiled with an easy, open face. Jae-jin had never seen that expression on him before.
"Even so. For the last one, I wanted to choose for myself."
The word last carried a quiet, settled feeling. The boy who had once been scolded by Kim Seong-min for not being smart enough and had cried over it was gone; what remained was only solid ground.
"The last one… You're not going to keep singing?"
Last. The end. The words from early in the broadcast, when Sang-hyeon had said he would quit without regret, floated up, and Jae-jin asked. A bitter look crossed Sang-hyeon's face.
"Back at the start of camp I told you, remember? Lee Han-hee, you're lucky people like you."
Living as a trainee had burned away almost every illusion about the industry, leaving only disillusionment. The hollow, dazed expression from that day rose again as Sang-hyeon spoke.
"Looking back now, it feels like I was just taking it out on you, and I'm sorry. But I was really… choking. I looked around and everyone else was moving forward, and no matter how hard I thrashed I was only sinking."
Sang-hyeon drew a deep breath and let the air go in a sharp exhale.
"I don't know how many times I thought I should just quit already. Because the future scared me."
When he had clashed with Kim Seong-min, An Do-hyeon had told him to hold back for the sake of his future. Sang-hyeon muttered that the advice had seemed so ridiculous. What future was there even supposed to be?
"In that tiny practice room I burned every hour I was given and thought I was working myself to death. But when I actually looked back, all I knew how to do was sing and do what I was told."
He had gone to an alternative school, so he had never really known group life, and he had no real social experience either. Sang-hyeon said he had simply lived by following whatever the company ordered.
"If I didn't become an idol, I had no idea what I was supposed to live on. I hadn't prepared a single thing. I just ran the hamster wheel and did what I was told. Then one day I looked up and the only future I could see was the one where I never made it as an idol."
The company manufactured idols as products, and about the lives of the inventory that failed to become idols, it kept its mouth shut. How could he not feel the crisis?
"So I thought if I was going to quit, I should quit fast—find my own path before it was even a little later."
Before life became something that truly could not be turned back, he had to step off this road.
"The people who actually shine are less than one percent. For most of us, reaching out with just our fingertips and then sinking is the natural order of this place."
He had to get out before the brilliance reserved for that tiny few blinded him completely.
He had repeated it to himself over and over. And still he couldn't let go.
"I know the spotlight going to the people who shine is natural. I know complaining about it is meaningless. I know that, but…"
He knew better than anyone. And still it felt unfair. He had wanted to be angry about the injustice.
Because he had wanted to keep dreaming that badly. Because he had wanted it that desperately.
He was already under the spell. They had made him dream like that, and then reality had been so merciless.
Watching Sang-hyeon pour out the feelings he had kept buried, his gaze fixed somewhere far away, Jae-jin asked,
"Did you pick Alpha Team because you'd given up?"
Was he planning to leave everything behind after this stage? Was his final stage going to be nothing more than a sub position the producers had padded out, a part that never even got a full verse?
But the expression on the face looking forward did not feel like someone preparing a last stand after surrender. It was hard to put into words, but it was clearer than that. As if answering the doubt, Sang-hyeon gave an awkward little smile.
"No."
He shook his head as he spoke. He simply hadn't been able to let go. He really was a fool.
"Even after feeling all of that, I still can't quit. I still want to sing. I want to perform good songs with good people."
This stage was something like a final filter. It might look like a stupid choice, but in that moment he had felt he had to pick this place. With that, Sang-hyeon stood up in one motion.
"A late-blooming flower. I want to try being one of those."
His voice was firm as he added that he had no intention of wandering the way Jang Seon-woo had. He did not want a life spent drowning in despair and inferiority and tearing other people down.
"So let's practice."
It almost sounded like something beginning to sprout.