Chapter Text
Jeongguk has been to exactly four sporting events in his life, and he's hated all four with the specific, simmering resentment of a man who did not consent to being here.
"I have a comeback in six weeks," he says, for what is possibly the ninth time today, though he's stopped keeping an accurate count somewhere around the parking garage. "I should be in the studio. I should be anywhere that isn't—" he gestures broadly at the arena around them, the deafening roar of eleven thousand people who are not here to see him, the overpriced foam finger currently digging into his ribs courtesy of his manager. "This."
"You'll live," Manager Oh says, not looking up from his phone. "The company wants faces at high-visibility events. This is a high-visibility event. You are a face."
"I'm a person."
"Debatable, on your worse mornings." Oh finally glances up, and there's something almost sympathetic in it, buried under the exhaustion of a man who has managed Jeongguk for six years and lost most of his illusions somewhere around year two. "Two hours. Smile during the timeouts. Don't fall asleep on camera again."
"That happened once."
"It happened at the Blue House. During the anthem."
Jeongguk decides this particular argument isn't winnable and settles back into his seat instead, arms crossed, the picture of a man enduring something. The seats are good—court-side, practically breathing distance from the action—which he supposes is the point. Nation's Prince, front row, visibly supporting Korean athletics. It'll make a nice thirty-second clip somewhere.
He's mentally halfway through tomorrow's vocal warmups when the crowd noise shifts. Not louder—different. A kind of held-breath quality that makes the hair on his arms stand up before he consciously understands why.
Then he sees him.
Number eleven. Small, for a volleyball player—Jeongguk knows just enough about the sport to know liberos usually are, built for speed and reflex rather than the net-clearing height of the spikers—but there's nothing small about the way he moves. He goes horizontal before Jeongguk's brain finishes processing that the ball was even hit in that direction, some impossible geometry of limbs meeting court meeting ball, and then he's back on his feet before the sound of his own body hitting the floor has finished echoing, already tracking the return.
The crowd loses its mind. Jeongguk, despite himself, actually sits up.
"Who is that," he says, to no one in particular.
Oh doesn't look up from his phone. "Park Jimin. Libero. They call him the nation's treasure, if you want to feel old about how little pop culture you consume anymore."
"I know who Park Jimin is." He does not, in fact, know who Park Jimin is, beyond the vague periphery-of-his-attention knowledge that comes from living in the same country as someone famous. He's seen the name. He hasn't seen this—the way the whole arena seems to breathe around this one small, absurdly fast person, like he's the thing holding the room together.
Jimin dives again two minutes later—an even worse angle than the first, a ball that by all physical logic should be uncatchable—and gets it up anyway, and the person next to Jeongguk actually grabs his arm in excitement, a total stranger, and Jeongguk doesn't even mind.
He's not sure when he stops performing attention and starts actually paying it. Somewhere between the third dive and the fourth, probably. He finds himself leaning forward, elbows on knees, the foam finger discarded somewhere on the floor, watching the specific look on Jimin's face after a good return—not triumph, exactly. Something more private than that. Relief, maybe. Like every save costs him something and he's quietly glad to have it back.
It's a good face. Jeongguk notices this the way he'd notice any well-composed shot—clinically, professionally, the idol-brain that catalogs good lighting and good bone structure on reflex. That's all it is.
The jumbotron seems to disagree.
He doesn't register it happening until the crowd noise changes texture again—less roar, more rising titter, a wave of phones lifting around him—and Oh, beside him, goes very still in the specific way that means trouble.
"Jeongguk." His voice has the flat calm of a man watching a car crash in slow motion. "Look up."
He looks up.
His own face, four meters tall, mid-lean-forward, watching the court with an expression he has not once in six years of professional smiling learned how to control. Rapt. Unguarded. Genuinely, helplessly interested, in a way that eleven thousand people and however many million more watching the broadcast at home are now witnessing in high definition.
The caption, added by some producer somewhere with a very good sense of comic timing, reads: JEON Jeongguk SPOTTED AT WOMEN'S— WAIT. MEN'S NATIONAL VOLLEYBALL FINALS.
"Oh no," Jeongguk says.
"Smile," Oh says through his teeth, already reaching for his phone to start damage control that hasn't even become necessary yet. "Smile, wave, look normal, you look like you've seen a ghost—"
Jeongguk smiles. It comes out closer to a grimace. The crowd loves it anyway, cheering harder, and somewhere down on the court he sees a flash of movement—Jimin, glancing up at the jumbotron along with everyone else, and then looking back out at the stands, scanning, until he finds the actual source of the commotion sitting court-side in an expensive jacket and an expression of pure, unfiltered horror.
Their eyes meet for exactly one second.
Jimin's mouth twitches—not quite a smile, more like he's trying very hard not to laugh—before his coach barks something and he's turning back to the game, jogging back to position like nothing happened at all.
Jeongguk's face is very warm. He tells himself it's the arena lights.
"We're leaving the second this ends," he mutters.
"We are absolutely not," Oh says, already typing. "Do you know how much positive engagement this is generating? Comms is having a field day. You're 'wholesome' now. Do you understand how hard it is to make you read as wholesome?"
"I hate this."
"You'll live," Oh says again, and this time doesn't even bother sounding sympathetic about it.
Korea wins in four sets. Jeongguk spends the rest of the match trying very hard not to look at the court and failing more often than he'd like to admit, and by the time he's hustled out a side exit past a scrum of reporters who definitely were not there for the volleyball anymore, his phone already has forty-three notifications, a trending hashtag with his name wedged awkwardly next to Jimin's, and one photo—already, impossibly, everywhere—of the exact moment their eyes met on the jumbotron.
He doesn't delete it off his phone.
He tells himself that's an oversight, too.
— ☾ ☼ —
The invitation arrives four months later, printed on cardstock heavy enough to double as a weapon, and Manager Oh hands it over with the specific gleam of a man who has already said yes on Jeongguk's behalf.
"Sports Ministry gala," he says. "Ambassador appointments for the upcoming Asian Games push. You're representing culture and youth engagement, whatever that means. It's an hour, there's a step-and-repeat, you shake some hands, you go home."
Jeongguk reads the list of honorees twice before he lets himself react to it. Fourth name down, between a marathon runner and a badminton player he vaguely recognizes: Park Jimin, National Volleyball Team.
"Oh," he says, aiming for neutral and landing somewhere closer to strangled.
"Mm." Oh's smile is the smile of a man who absolutely noticed the jumbotron clip get 40 million views and has been waiting four months for an excuse like this to fall into his lap. "Small world."
"You did this on purpose."
"I did nothing. The Ministry made the list. I simply," he says, already halfway out the door, "did not object to it."
— ☾ ☼ —
The gala is exactly as tedious as Jeongguk expects for the first forty minutes—a blur of handshakes, photographers calling his name in that specific pitch reserved for people who need his face turned exactly three degrees to the left, small talk with officials who want to be seen talking to him more than they actually want to talk. He's good at this. He's been good at this since he was seventeen. It doesn't require any of the parts of him that are actually awake.
Then the emcee calls the athletes up for the ambassador announcement, and Park Jimin walks past him close enough that Jeongguk catches the specific, ordinary detail of his cologne, something clean and unfussy, nothing like the elaborate manufactured scent Jeongguk's own stylist picks for him, and every rehearsed, effortless part of tonight briefly forgets how to function
Up close, Jimin is smaller than the jumbotron suggested and somehow more solid for it, like the TV had been lying about how much space he actually takes up. He's wearing a suit that fits like it was actually tailored for him rather than borrowed for the occasion, hair pushed back instead of the practical buzz he wears on court, and he looks, Jeongguk thinks with some distant, professional part of his brain, extremely good, in a way that has nothing to do with cameras.
Jimin glances over. Recognition flickers—of course it does, there are approximately zero people in this country who wouldn't recognize Jeon Jeongguk on sight—and then, unmistakably, amusement.
"You," Jimin says, low enough that it doesn't carry past the two of them. "The jumbotron guy."
Jeongguk has weathered six years of increasingly invasive interview questions with his composure fully intact. He does not know why this, specifically, threatens to undo it. "I have a name."
"I know your name. Everyone knows your name." Jimin's mouth curves, not quite a smile, the exact same almost-laugh from the arena. "I'm asking if you know how many times my coach has replayed that clip in the team group chat."
"Please don't tell me."
"Fourteen times. As of this morning."
"I genuinely hate this country's media apparatus."
"You're literally part of it," Jimin points out, entirely too pleased with himself, and Jeongguk is saved from having to formulate a response by the emcee calling both their names for the photo line, which is—in retrospect, obviously, inevitably—exactly where the actual disaster occurs.
The photographers ask them to stand together. Of course they do. It's the easiest headline in the building tonight, and everyone in a fifty-foot radius knows it, from the Ministry officials exchanging pleased little glances to Manager Oh visibly resisting the urge to pull out his phone and start drafting the press release in real time.
"Closer, please," someone calls. "Ambassador Jeon, if you could—yes, just there—"
Jeongguk steps closer. Jimin, beside him, goes very still in a way that Jeongguk only clocks because he's spent his entire career learning to read the difference between someone's public face and the half-second crack before it settles into place. It's brief. It's gone almost immediately, replaced by an easy, camera-ready smile that Jeongguk would bet money is exactly as constructed as his own.
Interesting, he thinks, and doesn't examine why it interests him quite this much.
"Any advice," Jeongguk murmurs, barely moving his mouth, "for surviving forty more minutes of this?"
"Think about something boring," Jimin murmurs back, smile never wavering, camera flashes going off in a steady rhythm around them. "Taxes. Grocery lists. My coach's stretching routine."
"That's not boring, that's just deeply upsetting information about your coach."
Something changes in Jimin's expression—not the constructed smile this time, something quicker and realer underneath it, gone almost as fast as it arrives, but Jeongguk catches it. A genuine startled laugh, swallowed halfway, badly hidden behind a cough.
The cameras eat it up. Of course they do. It'll be circulating within the hour, some captioned still of Park Jimin mid-laugh next to Jeon Jeongguk's carefully composed profile, and the internet will spend a full news cycle deciding what it means, and Jeongguk—watching Jimin compose himself, watching the real laugh get folded neatly back beneath the professional one—finds he doesn't actually mind.
"You're trouble," Jimin says, once the flashes finally let up and they're being herded toward the next photo op.
"I've been told."
"I meant that as a warning, not a compliment."
“I’ll have it as both," Jeongguk says, and has the singular pleasure of watching Park Jimin, nation's treasure, apparently unshakeable under pressure from international sporting federations and diving headfirst across polished gymnasium floors, momentarily lose track of what he was about to say next.
They don't exchange numbers that night. It would be too obvious, too immediately fuel for exactly the story the internet is already halfway to writing without their help, and both of them are professional enough to know it.
But when the gala photos go up the next morning—dozens of them, official Ministry shots alongside the paparazzi's own catch—there's one in particular that outperforms every carefully staged handshake and every rehearsed smile combined: Jimin mid-laugh, head slightly turned toward Jeongguk, and Jeongguk watching him do it with an expression he absolutely did not authorize his own face to make in public.
Manager Oh sends it to him with no caption at all. Just the photo, and, thirty seconds later, a single follow-up text.
Oh: we need to talk about your face
Jeongguk looks at the photo for a long moment before he puts his phone down, face carefully blank, definitely not thinking about a bad joke involving a stretching routine.
He fails, for the first time in longer than he can remember, to talk himself out of something he's clearly already decided.
— ☾ ☼ —
It's Jimin who breaks first, three days after the gala, via a message that arrives through the Ministry's official ambassador group chat—a genuinely baffling choice of platform that Jeongguk stares at for a full ten seconds before he understands what's happening.
Park Jimin: does anyone know if we're supposed to do a joint statement for the youth outreach thing or is that just me reading too much into a Powerpoint slide
Park Jimin: also jeon Jeongguk if you're in this chat please confirm you're a real person and not just oh manager's decoy account
Jeongguk reads it twice, sitting in the back of a car on the way to a schedule he's already forgotten the details of, and finds himself smiling before he's consciously decided to.
Jeon Jeongguk: I can neither confirm nor deny that Manager Oh runs a decoy account
Jeon Jeongguk: he might, actually. I should ask him
Park Jimin: see this is exactly the chaos energy I was hoping for
Someone else in the chat—the marathon runner, Jeongguk realizes, scrolling up—posts a single thumbs up and nothing else, which effectively ends the group conversation and, apparently, opens an entirely different one, because four minutes later Jeongguk's phone buzzes with a message that is very clearly not meant for the group.
Park Jimin: ok this is going to sound insane but do you actually know anything about the youth outreach powerpoint or should we just wing it
Jeon Jeongguk: I have never once known anything about a powerpoint in my life
Jeon Jeongguk: it's part of my brand
Park Jimin: incredible. groundbreaking. truly a visionary approach to ambassadorship
Jeon Jeongguk: thank you, I worked hard on it
It's easy. That's the thing that catches him off guard the most—not the fact that Jimin texts like he talks, quick and a little relentless, but how easy it is to text back. Jeongguk spends most of his life curating every sentence before it leaves his mouth, weighing how it'll read in a fan cam or get clipped into a headline. He doesn't do that here. He's not sure when he stopped.
The powerpoint, as it turns out, is real, and mandatory, and requires an actual planning call two weeks later that both of them attend from separate rooms in separate cities and spend approximately eleven of the allotted thirty minutes actually discussing outreach strategy.
"You're muted," Jimin says, the third time Jeongguk tries to make a point about scheduling. "You've been muted this whole time."
"I know that now."
"You gave an entire two-minute speech to no one. I watched you do it. It was very moving."
"I hate video calls."
"You do this for a living."
"I sing for a living. Nobody expects me to say anything intelligent while doing it."
Jimin laughs—the real one, not the camera-ready one from the gala, the one that comes out a little too loud and catches him off guard every time—and Jeongguk spends an embarrassing amount of the rest of the call trying to make it happen again.
By the end of the meeting, the actual outreach plan exists in some vague, half-formed state that the Ministry's actual staff will presumably have to fix later, and Jeongguk has learned, entirely incidentally, that Jimin loved his energy drinks, hates early morning practice with a genuine passion he doesn't bother disguising, and once got benched for a week in high school for starting a fight with a much bigger opposing player who'd said something about his height.
"You started it?" Jeongguk asks. "You're, what, five foot six?"
"Five seven," Jimin says, with the wounded dignity of a man who has had this exact argument many times before. "And yes. I started it. I also won it, if it matters."
"Does it matter?"
"It matters enormously."
Jeongguk doesn't remember the meeting ending, exactly. He remembers laughing about something else, and then his manager knocking on the door to remind him he has somewhere to be, and the specific, unfamiliar disappointment of realizing the call has to end at all.
The texting becomes a habit somewhere between the powerpoint call and the actual outreach event, low-stakes and constant in a way Jeongguk's schedule has no real business accommodating. Jimin sends him photos of increasingly terrible team meals with no context. Jeongguk sends back increasingly detailed complaints about choreography he's too old for. Neither of them mentions how often they're talking, or how strange it is that neither of them has run out of things to say.
His teammates notice before Jimin does, apparently—or at least Jimin reports as much, mid-practice, texting Jeongguk from what is very obviously supposed to be a water break.
Park Jimin: minjun just asked me who "the guy I keep smiling at my phone about" is
Park Jimin: I told him it's none of his business
Park Jimin: he did not accept that answer
Jeon Jeongguk: what did you tell him instead
Park Jimin: that it's a very complicated tax situation
Jeon Jeongguk: and he believed that
Park Jimin: absolutely not. he's been making kissing noises at me for the last ten minutes. it's very undignified for a professional athlete. Might sue
Jeongguk, in his own dressing room, laughs loud enough that his stylist glances over with the specific alarmed curiosity of someone who has never once seen him laugh at his phone before.
"Nothing," Jeongguk says, before she can ask, and turns the screen face-down, and does not stop smiling for the rest of the fitting.
They don't call it anything. Neither of them brings up what it is, exactly, or whether it's supposed to be something at all—there's an unspoken agreement, formed somewhere in the gaps between texts, not to look at it too directly, the way you don't stare straight at a bright light if you want to keep seeing it clearly.
It's just texting. Mostly.
Jeongguk tells himself that every night, right up until the moment his phone buzzes with Jimin's name on the screen, and something in his chest does something it has absolutely no business doing over a text message about bad team food.
He answers anyway. He always answers.
— ☾ ☼ —
The first time they actually go somewhere together, it isn't a date. That's the word neither of them uses, anyway—Jimin calls it "getting food since we're both free," and Jeongguk, texting back, matches the studied casualness of it so precisely that he has to sit for a second afterward and wonder when he became someone who strategizes about text tone.
They meet at a place Jimin picks, small and unbothered by the specific chaos that follows Jeongguk everywhere else—a back-alley barbecue spot with no sign out front, run by a woman who takes one look at Jeongguk's face, says nothing, and seats them in a corner booth without so much as blinking.
"How do you even know this place exists," Jeongguk says, once they're seated, once the initial strangeness of being somewhere public with Park Jimin and not immediately causing a scene has worn off into something closer to normal.
"Teammate's mom." Jimin's already reaching for the menu like he doesn't need it, already knows exactly what he's ordering. "She doesn't care who anyone is. She kicked out a congressman once for being rude to the waitstaff."
"I respect her enormously."
"Everyone does. It's the only reason the place is still standing—half the neighborhood would riot if she got bought out." Jimin flags down a server with the easy familiarity of a regular, orders enough meat for four people without consulting Jeongguk at all, and then glances up like he's just remembered Jeongguk exists. "You eat pork, right? I should've asked."
"You should've asked several minutes ago, but yes."
"I panicked. You have an intimidating face. It made me forget basic manners."
"My face is not intimidating."
"Your face," Jimin says, entirely too solemnly, "has been on a billboard. I saw it on my way here. It was forty feet tall and staring directly into my soul."
"That billboard is for a skincare brand."
"Still intimidating. Possibly more intimidating, actually, given the context."
It goes like that for most of the meal—easy, quick, the kind of conversation that doesn't require either of them to perform anything. Jeongguk finds himself talking more than he means to, about things he doesn't usually bring up on first dates that aren't technically first dates: the actual mechanics of a comeback, how much he hates interviews that ask him to describe his own music in three words, the specific exhaustion of being twenty-six and treated like a product with a shelf life. Jimin listens like it's actually interesting instead of just polite, asks follow-up questions instead of waiting for his turn to talk, and doesn't once reach for his phone the entire time.
"You're better at this than I expected," Jeongguk says, somewhere around the third plate.
"Better at what? Eating? I'm extremely good at eating."
"Talking. Making this—" he gestures vaguely between them, "—not weird."
Jimin considers this while chewing, entirely unhurried. "Give it time," he says eventually. "I'm sure I'll say something weird eventually. I have a real gift for it."
He does not, as it turns out, say anything weird. He walks Jeongguk to the car afterward—or tries to, before realizing Jeongguk's actual car is a security detail and a blacked-out SUV idling half a block away for exactly this reason, at which point he laughs so hard he has to stop walking entirely.
"Right," Jimin says, wiping his eyes. "Forgot. Nation's Prince doesn't just hail a cab."
"I could, theoretically."
"You would get recognized in four seconds and cause a minor traffic incident."
"...Fair."
It becomes a pattern, after that, in the loose and unofficial way that things become patterns before anyone agrees to call them one. Dinner, when both their schedules allow it, always somewhere quiet enough to avoid becoming a headline. A movie, once, in a private screening room Jeongguk's company keeps for exactly this kind of discretion, where they spend more time commentating badly on the plot than actually watching it. A late walk near Jimin's dorm that turns into two hours of standing outside talking about nothing in particular, until Jimin's curfew forces the issue.
Neither of them calls it dating. Neither of them calls it anything.
It's easier that way, Jeongguk tells himself—easier to keep it small and undefined, easier to protect it from the specific, grinding machinery that turns everything he touches into content. If it doesn't have a name, no one can ask him to explain it. If it doesn't have a name, he doesn't have to examine too closely what it means that he's started rearranging his schedule around Jimin's tournament calendar without really deciding to.
Jimin, for his part, seems to have made the same unspoken calculation. He doesn't push for labels. He doesn't ask what they're doing, or what it means, or where it's going—he just keeps showing up, unhurried and steady, like he's content to let it be whatever it is for as long as it wants to be that.
His teammates have stopped pretending not to notice.
"You're doing the smile again," Minjun announces one afternoon, loud enough for the whole locker room to hear, apropos of nothing except Jimin glancing at his phone. "The Jeon Jeongguk smile."
"I don't have a Jeon Jeongguk smile."
"You absolutely do. It's different from your normal smile. It's softer. It's concerning."
"I'm going to bench you."
"You're a libero, you can't bench anyone, that's not how the sport works."
"I'll find a way," Jimin says darkly, and pockets his phone, and does not stop smiling for the rest of practice, no matter how many times Minjun points it out.
It's good. That's the strange, quiet truth of it, underneath all the careful lack of definition—it's good, easier than anything Jeongguk's had in years, undemanding in a way that lets him just be someone for a couple of hours instead of performing being someone. He doesn't examine it too closely. He's gotten good, over the years, at not examining things too closely when the examining might cost him something he'd rather keep.
Jimin doesn't examine it either, as far as Jeongguk can tell. They just keep showing up—for each other, for the version of this that doesn't need a name to be real—and if some small part of both of them already knows that this particular kind of quiet can't last indefinitely, neither of them says so out loud.
It's easier not to.