Chapter Text
The fluorescent lights of the IVE dorm common room hummed a constant, flat note. It was late, the kind of late where exhaustion should have bred silence, but for Rei, it often bred something else. It had started subtly. A shared clip of a Japanese variety show on someone’s phone, Gaeul and Liz laughing at the over-the-top reactions. “Why are they so… extra?” Liz had giggled, not unkindly. But then Leeseo, ever the mimic, had started bowing exaggeratedly every time Rei entered a room, her back at a perfect 90-degree angle, chanting “Hai! arigatou gozaimasu!” in a high-pitched, squeaky voice.
The others would chuckle. Rei tried to laugh it off. “That’s not quite right,” she’d say softly, her Korean still sometimes feeling like a suit she hadn’t fully grown into.
But the suit kept tightening.
During dance practice, Yujin, the stern leader, would stop the music. “Rei-ya, your expression. It’s too… blank. Like one of those stone faces in a shrine. We need emotion.” The comparison hung in the air. Stone face. Shrine.
Wonyoung, whose every move was watched by millions, once sighed while they were getting ready for a schedule, looking at Rei’s meticulously chosen, avant-garde outfit. “Rei, sometimes your style is so… unique. Very… Nagoya back-alley. Don’t you think it’s a bit much for a simple fansign?” The word “unique” sounded like “alien.” Rei looked at Wonyoung’s flawless, universally appealing princess style and felt her own fashion sense, a point of pride, shrink into a costume.
The worst was when they were brainstorming concepts for a b-side. Rei, drawing on the rich storytelling of her homeland, suggested something with a taiko drum rhythm, a narrative of a wandering spirit. There was a beat of silence. “Ah,” said Gaeul, tapping her chin. “That sounds… very traditional. But our image is more ‘fashion pop,’ you know? Global. Not so… specific.”
The dismissal wasn’t of the idea, Rei felt, but of the place it came from.
It crystallized one rainy afternoon. They were filming a casual TikTok, doing a relay dance challenge. When it was Rei’s turn, she added a small, fluid move inspired by Noh theater—a slow, deliberate turn of the wrist. It was subtle, a piece of home she wanted to share. Later, scrolling through the comments translated by a dedicated fan, she saw it.
A top comment, with thousands of likes, read: “Why is Rei so stiff and weird? She always stands out in a bad way.” Underneath, in the dorm, Leeseo was replaying the video on the big TV. She giggled, mimicking the wrist movement, but made it jagged and robotic. “Beep-boop! I am Rei-robot from Japan! Efficiency over emotion!”
Wonyoung hid a smile behind her hand. Yujin shook her head, saying, “Don’t be mean,” but she didn’t stop it. Liz was laughing openly.
Rei stood in the doorway, unseen. The laughter wasn’t the bright, happy sound from their debut days. It had a sharp, brittle edge. It was the sound of her otherness being highlighted, packaged into a joke she was never in on. They weren’t being malicious, not in a way they would ever recognize. To them, it was just teasing.
To Rei, it was a thousand tiny cuts, each one whispering: You don’t quite belong. Your essence is a quirk to be laughed at. She didn’t cry. She had learned not to. Instead, she walked silently to her shared room. On her bedside table was a photo of her family in front of Mount Fuji, and a worn copy of a Matsuo Bashō poetry book. She picked up the book, her fingers tracing the characters.
The next day at practice, the choreographer praised her. “Rei, your energy is great today! So powerful!” She just nodded.
The power came from a deep, lonely well. It was the strength of someone who had realized that the home she longed for was not just across the sea, but was also a place she carried inside her—a place her members, for all their shared dreams, couldn’t yet understand and sometimes, carelessly, tried to erase. She danced perfectly, her smile meeting the mirror’s gaze but not reaching the new, guarded solitude in her eyes. The show would go on, but something backstage had fractured, silently, in a language only she could fully hear.