Chapter Text
Jinseol’s alarm goes off at 5:30 AM.
She ignores it, naturally.
Five minutes later, a second alarm goes off.
Then a third.
Then a fourth.
By the fifth alarm, Seo Jinseol finally accepts defeat and drags herself out of bed.
The sacrifices she makes for Yoon Jeonghan are frankly becoming ridiculous.
And the worst part? He doesn’t even know she exists.
Well, not exactly.
The thought stays with her. It follows her into the bathroom, sits with her in the kitchen as she prepares breakfast, and weighs on her as she packs snacks for the day.
The thought follows her into the crowded Seoul subway, where she stands shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of equally exhausted office workers.
By eight in the morning, Jinseol transforms into a perfectly respectable corporate employee—hair neat, suit pressed, and employee ID secure around her neck.
The definition of ordinary.
No one in the office would ever guess that the woman currently answering emails spent her weekend camping outside a venue for a fansign.
Or that the spreadsheet open on her second monitor isn’t actually a spreadsheet.
It’s a schedule. A highly organized, painfully detailed, slightly concerning schedule.
SEVENTEEN schedules.
More specifically, Jeonghan’s schedules.
Her coworker peeks over the divider. “What are you looking at?”
Jinseol immediately switches tabs. Thank goodness for years of experience. “Quarterly reports.”
The lie comes so naturally she almost impresses herself.
The coworker grimaces. “Gross.” Then, walks away.
Crisis averted.
Jinseol waits until he’s gone before reopening the document.
The title stares back at her.
alwaysjeonghan
Ten years.
It still feels surreal.
Ten years have passed since a seventeen-year-old Jinseol stumbled across a pre-debut clip online.
Ten years have flown by since she first decided that a long-haired trainee with an angel face deserved her attention.
Ten years since Yoon Jeonghan ruins her life.
The thought makes her laugh. Looking back, it sounds ridiculous.
Who spends a decade following an idol?
Apparently, she does.
From debut showcases to music shows, to concerts, to fan meetings, to world tours.
Virtually nothing went undocumented. Her collection spanned thousands of photos, backed up on a hoard of hard drives that would alarm law enforcement. She had spent a new car’s worth of money on camera equipment, accumulating enough airline miles along the way to qualify for a psychiatric intervention.
The irony isn’t lost on her.
Monday through Friday, she’s Seo Jinseol.
Corporate employee.
Salary worker.
Professional email sender.
She’s the kind of person who attends meetings that could’ve been emails.
Then, the clock hits six. And suddenly, she becomes alwaysjeonghan—one of the largest Jeonghan fansites in the fandom.
She’s living a completely different life as a completely different person.
The split should be exhausting. Instead, it feels normal because she’s been doing it for so long.
Long enough that she edits photos during lunch breaks.
Long enough that she recognizes airport schedules faster than flight attendants.
Long enough that half her annual leave is strategically placed around comeback season.
No regrets.
Mostly.
The years blur together. SEVENTEEN grows and so does she.
The group goes from rookies to industry veterans. From performing in small venues to selling out stadiums, then arenas.
And somehow, Jinseol finds herself growing up alongside them.
University becomes a job.
A job becomes promotions.
Promotions become responsibilities.
Yet somehow, every chapter of her life has a Jeonghan photo attached to it.
The realization is admittedly embarrassing, but true.
A notification appears on her phone.
A new article.
SEVENTEEN celebrates its tenth anniversary.
Jinseol stares, then clicks before she can stop herself.
The photos are fresh. Too fresh. In them, the members look older, possessing a quiet confidence and a comfort in their own skin that wasn't there before.
Especially Jeonghan.
An unexpected warmth settles in her chest at the sight, born from years of watching this evolution unfold. She hadn't witnessed it from the front row, and never personally, but she had been close enough.
Close enough to witness the years. The successes. The failures. The growth.
A decade.
Ten years.
The number feels impossible in an industry so aggressively fast-paced.
A voice interrupts her thoughts.
“Seo Jinseol.”
She freezes, slowly looking up to see her manager standing beside her desk with an unreadable expression.
Jinseol swallows, “Yes?”
Her manager points directly at her monitor, and her blood runs cold.
She’d forgotten about the article.
The photos.
The very obvious idol occupying her screen.
Death.
So this is how she dies.
Her manager stares at her while Jinseol stares back.
It was a battle of wills, one that she’s rapidly losing.
The older man sighs. “And here I thought you were working.”
Silence.
Her manager shakes his head, then returns to his office after leaving behind one final sentence.
“At least use your annual leave before it expires.”
Jinseol blinks once.
Twice.
Then immediately opens SEVENTEEN’s upcoming schedule.
A grin spreads across her face as she discovers there’s an event next week.
And Seo Jinseol has more than enough annual leave left to use.
Some things, after all, never change.
The first photo is terrible, objectively speaking.
Jinseol still keeps it, not because it’s good, but because it’s the first.
Back then, she didn’t even own a proper camera. It was just a secondhand DSLR she’d spent three months saving for.
Three months of skipping lunch.
Three months of pretending she wasn’t hungry.
Three months of convincing herself this was a reasonable financial decision.
It isn’t.
Not even remotely.
But seventeen-year-old Jinseol isn’t exactly known for making good decisions.
Which is how she finds herself standing outside a university festival at six in the morning. Alone, with a camera she’s barely figured out how to use.
And a group she loves enough to wake up before sunrise for.
The line isn’t long yet.
Just a handful of fans remained. Some clutched hand-painted slogans, while others lugged massive cameras with telephoto lenses that dwarfed her own gear.
Jinseol immediately feels underqualified.
Everyone seems to know what they’re doing. Everyone except her.
The next few hours are spent pretending she belongs. It’s a useful life skill, one developed early out of sheer necessity.
By the time the performance begins, her palms are sweaty.
She’s not nervous about seeing SEVENTEEN. She’s seen them before from a distance, from crowds, from terrible audience recordings uploaded in 360p.
No.
She’s nervous because she’s about to photograph them.
The realization felt ridiculous because they’re just people—very talented and very attractive people.
But still, people.
The thought helps.
Then, SEVENTEEN walks onto the stage, and suddenly every coherent thought disappears.
Photos don’t prepare you for real life; videos don’t either. Neither do broadcasts.
The members are louder, brighter, and more alive.
And Jeonghan, well.
Jeonghan is Jeonghan.
The sunlight catches his hair. His smile reaches all the way to the back of the crowd.
And suddenly, seventeen-year-old Jinseol understands why people write poetry. Not that she would, absolutely not.
The camera trembles slightly in her hands.
She raises it anyway.
A click.
Then another.
And another.
Most of the photos are unusable. Some are blurry. Some accidentally focus on the wrong member.
One is literally just the sky.
Jinseol doesn’t know how that happened. She chooses not to investigate.
Then it happens.
A brief moment, barely two seconds.
Jeonghan turns toward her side of the crowd, laughing at something one of the members says.
With his head tilted back, completely unaware, Jinseol presses the shutter.
Click.
The moment disappears quickly.
It was lost among songs, choreography, the noise of the crowd.
The performance ends, and the crowd begins to thin, but Jinseol remains frozen in her seat.
She keeps reviewing photos, deleting most of them. Then she stops, because there it is.
That photo.
The one that caught Jeonghan in mid-laugh with his eyes crinkled and sunlight spilling across his face.
The image isn’t perfect. Far from it.
A professional photographer would probably find twenty things wrong with it.
The framing, the lighting, the focus. Everything.
But Jinseol stares at it for a long time.
Because somehow, despite all its flaws, it feels real.
She’s just seeing a twenty-year-old boy laughing on a stage.
Suddenly, she understands.
The question of why people become fans hasn't crossed her mind in years; she outgrew that curiosity a decade ago. What she understands now is the obsession of the fansite master. She knows exactly why they spend money they don't have, why they travel until they're numb, and why they surrender the best years of their lives just to chronicle someone else's.
It’s not about perfection.
It’s about preserving moments. Capturing pieces of time before they disappear.
It follows her home, then stretches into the night.
She opens a brand-new social media account.
The username takes less than five seconds to choose.
alwaysjeonghan.
Simple.
Straightforward.
She posts the photo, then immediately throws her phone across the room out of panic.
A normal reaction.
The account gains three followers by morning.
Then ten.
Then twenty.
Nothing remarkable.
Yet years from now, after documenting a lifetime of world tours, airports, and concerts through a lens, Jinseol will still look back on that first photo. An entire decade spent behind a camera, always returning to the same beginning.
The one that started everything.
And think:
This is entirely your fault, Yoon Jeonghan.
Unfortunately.
Ten years later.
She still means it.