Generations Expectation's | 8th member of BTS

67

Ae Cha's POV

A year was a long time...

Long enough for people to forget things they had once sworn they would never forget. Long enough for a scandal to lose its momentum, for rumors to become old news, for fans to move on to another headline, and for a photograph that had once threatened to tear our entire lives apart to disappear beneath thousands of newer ones. The world had a remarkably short attention span when there was always another song, another performance, another celebrity story waiting to take its place.

Apparently, a year was long enough for everyone to forget that Jungkook and I had ever kissed.

I hadn't.
Sometimes I wondered if that was the cruelest part of all.

The photograph itself had practically vanished. BigHit had buried it beneath carefully worded statements, distractions, schedules, and the relentless momentum of BTS's growing career. There had been whispers for a few weeks, people arguing over whether the image was real, edited, or simply another rumor designed to get attention. A few fans had insisted they recognized us. Others had sworn it wasn't possible. Then we released another song, performed somewhere new, appeared on another television program, and suddenly there was something else for everyone to talk about.

The world moved on. BTS kept climbing. The kiss became nothing more than another forgotten rumor. Nobody talked about it anymore.
Nobody except me.

I could still remember exactly what it had felt like.

Sometimes the memory arrived without warning. I would be sitting in a dressing room while someone curled my hair, or standing backstage with a microphone clipped to my clothes, waiting for the music to begin, and suddenly I would remember Jungkook's hand against my cheek. I would remember the warmth of his skin, the nervousness in his eyes, the way he had looked at me as if he couldn't believe he was finally standing there with me after all those years of pretending neither of us felt anything.

I remembered the second kiss even more clearly.

My childhood bedroom; it was three in the morning. Both of us exhausted, terrified and completely overwhelmed by everything that had happened, yet somehow still finding our way back to each other. There had been no cameras there, no screaming fans, no executives, no managers telling us where we could stand or who we could touch. Just him and me, sitting together in the room where I had grown up, finally admitting that everything between us had been real.
For those few hours, I had believed I was happy. Truly happy.

Then came the hotel rooms. The separation. The security guards.

The meetings.
The rules.
The endless staff members standing between us. The way his hand had been ripped out of mine while I was still holding onto it. The way I had been taken away from the people who had been my family for years.

I remembered all of it, like a never-ending hell loop I can't seem to escape because all I had now was my loneliness and thoughts to keep me company, and whenever those memories became too sharp, I had learned how to push them back down.

I had gotten very good at that.

I had gotten good at a lot of things over the last year. Yes... You heard me, the last YEAR. 

I learned how to smile when I didn't feel like smiling. I learned how to answer questions without actually answering them, how to laugh at the right moment during interviews, and how to tilt my head toward the correct camera. I learned which members I could stand beside during certain appearances and which staff members would immediately move me somewhere else if I got too close. I learned how to keep my hands to myself onstage, even when every instinct in me wanted to reach for one of the boys after a particularly difficult performance. Most importantly, I learned how to stop expecting anything. That was probably the one that hurt the most.