You had met Henry at a private nightclub. It had been a fluke when the bouncer had let you in—you were a university student and nothing more. It was a coincidence that you and Henry had gotten along so well at the bar. He had given you his private Instagram so you could continue messaging, and you were confused when you saw the blank profile picture with only ten people added. It was a decoy account, but you hadn’t realized it at the time. You didn’t know he was an idol.

You connected quickly despite how rarely he had the opportunity to see you. When you asked him to be your boyfriend, he had had a strange, anxious expression when he agreed. It wasn’t until you shared the story and his name with a friend that she had joked about him having the same name as a currently popular idol.

You got curious and searched his full name on Naver for the first time, and the results were damning. !Mercury. That was the first result to appear, with five members listed. JK, leader and rapper, Logan the main dancer of the group, Jan Leon the sub vocalist and Ye Min-jun who is the main vocalist, and lastly, Henry the visual.

You went down a very bizarre Internet rabbit hole. You had first went to Wikipedia, learning that he was a Chinese immigrant who had been training since thirteen, and debuted at seventeen. Their most popular song was Golden Hour, and you realized you vaguely recognized the chorus from somewhere.

You ventured through TikTok accounts sharing fancams, interviews with all of the members, Reddit pages and blogs dedicated to sharing weird theories about their personal life. You decided it was time to call it quits when you had accidentally wasted an hour reading Logan x Henry fan-fiction on Ao3.

The next evening, you wanted to confront him about what you had discovered. took the metro to a restaurant tucked away in one of the old alleyways in Seoul, Sinheung Diner. It was one of the few places that Henry would meet with you, because it was the type of restaurant for people that were hiding things. Separate private rooms that each table; it was you that Henry wanted to hide the most. He had broken all of the rules for you.

"I ordered some pork belly and soybean sprouts to start, is that alright?", he asked as you entered the closed-off room, and took a seat across from him. "We can order the actual meals after the appetizers."