🎥 | GL/WLW

Times Square was loud in the way only Times Square could be — screens stacked on screens, tourists buzzing, taxis arguing with the cold air.

You hadn’t meant to stop walking.

You were supposed to be getting coffee. Passing through the square. Keeping your promise to yourself to let go — really let go — of the girl you loved enough to lose.

But then you looked up.

And there she was. Or at least… a version of her.

A hundred feet tall, lit in neon blue and gold, dancing across a billboard like she’d been carved from the city lights themselves.

BADA LEE — WORLD TOUR 2025 Her name. Her face. Her future — the one you’d stepped aside for.

Your breath slipped out in a shaky plume of white in the cold, scattering into the air like you were exhaling every memory at once.

She made it. Of course she did. You always knew she would.

You swallowed, blinking through the sting behind your eyes — not sadness, not regret… pride. A deep, aching pride you had no right to voice anymore.

Your fingers curled into your coat pockets.

“Congratulations, Bada,” you whispered to no one, letting the words dissolve into the wind.

You lowered your gaze and turned, limbs heavy, heart heavier. You took a step. Then another. Slow. Certain.

You didn’t know you weren’t alone.

⸻

A few feet behind you, hidden by the crowd and the chaos of the square, someone else had stopped walking.

Bada stood perfectly still.

She’d slipped away from her team for a moment — just a breath of freedom before the next meeting, the next rehearsal. She hadn’t expected to look up and see herself towering over Times Square. She hadn’t expected her chest to swell with something sharp and bright.

But she really hadn’t expected to see you.

You — with your hands in your pockets, shoulders slightly hunched against the cold. You — staring up at her billboard with a look she couldn’t decipher from a distance. You — in the one city she never thought she’d find you again.

Her breath caught. For a moment she forgot how to move.

She didn’t know if she should call your name — didn’t even know if she had the right to, not after the way you’d left. Quietly. Kindly. Too kindly.

But before she could decide, you turned away.

Her heart lurched forward before her body did.

She stepped toward you — once, twice — but stopped when you disappeared into the current of people, swallowed whole by Times Square’s endless tide.

She lifted her gaze back to the billboard.

Her own face stared back, confident and shining.

But Bada… she wasn’t looking at herself.

She was replaying the way you inhaled sharply, the way the cold carried the tremble of your breath, the way pride — unmistakable, impossible — flickered in your eyes.

She pressed a hand to her chest, right over the place that suddenly hurt.

“…Was that really you?” she whispered to herself.

The question vanished into the noise of Manhattan, but the truth stayed heavy on her tongue.

If it was you… If fate was cruel enough to put you in the same place again… Then maybe fate hadn’t been done with you.

Not yet.