The juice box was warm.

Not hot. Not cold. Just wrong. Like something left too long in a van, passed hand to hand until it reached her — dented at the corners, the straw taped loosely on the side.

“Drink all of it,” the medic said, not looking her in the eyes. “Your bloodwork’s low again. You want to faint on stage?”

Rumi didn’t answer. She didn’t care for rhetorical threats.

She took the juice with one hand and gave a nod sharp enough to end the conversation.

Apple. Again.

She walked barefoot across the concrete, her boots dangling from two fingers, her back slick with post-rehearsal sweat. The corridor behind the stage was a fluorescent-lit coffin — humming lights, open equipment crates, gaff tape peeling off the floor like shedding skin. She passed dancers stretching, choreographers arguing, a stylist silently weeping over a dress someone tore during the bridge.

No one looked up.

She sank onto a flight case marked “VOCALS,” peeled the straw off the box, and poked it through the foil with a soft sigh. The first sip tasted like chemicals and childhood. Sweet. Shallow. A little bitter near the end.

She hated the taste. She drank it anyway.

The way she did everything.

...----------------...

She stood to leave, adjusting her jacket — and that’s when he appeared.

No footsteps. No warning.

Just a blur of motion to her right, a hoodie brushing her arm, and suddenly her body jolted sideways. The juice box slipped — slapped the floor.

She caught herself with one hand, palm skidding across the cold metal rim of the soundboard. She straightened, sharp with breath.

The boy — no, guy, definitely older — didn’t pause. Didn’t look.

Just a single line thrown backward like a knife over the shoulder:

“Watch where you’re going.”

His voice was deep, like it had traveled through too many tunnels before reaching her. Not cruel. Not kind. Just blunt. Thoughtless. As if she were part of the floor plan he had to get around.

She blinked. Took in the details as he vanished — hood still up, black cargo pants, boots that didn’t squeak. A clipboard tucked under one arm like he belonged to tech, but no badge, no lanyard.

He walked like someone used to backstage mazes. Not lost. Not new.

And yet —

She’d never seen him before.

That alone was rare.

Her hand still tingled from the catch. She glanced down at the fallen juice box. It had burst slightly at the seam, dripping across the concrete like blood. One of the backup dancers stepped in it without noticing, trailing a sticky smear down the hall.

Rumi stared after the stranger for a long time.

He never once looked back.

...----------------...

The next day was bright and hollow — the kind of day made of sponsored hashtags and exhaustion disguised as glitter.

Soda Pop was their opening number. Cute, loud, exhausting. The choreography was all bounce and chaos, all fizzy vocals and saccharine stage smiles. Rumi moved through it on autopilot, the music drilled into her muscles by endless rehearsal.

She hated this song.

Not because it was hard. Because it was fake.

The smile she wore felt like a plastic mask stapled to her skull. Her chest burned from the cardio. Her knees ached from the pre-show run-through. Her soul — if she still had one — was busy trying to climb out of her body.

Halfway through the second chorus, she saw them.

Juice boxes.

Hundreds of them. Labeled with her group name. Stacked in open crates by the fan pit barricade. Staffers handed them out like prizes, waving and laughing, letting the crowd squeal and snatch them up like gold.

Same brand. Same box.

Apple.

She stared as one girl clutched hers to her chest like it was sacred. Another screamed and threw hers in the air. One fan bit the straw and waved at the stage — at Rumi, specifically — mouthing something like thank you.

Rumi’s throat closed.

That was her blood sugar supplement.

Her medical juice. The thing they gave her so she wouldn’t collapse after skipping two meals and rehearsing until 3 a.m.

They’d turned it into merchandise.

“Fan treats sponsored by HeartPop Juice! Featuring the real backstage flavors of your favorite idols!”

Her fists clenched in the middle of the hip sway. She nearly missed a beat.

No one noticed.

She was just one more moving piece in the soda-pop machine. Smile, sing, step left. Keep the rhythm, keep the brand. Stay sweet, even as your insides turn.

And then—

Just beyond the edge of the stage lights, under the rigging — him.

The boy from yesterday.

Same sharp jawline. Hoodie gone now. Just a black t-shirt and folded arms. Leaning against a lighting rack like he had every right to be there.

Watching.

Not the audience.

Not the full group.

Watching her.

...----------------...

She didn’t look away.

And neither did he.

She didn’t ask his name the first time.

She didn’t need to.

She wasn’t curious, not in the usual way — not like the others who asked for followers, stage names, blood types. She wasn’t interested in what his Spotify wrapped looked like or which dorm room he slept in.

What caught her was the silence he carried.

Like it was stitched into his hoodie.

Like it followed him the way perfume followed idols.

But heavier. Older.

She saw him again two days after the push — not in the hallway, not under stage lights, but in the mission briefing room that wasn’t called that on paper.

Officially, it was “Vocal Warm-Up Studio 2C.”

Unofficially, it was the place where backup dancers learned how to draw sealing sigils with their feet, where stylists whispered incantations into glitter gels, and where the company’s real work got done — behind locked doors and sweet-smelling lies.

...----------------...

She stepped into the room, still tying her jacket, half-listening to the team leader talk about “low-level disturbances during fan sign transit,” when she noticed the hoodie again.

But not a hoodie this time.

Just a black t-shirt stretched clean across a lean back, the ridge of a shoulder blade visible where the fabric clung too tightly, the edge of his jaw defined in the flickering blue light of the projection wall.

He was seated apart from the others, one leg propped up on a folding chair, bandage still visible through torn jeans. He didn’t look injured. He looked like someone who’d forgotten pain existed.

She stood by the door longer than necessary.

Something in her stomach turned, slow and metallic — not nerves, not recognition — something more dangerous.

She knew that kind of silence.

She’d worn it once.

Still did, some days.

The meeting began. Someone mentioned recon reports from Incheon. Another spoke about music video locations and protective barriers disguised as LED rigs. None of it mattered. None of it stuck.

Because he hadn’t looked at her.

Not once.

And still, she felt it —

That pull.

...----------------...

His name was written on the mission board. Just once, in cold letters and thin marker strokes, under “Logistics & Shield Technician.”

Kang Jin-u.

Not a code name. Not a borrowed alias.

Jinu.

She stared at the letters longer than she should have, letting them echo in her head like a lyric that hadn’t dropped yet.

He didn’t notice.

Or maybe he did, and chose not to react.

Either way, it made her furious.

...----------------...

After the meeting, she caught up to him — not because she meant to, but because her feet moved before she had time to think. He moved fast for someone still recovering from a demon wound. He didn’t limp. He didn’t pretend to be invincible either. He just walked like someone used to moving through danger and not waiting to see who followed.

“Hey,” she called, sharp, from behind.

Her voice cut through the hallway like a blade unsheathed.

He turned.

Slow. Unbothered. Eyes unreadable.

They stood five feet apart, in the dull glow of the vending machine’s fake “Happy Snacking!” light.

“About the other day,” she started — but didn’t finish.

He raised one brow. “You still mad about the juice?”

No apology. No smirk. Just that flat voice again, like she was the one making something out of nothing.

She didn’t flinch. “You pushed me.”

“You walked into me.”

“You weren’t looking.”

“You were.”

He crossed his arms, and something in her breath hitched before she could stop it — not because of the movement itself, but because of the way he tilted his head slightly when he looked at her, as if examining something not entirely unpleasant, but not quite safe either.

“I didn’t know you were on the team,” she said.

He shrugged. “Didn’t know you were more than a mic stand.”

That one stung.

Not because it was cruel.

Because it was true.

...----------------...

Silence stretched between them, electric and strangely clean.

For the first time in too long, she didn’t know what to say next — didn’t know how to end the moment without retreat or violence.

He leaned forward slightly, enough to make her instincts spike, but he didn’t touch her. Just said, low and not unkind:

“You fight like someone who’s tired of being alive.”

She stared.

The line sank.

Heavy. Intimate. Honest in a way that people weren’t anymore.

And then —

he walked away again.

Just like before.

Except this time, he left something behind.

His name.

His words.

And the awful, aching feeling that he’d seen straight through her —

in a place even she hadn’t dared to look.

It started as a pairing exercise.

A cruel, accidental trick played by the universe — or perhaps, by the training director who thought throwing mismatched frequencies together would “force cohesion.”

She hated duets.

Not because she couldn’t hold her own — Rumi had trained in four registers, mastered resonance magic, could shatter enchanted glass with a whisper.

She hated them because she could feel too much.

Duets were traps.

Tiny, melodic cages where your voice bled into someone else’s, where breath became shared, where distance dissolved into chords and harmonies and things you couldn’t lie through. You couldn’t fake it. You couldn’t guard against it.

And now they wanted her to duet with him?

Kang Jin-u — the boy with silence behind his teeth and knives in his stare?

It was almost funny.

Until it wasn’t.

...----------------...

The rehearsal room was darker than usual.

Low blue light spilled across the piano’s polished shell, shadows of cables coiled like veins on the floor. A single microphone stood at center. Twin stands. No filters. No reverb yet. Just raw input.

Like a confession booth without curtains.

Jinu was already there when she entered.

He leaned against the mixing board with one hand in his pocket, black t-shirt clinging to his frame, a pair of wired headphones looped carelessly around his neck — not listening, not performing, just waiting.

She froze in the doorway for a second too long.

The tension clung like wet velvet.

The director’s voice pierced through it from the booth:

“Track 08. ‘Soda Pop.’ Run the bridge into chorus. You both know it. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

And then the track played —

soft at first, like a sugar-dipped memory.

That absurdly sweet, retro-themed K-pop anthem they’d both mocked just a week ago during choreo warm-ups.

The one where demons attacked the set midway through shooting, forcing the entire team to fight in neon jumpsuits while still on roller skates.

The song that survived the bloodbath.

Now it was back.

And it was their duet.

...----------------...

The first verse was his.

He didn’t look at her when he sang.

He looked through the microphone, voice low and unadorned, like he was unspooling a thread from his chest and letting it dangle in the air, daring anyone to pull it.

Rumi didn’t expect to feel it in her spine.

Didn’t expect the weight behind his tone, how he didn’t reach for vibrato or drama — how he just delivered, steady and bruising, like truth itself.

When her turn came, her breath caught.

She knew this line. She could sing it blindfolded.

But suddenly, the syllables felt foreign — as if the room had rewritten them, as if he had.

Still, she opened her mouth.

And the moment her voice entered the air, something shifted — something subtle but seismic.

It wasn’t just pitch.

It wasn’t just harmony.

It was alignment.

Two frequencies, colliding —

not soft, not tender.

Violent. Beautiful.

It made the director sit up.

It made the lights flicker.

It made her knees almost buckle.

Because there was chemistry, yes — but not the cute, fan-service kind. This was the kind of chemistry that broke things. That remade things. That pulled locked doors off their hinges and showed you what lived in the rooms you’d tried so hard to forget.

He stepped closer at the chorus.

One step. Not rehearsed.

She felt it like static before a lightning strike — her breath growing thinner, eyes fixed not on him but on the spot just past his shoulder, trying to keep control.

But she could feel his energy now. Raw. Focused.

He sang the harmony over her melody, like wrapping barbed wire around silk, like stitching a wound without anesthetic.

“Soda pop, soda pop / I was fine before you came…”

“Fizzy lies in a paper cup / but now I taste your name…”

They hit the final note.

Together.

And it rang longer than the audio system allowed.

An echo that wasn’t digital.

A reverb that came from the air itself, charged with something older than music, older than memory.

The room fell silent.

Too silent.

Even the director didn’t say “cut.”

Because no one had breathed.

Rumi let the mic fall from her lips.

Jinu was already looking at her. Not smirking. Not smug.

Just… present.

Like he’d felt it too.

Like they’d just survived something together.

Or maybe hadn’t.

...----------------...

They didn’t speak afterward.

He handed her a bottle of water. She took it without a word.

Her fingers brushed his just slightly. No sparks. No clichés.

But her skin felt too hot for three minutes after.

Later, when she walked back to the dorms, she didn’t replay the lyrics in her head.

She replayed his voice.

The way it filled the space beside hers.

The way it didn’t compete.

The way it fit.