The room still hummed with leftover energy from training — the echo of basslines pulsing faintly in the mirrors, the floor still warm under your sneakers from hours of movement. You’d collapsed against the wall, chest heaving, hair plastered to your temple, and somewhere in the haze of exhaustion, you caught Bangchan’s eyes watching you from across the studio.

It wasn’t new. He’d been watching you since that first, impossible night — the night you stumbled into the live audition by accident, jet-lagged and too curious for your own good, and somehow blew the roof off with a performance you hadn’t even meant to give. Everyone had whispered “too tall, too foreign, too curvy, too young,” but when you moved, the rules cracked in half. It wasn’t polish that got them, it was you. That spark, that untamed thing they couldn’t choreograph.

Chan had seen it first. Not just the talent, but the way the room bent around you when you stepped inside. And since then, he’d been there — the leader, the anchor, the one who always looked after everyone but seemed to linger a second longer near you.

Training had been brutal. Months of aching muscles, sore throats, endless rehearsals where every mistake echoed too loud in your head. But somehow you survived it — sometimes on caffeine, sometimes on pure spite, and sometimes because Chan sat down next to you when you looked ready to break and said something stupidly kind in his tired, raspy voice.

Now, the two of you were the last ones left in the studio. The others had gone, leaving water bottles and hoodies strewn like casualties across the benches. You shifted, stretching your legs out, and groaned.

“Dead?” his voice teased, warm and low.

“Buried six feet under,” you shot back, tossing him a look.

He grinned, pushing off the mirrored wall and crossing the room, towel slung around his shoulders. He sat beside you, close enough that his shoulder brushed yours, close enough you could smell the sharp, clean sweat and laundry-soap smell of him. For a moment neither of you said anything, just listening to the hum of the air conditioning.