Chapter Text
The text comes in at 2:17 AM, which is either far too late or way too early, depending on your personal choices. Jisung has given up making that distinction for himself. He exists outside space and time, outside sleep and hunger, running on nothing but regret, bad choices, and a two-day-old takeout box of japchae that’s starting to smell.
The deadline for the song he’s working on is in four days - just enough time to panic, but not enough to actually change anything. The studio is in disarray, a mess that would be embarrassing if there were anyone else here, which there isn’t so it’s fine. Three hoodies strewn across the room, accompanied by beanies, are the only studiomates he has anymore - not since Chan up and left him for a job in Sydney - and the monitor glows a sickly pale, like it’s on its last legs too.
The song is almost there. It’s been almost there since midnight, but that’s the worst place for it to be. It sounds almost right, but something is still off, and the gap there is starting to wear on his nerves.
He pulls up the chorus again, adjusts the layering on the vocal line by a mere fraction, something that will matter to him and no one else, listens back, hates it.
It’s the worst thing he’s ever heard.
His phone buzzes like a reminder - 2:18 AM - and he glances over with disdain.
Chan.
It’s not unusual - he and Chan always operated on similar, sleep-deprived schedules. The two-hour time difference between Seoul and Sydney didn’t change that. Jisung finds it comforting in a way - like Chan is still across the hall, even though he’s really thousands of miles away.
isn’t this your song????
Four question marks and no capitalization. Jisung frowns. That’s unlike Chan. And what song could he possibly be talking about? Jisung has written over a hundred by now-
There’s a link directly below the text. He clicks it without thinking.
The page finally loads, and there it is - an ISU livestream, World Figure Skating Championships, some arena somewhere. The caption in the corner reads Lee Minho (KOR) - Short Program, and the skater is already mid-performance. Dressed in a dark costume, the skater glides across the ice, precise and controlled in movements that Jisung doesn’t have the technical language for. Just as he notices the skater’s physique, the strength of his thighs and the grace of his movements, the audio finally registers properly.
Jisung goes still.
He knows the song - of course he knows the song. He knows it in the very specific way that one knows their art - in the body before the brain catches up. Knows it in the way he made it, with his own hands, and tried to hide it just the same. It takes approximately two seconds for his brain to catch up to what his ears already know.
The chord progression, the specific texture of the vocal layer he spent a week getting right and then never listened to again-
Oh, he thinks, with the particular flatness of someone watching something bad happen in slow motion. Oh yeah, that's my song.
Alien.
His song - his. His voice, pitched under layers of production. He hears the seam where he almost deleted the second verse but didn’t. Can feel the 3AM mania that produced the bridge. Remembers Chan’s hands on his back when he’d pitched over his desk in anguish. He hasn’t listened to it in years, released solely because he needed a song to fill a quota and he didn’t have time to write another. His contract stipulated that the label - so small it barely qualified as one - owned it outright. Every time someone brought it up, he’d change the subject.
This song was never meant to be understood by anyone else. It was meant to be his.
On his phone screen, a stranger in a sparkling costume a thousand miles away is skating to it on international television.
Jisung watches, and holds his breath.
He doesn’t even know why he’s still watching. The program - the song - is halfway through, and he pulls up Lee Minho’s Wikipedia page on his desktop.
Twenty six. South Korean. Ranked third in the world. Gucci ambassador. That last detail shouldn’t really matter, but it makes everything worse.
He moves like a dancer through the worst year of Jisung’s life. Then comes the chorus, and something in Lee Minho’s movement changes - the sharpness that has carried the whole performance goes soft at the edges, and what’s left is slow and deliberate in a way that has no business being as accurate as it is. Jisung wrote that section, those chords, about something specific - something private. Lee Minho moves through them like he already knows.
Jisung closes the link and, with all the restraint in the world, gently places his phone face-down on the desk. From his desktop, Lee Minho’s profile photo stares at him from the Wikipedia page.
With a grimace, he picks up his phone again.
Disgust, he thinks to himself. That’s what this is - this cold, certain, vile feeling settling in his chest. It isn’t there because his music is being used - he’s been in the industry long enough to understand licensing - but this song was not made for consumption. That was the whole point of releasing it silently, without promotion or context, on a platform few actually use. No one was going to go looking for it.
He thought it was safe.
And here he is, listening to his own lyrics fill an arena full of people, on a livestream with the comment count ticking steadily into the tens of thousands, and some skater that has never met him is performing it like he knows what it means, like he gets it, like it was made for him.
It wasn’t made for him. How could it be? It’s not like Lee Minho will ever actually understand it.
The performance finishes. Jisung opens his messages and types back, where did you even find this?
Then he deletes it and types, yeah it’s my song.
He puts the phone down and closes the Wikipedia page. The song he’s supposed to deliver in four days sits open on his monitor. He stares for two seconds, then pulls up the ISU stream again.
The program is over. Lee Minho is putting on his guards at the boards, heading for the kiss-and-cry, and the camera finds his face for a brief moment.
He looks… happy. Proud. Not what Jisung would expect from someone who just spent four minutes inside an open wound that isn’t his.
Jisung closes the tab. For real this time, promising himself he won’t look at it again. He means it.
Five minutes later, Lee Minho’s short program comes to a close again, and Jisung’s face is set in a frown that hasn’t moved.
Outside, Seoul stays quiet. The night is still. Inside, the crowd noise bleeds through his speakers - cheers from Boston, from the ISU World Championships, filling up a studio they have no business being in.
The worst part is that no one cares. His most private piece of lyricism is currently circulating through international sports media, and no one cares. His deadline is swiftly approaching, and no one but the label cares. The half-finished chorus on his monitor doesn’t care.
He is the only one on this planet who cares, and he would like it noted that he cares very much, even if no one else does. This is not something he gave Lee Minho permission to do.
At some point the ISU stream moves on to the next skater. It takes Jisung a few minutes to notice, but when he does, he goes back and finds the clip.
Then he watches the program again, and again, and again. Sound on, sound off, half-volume. He’s searching for something - some angle from which the choreography goes generic, where it becomes just a pretty skater and a sad song. He tries to find excuses, tries to convince himself that Lee Minho, or his choreographer, or someone, just heard a random song on a random Tuesday and decided to make a dance to it. Nothing more.
The japchae still smells. Nothing has changed.
He still can’t find anything.
He watches it a fifth time anyway.
