Chapter Text
It’s super nerve wracking, waiting in the blacked out car on a side road for the cue to make his dramatic entrance. Not that he thinks it’ll be all that dramatic, he’s sweating in the car and pretty sure his nervous fidgeting is creasing the nice dress pants they insisted he wear.
It’s a little bit insane how much work went into the show already, and they haven’t even really started filming any of it.
Well, they’ve been to his house to film b-roll, which he had prepared for by calling Chan in a panic and asking what he should do because he had never expected to make it this far. He had applied for the show when half-drunk with his friends, both of whom were in loving, long-term relationships and in their sloshed stupor they had all decided that it was the perfect thing to get him back out there.
When he got the email saying he had been selected as a contestant, he had mostly just been confused. He was exceptionally boring - a sound designer for a performing arts venue, still a weeb at 29 somehow. The only interesting thing about himself was the show’s prerequisite - being a divorcee.
Maybe the producers wanted to corner the adult loser demographic and decided to pick him.
He’s watched the previous seasons of the show, obviously. It would be basically irresponsible of him not to, since he’s about to spend a week in a villa in Jeju with seven other divorcees trying to find love again.
It might actually be his best shot at it too, he’s tried dating a little since the split but it’s always gone pretty poorly. There’s a lot of stigma around being divorced, less so for a guy but he’s still seen as carrying a lot of baggage. Which he is. There are a lot of feelings of inadequacy that have been resurfacing real hard recently. He also has his daughter to consider, even though custody is divided.
She’s still young, just over three, and the divorce was relatively amicable so there shouldn’t be any lasting scars for her. But he does need to make sure that any future arrangements for himself are a good decision for her too. He visits her as often as he can, at least once every weekend, for days out doing fun activities so they can still bond. He’s been slowly transforming his second room into a bedroom for her since there are plans for weekends at his place once she is ready to spend the night away from her mother.
For now he has Bbama at his place, and takes him to see Bora whenever he can. His daughter loves going to the park and running after Bbama on her tiny little toddler legs. Everyone loves the park, they spend a lot of time there, especially the one with the dog park right near Bora’s mother’s home.
Bbama is with his parents right now, for the week of filming, and Bora is with her mother and grandmother that moved in to help out when he left. And he’s in a car that finally turns back on to bring him to the driveway of the villa for his first appearance.
There are a bunch of people on the grounds when he gets out, someone walks up and does some really quick retouching of his hair, and one that explains how the entrance will work.
“Walk out to the side of the house, there’s a pool that you just follow up to the glass door to the back. They’re gathering at the couches there, just sit wherever feels comfortable once you enter.” The staff member with a clipboard says. “There will be cameras placed along the entire path, and throughout the house. Don’t bother trying to look directly at them, we’ll direct you specifically if you need to face the camera.”
Sounds… super awkward.
He knew he would be recorded the whole time, obviously. It’s a reality TV show, there were going to be cameras. Literally everywhere too, he remembers the infrared camera scenes in the bedrooms from last season on which one of the couples got caught hooking up. That will not be him, he is not risking public humiliation more than he already is by just being here.
“Any questions?” The clipboard guy asks, and Jisung has several - including why he’s doing this.
“What about my stuff?” He asks instead, because he’d been told to load his suitcases into the car’s trunk. It’s important that he has access to it, because he’d spent a decent amount of money buying a nearly completely new wardrobe with input from Chan and Changbin’s girlfriends. His usual uniform of graphic tees and stained jeans won’t cut it here.
“We will bring everything up to the rooms once the introductions are complete and you have explored the building.” the guy tells him, and cool he guesses. Exploring the villa sounds neat.
Without any other questions, he’s counted down for his entrance walk and then sent off on an incredibly long and meandering path to the glass doors. Long enough that he considers the possibility that he got lost along the way, but there are still cameras mounted onto tripods everywhere so he figures he’s going in an at least an ok direction. That or they’re just filming him getting lost for kicks.
He finds the glass doors eventually, sliding them open to reveal two couches and assorted single seating person nearby, with two other people already seated at them.
“Hi, I’m Han Jisung.” He says, hoping that’s not the most awkward thing he could possibly say. He picks one of the single seats, since the other two seem to be evenly dispersed across the two couches. It's maybe giving off avoidant vibes, but this is so awkward already, and sitting right next to someone when there's so much available space is probably significantly weirder.
“Choi Bogum.” says the guy, who is definitely older than Jisung. Even five seconds into meeting him, the dude feels sleazy and Jisung doesn’t fault the woman for sitting far away from him.
“I’m Park Seohyeon, nice to meet you.” the woman says, dressed in a nice silk evening gown. She’s pretty, and apparently nice too since she reaches her hand over to shake his. Strong as well.
It’s really awkward while they wait for the next person to come over, all of them staying silent and just… looking around to pass the time.
Jisung assumes this is the living area, based on all the seating, and it’s nice. The villa is ocean-side, he could hear the sounds of the waves earlier when he made his interminable walk, and the sea is reflected in a lot of the decor elements. Lots of whites and soft blues and sage greens, all things he only knows because they had to frantically redecorate his dingy as shit bachelor’s pad for the cameras. He likes blues, Bora’s future room has lots of blues, though the rest his apartment leans a lot towards the black and gray and red because he asked his friends for help and Chan hasn’t seen a color he couldn’t avoid.
The next person walks in, another attractive woman in a complicated looking dress. It’s pretty, expensive looking but everyone was told to look business-fancy for their introduction. Her heels click on the tile flooring as she makes her way over, assessing all of them before sitting on the couch with Bogum.
“Hello, I’m Kim Minju.” She tells everyone, and Jisung is validated in knowing his introduction was at least not the dumbest one. Everyone echoes their names back to her and then it’s time to wait again, Bogum and Minju whispering small talk to each other softly.
Jisung turns his head to watch the fifth person walk in when the door makes its swishing sound, and his first thought is that he’s absolutely screwed. He’s supposed to compete with that?
The man looks like a model, walks like one too with his hands in his pockets casually and absolutely owning the suit he’s in.
Jisung feels like a kid in his.
“Pleased to meet you, Lee Minho.” He says, glancing around the room casually like he’s completely comfortable with the situation at hand. God Jisung is fucked.
Both women are obviously enthralled, because why would they not be? He’s gorgeous, and, like, suave and shit.
He sits in one of the single seats, off to the edge with his legs crossed and it looks cool, unlike Jisung’s nervously crossed legs he's making an active effort not to bounce. The next person to arrive, Song Haeun, sits next to Minho meekly, all three women looking at him while Bogum tries to keep Minju’s attention by talking to her.
It’s not going great, they’re all going to fail because the show producers cast some god to compete with them. He’s got to have some giant fucking flaw lurking in the wings for any of them to have a shot.
The last man to enter the villa introduces himself as Kim Hyunwu, and Jisung at least has a shot against him. While Jisung is definitely a nerd, he’s arguably a cool nerd - the type to have enough game to bring his date to his anime figurine collection even if she doesn’t stay long afterwards. Hyunwu doesn’t appear to have enough game to even look the women in the eye, and Jisung is unsure how he managed to get married the first time.
The last woman to enter is Kim Tara, a white woman who raises a few eyebrows when she introduces herself in flawless Korean. She’s very pretty though, like all the other women. Jisung can’t say the same for the men, other than the randomly stunning Minho they’re all pretty average looking.
It’s going to be a race to the bottom for them, and he pities the women a little for having to deal with that.
With everyone there though, a staff member prompts them to start exploring the building, directing them up the stairs to the bedrooms first. It’s hard not to notice the cameras everywhere, the place set up like a very ritzy maximum security jail. They’re in all the corners, a man with a camera mounted to his chest walking in the hallway with them. And he’s supposed to just, pretend they’re not there?
He tries to focus on anything else, inspecting the décor with an intensity that he would never bring anywhere else. Art is cool and whatnot, but he’s not even sure if he and his wife ever owned a vase, much less appreciated the stippled texture of it. Further up there are signs on the doors in the hallways, alternating blue and pink presumably to indicate who should try to claim which rooms.
He enters the first blue labeled room, staring down the décor to avoid scanning for cameras immediately. He sees it, up in the corner by the door and aimed at the two beds, which probably means that they’re expected to have a roommate. It happened in every other season so he’s not super shocked, but the last time he had a male roommate was during his enlistment and this just feels a little weird. Everything about this feels a little weird. Some of it a lot weird.
The room is nice though, the beds either doubles or queens – either way bigger than his current one. It’s a bit weirdly decorated, with a giant painting of a mermaid on the wall opposite the beds, but that’s more ignorable than the camera man that walks in after him to film him looking around.
The two doors on the mermaid wall lead to a bathroom and a walk-in closet, neither of which have a visible camera thankfully.
He doesn’t really know what else to do, the camera man is still following him around and he’s just… standing in an empty closet. Like some nerd. Cool.
The bedroom had a window, maybe he’ll look pensive or something looking out of that. He’s trying, ok.
The view is actually very pretty, this room facing the water. There’s a little cliff or wall around the edge of the property, with a path down to the seaside that he’ll probably end up exploring later. Maybe sooner, depending on how chaotic this group will get, he’s seen the fights on the previous seasons.
He doesn’t intend to be in the fights though, hence exploring. With the others in the group, he expects the fights will be over who gets to be with Minho and then he’ll just sneakily disappear and look at the crashing waves or something until the dust settles.
“Which bed have you claimed?” Bogum asks as he strides in, and Jisung looks up from the window confused.
“Oh, uh. This one.” He says, pointing at the one closest to him. Maybe he was too pensive, clearly the room assignments happened already and he doesn’t even know what the other one looks like. Oops.
Bogum throws his suit jacket on the other bed, apparently deciding to be his roommate. He’s a little glad it’s not Minho, because his already low confidence would be shattered if he had to wake up to the realization that he’s competing with that every day.
Bogum is not ideal either, he is giving off massive self-important vibes. Jisung would have preferred the other nerd honestly, but whatever. He can do this. It’s just a week.
Once he’s done rolling up the sleeves of his crisp white dress shirt to show off his forearms, Bogum starts to make his way out of the room. There’s the entire rest of the villa to explore, and Jisung’s only seen two rooms so far. Others are also starting to walk out of the bedrooms when he makes it to the hallway, all going back down the stairs to map out the rest of the common areas.
He’s two steps down the stairs when he hears heels behind him, stomping harder than they really should. He turns to find Haeun gripping the bannister tightly, other hand shoving her long hair back behind an ear so she can see where she’s stepping.
Jisung’s wife used to do the same thing, uncomfortable in heels because she wore them so infrequently. They only really came out for Jisung’s grand openings and her work holiday parties, and came right back off as quickly as possible after them.
He takes a step back up the stairs, holding out an arm to Haeun so she can have two points of stability. The heels she’s wearing are really tall too, stilettos which Jisung remembers being told are the hardest to balance on.
She seems hesitant, but he tries to smile at her as calmly as possible.
“Just down the stairs, my wife was the same.” He says, and then immediately cringes because he’s not sure starting with talking about his failed marriage is an ideal opener. They all know they’re divorced, so it’s not like it’s a big revelation that will tank his odds, but god he’s shit at this.
She accepts his arm though, walking with a tiny bit more confidence as Jisung takes them one stair at a time so that she has plenty of time to stabilize herself.
“Thank you.” She says meekly when they’re on solid ground again, Jisung smiling at her because she looks really shy. The same kind of shy he is, and he’s still not really sure why either of them are here at all, but he might have made an ally. He doesn’t really know why he needs an ally, this is not really supposed to be a competition – at least not against the women, but he likes the idea of having one.
They walk through the living area together, her steps still very hesitant and clearly uncomfortable. A quick glance down shows that the thin straps of her heels are definitely digging into her skin pretty bad.
“Do you want to take your shoes off?” He whispers as they make it to a dining room, eight chairs around a long table. She looks around nervously, the confident clicking of heels echoing somewhere else in the house. “I’ll take mine off too, they’re pinching a little.”
They’re not really, his shoes are one thing he didn’t buy new for this, but she looks so uncomfortable he wants her to take them off.
Them both being barefoot seems to be the trick, and she eventually agrees with a soft voice and Jisung pulls one of the chairs out for her so she can sit to fiddle with the delicate straps. He kicks his own shoes off, hooking the heels on his fingers since he doesn’t exactly know where he can drop them off. They literally just came down from the bedrooms.
Haeun dangles her heels from her fingers too and they’re back to walking around significantly more comfortably as they make their way into a staggeringly huge kitchen. Minho’s in it, opening and closing cabinets like he knows what he’s doing, humming occasionally.
Jisung doesn’t know anything about cooking beyond keeping himself alive with ready-made meals, so he wanders off to the other archway, Haeun trailing after him. He ends up picking up Seohyeon in the hallway, who spots his little barefoot posse and crouches down immediately to tear her own shoes off.
Together the three of them discover the greenroom type thing that the staff have set up in the far corner of the ground floor, with a first aid kit, a stylist-slash-makeup artist on standby for emergencies, and several of the show’s staff sitting in chairs discussing something.
The AV headquarters of the show are in the pool house, that they were told to just ignore exists, but this is a spot where they can go if they want anything from the showrunners. They drop their shoes off in a pile by the door and go back out, learning there’s a basement to this place that they have yet to find.
They run into Hyunwu trying to find the door to the basement stairs, Jisung somehow leading this random amalgamation of people on a quest and he doesn’t know how the fuck it happened. He’s never really been leader material before, usually just doing what others tell him to.
He doesn’t question it thought, cheering when they finally open a door to some stairs and make their way down to find the basement split into a home gym, Bogum already in it and making a show of flexing when they enter, and a home theater.
With, like, theater seats and everything. What Jisung wouldn’t do to have this in his home?
Their phones all ring with a text message and they walk back up the stairs to find their suitcases all in a pile in the entry hall, everyone told to put their things away before dinner. Camera men are recording them as Jisung walks up to forage through the pile for his two suitcases.
Normally he’d live out of them, because again this is only one week. He’ll be recorded the whole time though, so he carefully arranges everything in neat stacks in the closet like he’s never done a single day in his life.
Bogum arrives and unpacks in the other half of the closet, lining up a staggering amount of workout clothes. Jisung brought some, just in case the scripted activities require it, but he’s not really intending to use the gym downstairs. The theater on the other hand…
He’s sick of his suit, way too stiff and also way too hot for the humid Jeju air. He switches to a nice (brand new) white t-shirt that he figures will look ok with the slacks he’s keeping on to maintain a little bit of the formal air the producers wanted.
Their phones sound with a text message again and they’re summoned back down, the sun starting to set out the windows and Jisung hopes he gets to look at it from the beach at some point. Actually, that sounds really romantic and whatever, they’re definitely going to try to get them to do that during the scripted activities.
They have to cook their own dinner, apparently. The kitchen is laid out with everything for a communal barbeque. Several from the amassed crowd start to step up to the counters, divvying out tasks and Jisung rushes to the cabinets to give himself the role of setting up the table. He’s not equipped to cook at all, opening and closing all the cabinet doors until he finds plates and bowls.
Minju starts a fuss about if the kimchi is vegan after she scans the laid out ingredients, apparently she doesn’t eat meat and the spread is an affront or something.
It makes sense, the meal is extremely geared towards meat eating and it’s not like the production crew weren’t made aware of her diet. They had asked Jisung a ton of mildly invasive questions about his dietary and other preferences, as well as a list of all potential allergies and any medical conditions that could impact filming. They had to have known, probably set this up to generate something interesting to film. He figured the filming crew would be a little predatory, but messing with food is extra rude.
She loses any sympathy that she could have garnered when Minho, who is the only guy sorting through the ingredients looks into the fridge and holds out a block of tofu. “I can make you braised tofu if you prefer.” He offers and Minju huffs, arms crossed.
“I don’t want to eat anything different, the meals should be able to meet everyone’s needs.” She grouches and Minho shrugs, putting the tofu back completely unbothered. He’s not the one who won’t have anything to eat.
To make things easier, the four people cooking grill all of the meat in the kitchen, making sure to keep the grilled vegetables nice and separate for Minju who watches over them carefully. It turns out the kimchi is not vegan, and the show staff promise to go out and buy some for her for the next day, but she’ll have to go without now.
She’s clearly incensed, because is it even a meal without kimchi? Jisung’s been assigned cutting the existing kimchi with scissors, something he can actually handle, and he does agree with her complaints a little as he pops a piece into his mouth.
Bogum and Hyunwu show up again as the food gets brought to the table, from whatever hidey-hole they had stationed themselves in. It turns out there’s a bunch of good cooks in the house, because the dinner is excellent. There are compliments in every direction as they sit down and eat, Minju sitting at the end of the table with a frown on her face as she makes wraps out of just lettuce and grilled onions.
Sucks to suck, the beef is delicious.
The conversation doesn’t stray very far from the food in front of them, they’ve been told explicitly not to share too much about their lives because the show is structured to have them sharing big details slowly over the course of the week as they pick their person and fall in love or whatever. It’s supposed to be all intense, so that you fall in love with someone only to discover a big hurdle the next day.
After seeing everyone, especially what he’s competing against, he’s not convinced the falling in love part going to happen to him. Even just on day one, knowing literally nothing about each other, all the women watch as Minho talks with rapt attention. Jisung has literally no chance, even if any of the women turn out interesting.
A staff member shows up as they’re slowing down, to explain to them how the next day will go. They’ll meet at ten in the morning to do the first reveal of the week, and then there’ll be a challenge for the men, followed by the women picking their partner for the night’s scheduled date event. Until then, they’re free to mingle and get to know each other as long as they stay on the villa grounds.
Everyone agrees to the rules, Minju complains some more about the food options, and they start to disperse. Bogum fucks right off, chasing after Seohyeon that said she was going out to explore the grounds. Hyunwu disappears too, not chasing after anyone.
Jisung stays, because it’s pretty clear that the show staff will not be doing the dishes for them and he might as well help since he didn’t cook. Plus, the majority of the women are still around, and technically he’s supposed to be finding the love of his life or whatever. He can at least pretend to do what he’s supposed to be here to do.
He stands by the sink with Tara who dries the plates he hands off, Minho and Haeun at the other sink or this way too fancy house cleaning off the pans. Minju is still around, complaining vaguely at stuff while putting the extra rice away.
“Can you hand me the- um-“ Tara says, hands waving around a little as she tries to express the word she clearly forgot. “The towel.” She says in English, and Jisung replies back with a “here you go” also in English.
“You speak English?” She asks, still in English though it’s accented a little. So is his, and it probably isn’t oversharing anything the producers want to reveal later to explain why.
“Spent a while living in Malaysia as a kid, and my best friend is Australian.” He tells her in his weird colony mashup accent. It used to be mostly British, pre-Chan being his only source of English conversation. Now he’s picked up a lot of his linguistic quirks too.
“Awesome. I grew up in America.” She tells him like it wasn’t obvious from her everything.
“I always wanted to go there one day.” He tells her and she smiles back, chatting about her favorite places that she recommends he goes to if he can. He makes a vague note of them, because he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. This show is eating into a lot of his vacation time, and the rest of it he spends trying to help out with his daughter when there’s something her mother can’t get out of.
It makes the dishwashing go faster though, them chatting as Jisung hands glasses and chopsticks over to dry off.
After they’re done in the kitchen there’s not much of a plan, they have just free time to do whatever until they go to bed. Jisung decides to go investigate the home theater, because that’s obviously the most important part of the house. It’s not the most social, the show won’t get a ton of footage out of him there, but he already talked a whole lot today and he’s mildly tapped out.
It takes him twenty minutes to figure out which of the three remotes controls the screen and select something to watch, and then approximately thirty seconds to discover that one of the primary speakers in the room is a half second behind the others, and he pauses the movie in outrage.
He stomps angrily up to the controls cabinet, and ends up messing with the speaker inputs for the next couple hours, unfucking the entire control panel and going up to his room at some point to get his laptop so he can do a software update on the stupid thing. This is a several billion won mansion, and they can’t do basic maintenance on core system?
Multiple people stop to investigate the room, most immediately leaving when they find him hunched over the inputs at the back. Minho is the only one that talks to him, a simple “Will it be fixed tonight?” that Jisung shrugs at, because this is very much a DIY setup done by a general contractor, and he’s not going to recode the personal use console, but he can do some minor tweaks to improve sound quality. Also a lot of cable management, what were these people thinking?
So he talks to literally no one that night, makes no headway on finding his second true love. The camera man that drops by has a field day recording him though, Jisung ignoring him completely as he gets filmed from several different angles.
The sound system is in working order again at nearly midnight, the software update done and the cables all nice and tidy when Jisung went to find the staff and asked for a bunch of zip ties. All the AV people he knows always carry a bunch when they’re working, and it only took a little bit of asking before he was handed a little bundle of them.
He makes his way up, with his abandoned shoes from earlier, to his bed decently late. Bogum is already in bed and snoring when he tiptoes in, washing up as quietly as he can before sneaking under the unfamiliar covers. He had the foresight to plug his charger when he unpacked earlier, so he only needs to pat around for the cord instead of attempting to plug it into an outlet in the dark. And then he gets to try to sleep, doing his best to ignore the blink of the camera in the corner.