Hanbok || 2Shin (English version)

Interlude: the first photo

How boring those girls were.

Kye Seok-neul had lost count of how many times he had thought the same thing, but could anyone blame him? It was true. The members of ITZY didn't do anything. They never went out late at night, they didn't go to bars, they didn't go to compromising places, they didn't meet any guys (or girls) when they went out, nothing. His informants inside JYP told him the same thing: no strangers were ever seen leaving their dorms, nor did they keep illicit substances in their dorms.

Nothing, and that for Kye Seok-neul, a Dispatch reporter, meant boredom as hell. He wished he had been assigned to another group, a bigger fish than ITZY. Seok-neul had been involved in the K-Pop industry's biggest scandals, directly or indirectly, and yet the people at the top preferred to put him to watch five nuns instead of giving him a job that was up to his standards. He earned well with the previous jobs, but the several zeros in his bank account were slowly starting to disappear. He managed his money well, but he had to keep a good income coming in.

When he was informed that he would now have to keep an eye on ITZY, the new JYP group, he was disappointed (a new group was not interesting), but he promised himself to get something out of them, some dirt. They had to have it, right? Well, he'd find it, make it public, and make some serious dough.

That hadn't been the case so far. He began his task shortly after the group made their fourth comeback, having to keep up with the massive amount of content they put out. It was so much that he had had to split it with his two assistants. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Games, humor whiter than a silk scarf, the occasional flirtatious moment between two of the members... The same as other groups.

One of the few things that caught their attention was episode number three of the series behind Not Shy. Specifically, it was the moment when the youngest of them all, Yuna, had come close to kissing rapper Ryujin. More than anything else, Seok-neul found the Ryujin girl's reaction interesting. She had almost panicked at the other girl's closeness and her voice had choked as she spoke into the camera. Seok-neul could have sworn she had even blushed, but with the ridiculous amount of makeup she was wearing it was impossible to say for sure.

"That's the reaction I would have if the guy I like approached me like that," Choe Eun-suk, his only female assistant, had pointed out.

Seok-neul took her word for it and had contacted his informants within the company. Unfortunately, they didn't tell him anything useful: no one had seen either Shin acting weird with the other. No visits to each other's bedroom, nor did they often leave the building together.

Another dead end. He had nothing better to do, though. Paperwork, write up a couple of minor things for the paper.

He asked Eun-suk to watch the videos on ITZY's YouTube channel with him, since she had a better eye reading people than he did.

"Do you notice it?" Eun-suk askedone day when they finished watching a video of a series called ITZY? ITZY!

"What?" Seok-neul said with a grimace.

"The smile that sticks to the older Shin when she sees the other one," she said.

Seok-neul replayed the video again, fixing his attention on Ryujin and Yuna's interactions.

"Smile like an idiot," Seok-neul said.

"Exactly."

"Do you think...?"

"I don't know," Eun-suk interrupted. "It's probably just my imagination."

"You're almost never wrong about these things."

"It's hard to say, but if I had to pay a little more attention to any one member, it would be these two."

Seok-neul tapped his fingernail on the table, deliberating.