INTERLUDE: A Blaze Of Glory

[FLASHBACK - 3 YEARS AGO]
[DECEMBER 11, 2021 - BACKSTAGE, CJ ENM CONTENT WORLD, PAJU]

The thing about victory is it makes you stupid.

Ryujin knew this from trainee days. First time she nailed a showcase and immediately tripped on a stair because her brain was busy celebrating instead of watching her feet. Victory is champagne bubbles in your blood. Victory is walking into a penthouse in full MAFIA leather, eyeliner sharp enough to commit crimes, thinking nothing can touch us.

Nothing ever had.

The 2021 MAMAs were theirs. The trophy went elsewhere, but the energy belonged to them. The crowd screaming ITZY like a summons. Every other group in the building looking at them like something new and dangerous had walked in.

She'd felt it before the first note. Heo Sungtae's face on the pre-show screen, the electricity of a crowd that understood they were watching something happen. LOCO running hot, Chaeryeong on the pole, Lia behind the chains and the whole arena going wahhhh, Ryujin's body inside the choreography like a second skin. Then the transition. Stage black. Gun at Yeji's head - cold prop metal, Yeji's breath audible in her ear for exactly two seconds - and the choice. She swung the barrel past Yeji, aiming directly at the boss.

Then the fight. The weeks of stunt school taking over, her body running the choreography her brain had stopped thinking about three rehearsals ago. The first man went down on instinct, the second on adrenaline, the third because the crowd noise had changed and she felt every person in the building watching one girl in leather boots punch through a corridor of men twice her size and the sound dropped into a low, collective rumble that meant they believed it. She reached Heo Sungtae. He spat his line - you were a tiger in disguise and Ryujin took the gun from the last man standing and shot him with it.

I'm the mafia. Camera. Smirk. The stillness after the violence louder than the violence itself. Meaning it completely.

Heo Sungtae had found them backstage after. The actual Jang Deok-su from actual Squid Game, the actual biggest show on actual planet Earth, bowing to five girls in leather and smudged eyeliner, telling them it was the best stage he'd ever been part of. They'd cried. All five of them, prettier than they had any right to, because in December 2021 that man's approval was basically a Daesang and nobody could tell Ryujin otherwise.

He'd talked to her the longest among the group. Asking about the stunt training, how long she'd practiced the fight sequence, whether she'd done her own falls. Ryujin told him she'd gotten the idea watching NCT do Kick It at last year's MAMA - the boys got their action movie moment and she'd decided on the spot that the genre wasn't gendered. People had been telling her she looked like Han So-hee for years, so when My Name dropped two months before the show she'd watched all eight episodes in one sitting and thought: fine, I'll give you the action movie version. Went to stunt school without telling anyone. Learned to take a fall on concrete floors until the bruises stopped being accidents and started being technique. He'd laughed at that, this huge delighted sound, and kept calling her "our mafia" like it was already decided, like the character had jumped off the stage and into her skin permanently. Ryujin had stood there proudly in her scuffed boots, prop gun still warm in her waistband, and thought: the scariest man on television thinks I'm a badass.

She'd carry that for years. Longer than she should have.

But they went home with nothing.

The envelope had gone to aespa. Ryujin was already on her phone before the announcement finished. She ignored the loss, already tracking the view count on the performance clip doing something insane, the number climbing fast enough she kept refreshing it. Four million and change. She turned the screen toward Lia without talking. Lia looked at it. Looked at Ryujin. Neither of them said the obvious thing. And that was the conversation.

The thing was, they'd been in adjacent rooms all night and neither group had said a word. Wall-to-wall awareness, zero contact. Ryujin had heard aespa through the partition - voices, movement, the sound of girls who knew they'd just had a good night. She'd thought about going over. Hadn't.

Karina was apparently two different people. The stage version was untouchable, sculpted, the kind of beautiful that made you forget she was real - Ryujin had watched her open the show standing with Yeji, two faces that had no business being on the same stage because their combined aura was so overpowering it was basically unfair, and the whole arena had understood immediately why those two had been chosen to represent their generation. The girl through the partition was losing it over something - a laugh that outran itself, wheezing by the end, still going when there was nothing left. Someone that gorgeous had no business sounding that unhinged. Ryujin had listened for longer than she meant to, tucking the sound away without knowing what to do with it yet.

The rest came through in pieces. One voice kept switching between Korean and English mid-sentence, cracking jokes in both languages with a grin you could hear even through a wall - the words casual but the delivery barely holding together, like she was one breath away from cracking up at her own bit. Someone small and earnest kept announcing things - food opinions, mostly, delivered with the sincerity of the Daesang acceptance speech itself. And another had this bright, hyping energy, exclamation marks you could hear, a voice that turned everything into an event just by being excited about it.

The bilingual one said something about a guy - an MC, maybe, or someone from the ceremony - half in English, voice already threatening to break. Then the earnest one, answering in English so broken it was its own dialect: "I think he's liar." Same sincerity as the food opinions. The bilingual one lost it. Someone else was already wheezing. Ryujin bit her lip to keep from laughing through the wall.

Four girls in a dressing room having the best night of their lives, same as them. Just on the other side of a wall neither group had figured out how to walk around yet.

Yeji had made the call. She'd been ordering fruit juice when she said it - "aespa's right there, it'd be nice to share together" - like the idea arrived with the cups, a spontaneous thought. That was Yeji, the leader who always the one who found the door first and made stepping through it look like nothing.

Ryujin couldn't remember whose idea it was to make it watermelon, but she claimed it anyway. She'd clocked the stand earlier - the cups, the colors, the way it'd read against their performance blacks - and then suddenly the answer was obvious, like it had always been there. Fresh, sweet, easy to carry. Good enough to mean something without making it weird.

Chaeryeong had volunteered before anyone else could. "Oh let me go! Let me go!" - bouncing on her toes, hand already up like she was answering a question in class. The enthusiasm was pure, uncomplicated, the version of Chaeryeong that operated on instinct before her brain caught up and started asking questions.

Then her brain caught up. Ryujin watched it happen in real time - the shift from "I'll do it!" to "wait what did I just volunteer for" hitting somewhere between the juice stand and their dressing room door. Suddenly Chaeryeong was holding the cup arrangement like it actually needed balancing, rehearsing something under her breath, eyes going distant in a way that meant the kdrama script in her head had just turned a simple drink delivery into a twelve-episode arc with emotional stakes. The same focused energy she put into nailing a difficult eight-count, except now she was choreographing an interaction that was supposed to be casual.

Ryujin kept her mouth shut because saying anything would've ended it. She wanted to see where it went.

Karina would tell fans later that Chaeryeong came in, put the juice down, kept her head down the whole time, mumbled something in the general direction of the floor, and left, calling her the "top of the head fairy" because that was all she'd seen of her.

Ryujin's version was shorter - Chaeryeong came back through their door at something between a walk and a sprint.

"How'd it go?"

"Great."

She sat down and looked at nothing.

And that's how it all started. An hour later Karina had posted the whole aespa lineup holding their cups - Giselle taking the selfie, captioning it thank you ITZY sunbaenim with a heart. Yeji was already typing on Bubble. Ryujin put her phone down and looked at the ceiling.

Good people. Or just very hungry ones. Probably both.

They were so hungry back then. Fuck, they all were.

[LATER THAT EVENING - SIGNIEL SEOUL, 80TH FLOOR]

"JYP booked the whole floor." Yeji was still in the harness, the one that made her shoulders sweep up like temple eaves. The elevator was climbing and she was explaining logistics in the voice she used for briefings. "Jihyo-unnie's already there. Games. The boys are coming."

"The WHOLE floor?" Yuna was already bouncing on her toes, wearing four-inch platform boots on a frame that already made her the tallest member without them. Her head came within kissing distance of the elevator ceiling with every bounce she didn't notice because she was too busy checking her reflection in the polished doors while her rhinestones caught the overhead light in scattered bursts.

"Games!" Chaeryeong's eyes went wide with genuine excitement. "Jihyo-unnie said there would be games."

"I LOVE games," Yuna announced to the elevator at large.

"You love WINNING games," Ryujin corrected.

"I love games that I WIN."

Yeji met Yuna's gaze with one eyebrow slightly raised.

Yuna looked back at her. Something visibly processed behind her eyes. "Wait, hold on - drinking games? Or like - " She gestured vaguely at the elevator ceiling. " - games games?"

"With Jihyo-unnie and Nayeon-unnie running it?" Lia was checking her phone, filming the elevator buttons for reasons that were completely unclear to everyone including possibly herself. "Both. Definitely both at the same time."

Chaeryeong had had "a few" at the official downstairs party, the one with managers and press and socially acceptable levels of celebration, and her eyes had gone glassy in a way that meant she was calculating something. Ryujin knew that exact look. It was the one Chaeryeong got right before random dance battles in practice rooms.

Competition mode was activating.

Ryujin watched the floor numbers climb steadily - seventy-six to seventy-seven to seventy-eight - trying to figure out what kind of party required booking an entire floor of the Signiel Seoul eighty stories above street level at one in the fucking morning.

The elevator dinged.

The doors slid open.

Ryujin's brain stopped.

Eight women stood there in full noir costumes matching the MAFIA concept they'd just performed and someone had brought confetti guns.

FWUMP. FWUMP.

Both cannons fired point blank, aimed directly at her face. The blast hit first, her hair flattening straight back, eyeliner migrating somewhere entirely wrong, the full concentrated force of a stage air cannon she'd been firing at crowds for three years and had never once been on the receiving end of. Her ears rang, gold and silver confetti already inside her mouth before she thought to close it, inside her collar, tangled in her eyelashes, stuck to whatever survived of her stage makeup.