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Everyone liked to pretend the music industry was all glitter and gratitude—but Viktor knew better. It was blood, it was teeth, and he’d learned how to bite back early.

He wasn't sure when it had started. The love not for the stage, but the inner workings of it. The picking apart of every mechanism and angle to frame the idols in their best light. Obsessively looking over every clip of his favourite groups to try and figure out what he could have done better with them if he had been the one calling the shots.

He wasn't sure when it had started, but what he did know is that it had led him far. All the way to Korea, among the stars he had always dreamed of meeting. Writing lyrics for the band of misfits he had picked up along his journey. Misfits that had topped the charts just last week, actually, with a song written by Viktor himself. If anyone had told him ten years ago that he'd be the agent and lyricist for a freelance group of girls that probably would have gotten eaten up without him, he'd have laughed in their faces. But in the end, who was better to lead a group like that than him?

Because Viktor, like most other agents, demanded perfection. But unlike other agents, he was also a choreographer, lyricist, and occasional composer when times called for it. So he had full control on whatever came out of the production machine. And a man like Viktor knew how to please a crowd. Every win was accepted humbly, every scandal twisted back around to make them look better. Of course, he revelled in it like a magician watching a crowd in awe.

The only thing that managed to ruffle his carefully arranged feathers was a terrible rivalry that he had somehow not been able to let go of since his first days writing. And he remembered exactly how that had started.

You had been at the same audition for a junior writing role in another group. Somehow, both of you got picked, and both put on the same writing team. Which had been a total mistake, but at the time, no one realised it yet. Fights broke out every two days, scripts got sent out late, and you ended up both getting fired. Since then, Viktor had sworn an undying hatred towards you. And by the look of it, you had sworn the same.

He had tried to look as little as possible into your life. For the first few years, it had been easy. Neither of you were really important. Then, to his shock and horror, a year or so after Viktor started his own group, you had taken over a marginally popular group from a retiring agent and brought it up to the same level as Viktor's. So was rekindled the rivalry.

It was almost beyond his control. He had to make sure you were less good than him. The second your group got a song out, his retaliated with their own. The moment his group scored an award, yours was quick to follow. Even now, his place at the top was dethroned by you every few days. It was a clear rivalry that bled through into everything your respective idol groups did. The problem was that rivalries caused rumours.

And rumours, unfortunately, were bad for business.

So, in a move Viktor could only describe as both deeply humiliating and profoundly corporate, the higher-ups had decided to make a show of unity. A collab track. Written by the two ennemies that had started it all, no less. Nothing screamed “peace” quite like locking two people who hated each other in a soundproof room for eight hours with nothing but cold coffee and creative differences.

He walked into the studio and hour early, to make sure he'd arrive first. One more thing he could gloat about when you arrive, besides how his latest single outperformed yours by two hundred thousand streams. His only companions were one of those fancy leather couches, a stack of notebooks, and of course, the beautiful sign of corporate goodwill. A basket of fruit.

As expected, you came in twenty minutes later, fourty minutes early. The look of shock on your face when you saw him already seated and working was worth waking up at six for.

"I've been waiting. Too busy getting ready for the cameras again?"