The team lined up on stage.
And the gap told the whole story before a single word was spoken.
There they stood — a neat line of teammates, and then June, and then the very visible, very deliberate, very pointed foot of space between him and the person standing closest to him. Not accidental. Not a matter of spacing or stage positioning. Just the physical, spatial manifestation of everything that had been happening behind closed doors made suddenly, publicly, globally visible.
The livestream saw it immediately.
The coaches saw it immediately.
Everyone saw it.
Now. Let's talk about what June's life on this team had actually looked like. Because it deserves to be said plainly.
June was the only newcomer on a team of OG LEAVEN trainees. And from approximately day one, his presence had been treated as somewhere between inconvenient and invisible. His ideas got brushed past like they hadn't been said. His suggestions evaporated into the air before anyone acknowledged them. During breaks, the team moved and he didn't — not because he wasn't paying attention, but because nobody told him they were going and nobody waited. Lunch? Alone. Every time. Not because June didn't try, but because sitting down with the team was a door that was simply never opened for him.
When they spoke to him, it was functional. Instructional. Do this. Stand here. That's your part. Nothing more. When he asked questions — reasonable, legitimate questions from someone navigating a new environment — the answers came back as dismissals dressed as advice. "Figure it out yourself.""You've been in the industry. You don't know this already?"
Using his experience as a weapon against him. Innovative cruelty, that.
And here's the thing about all of this — the thing that makes it worth examining rather than just cataloguing —
Insecurity is a poison. A slow one. The kind that doesn't announce itself, doesn't wear a name tag, doesn't give you the courtesy of knowing it's there until it's already doing damage. These were talented young men. Every single one of them. Genuinely, measurably talented. But the moment they were grouped with June — with his years of industry experience, his name, his history — something activated. Something pre-rational and deeply human. The shadow his past cast over them felt bigger than they felt, and instead of sitting with that discomfort and examining it, they aimed it outward.
At June.
Who had done nothing.
Genuinely, specifically, documentably nothing wrong to any of them. For some of his teammates, this was the first time they had ever been in the same room as him. No history. No incident. No reason.
Just the complicated, messy, deeply human instinct to protect the ego before it's even been threatened — activated on sight, running on assumptions, completely unaware of itself.
And June?
June had every right to push back. Every right to defend himself, to call it out, to refuse to be treated like background furniture by people who didn't know him and hadn't tried to. That would have been justified.
Instead he nodded. Kept quiet. Figured it out himself. Did what he was told and did it well and didn't make it anyone else's problem.
Which, somehow, made his teammates dislike him more. Because nothing is more quietly infuriating to an insecure person than someone who refuses to react the way you expect them to. It disrupts the narrative. It removes the justification. It makes the whole thing look like exactly what it is.
And dislike is, as this author is very much aware, an extraordinarily generous word for what was festering in that team dynamic. The human psyche is a labyrinth. A dark, complicated, occasionally deeply embarrassing labyrinth. And most people are navigating it without a map, bumping into walls, and occasionally taking it out on the nearest June.
So there they stood.
The gap visible.
The coaches watching.
The livestream watching.
And June, standing in his little pocket of manufactured isolation, perfectly composed, waiting for the critiques to begin.
The internet, naturally, had already clocked every pixel of that gap.
@chunchunMaroo: the audacity of that foot gap. I have never felt so much secondhand rage from a stage formation in my LIFE.
↳ @RatGirlSummer: they really said "we will make the exclusion visible on a global livestream" and did not think that through even slightly
↳ @hells_swarm: June stood there with his WHOLE dignity intact while they made it weird. he ate and left no crumbs just by standing there.
↳ @LegalEagleKween: the gap is evidence. I'm filing it away.
↳ @404BrainNotFound: June said nothing, did everything, caught a fainting crew member, asked politely to resume, and STILL got the gap treatment. I am not okay.
↳ @Totoro: whatever the coaches are about to say to that team I want it delivered with full volume and zero mercy.
↳ @SleepyGoblin: the way June just stood there unbothered while the gap screamed on his behalf. main character behavior. unconscious main character behavior which makes it even worse.
The critiques were coming.
And something told everyone watching — in the arena, on the livestream, in every corner of the internet that had clocked that gap — that they were going to be something.
****
Back to the critiques.
Dora looked at June's teammates.
Just — looked at them. For a long, unhurried, deeply loaded moment. The kind of look that has weight and knows it.
"Did y'all actually understand what just happened during your performance?" Her voice was measured. Precise. The kind of calm that is significantly more intimidating than volume. "Like — genuinely. Did it never register? Because from where I was sitting, aside from June, every single one of you treated what happened like it was some kind of personal inconvenience."
June's teammates blinked. The shock on their faces was real — the specific shock of people being called out for something that had genuinely, completely, not registered as a thing they were being called out for.
"Yeah." Dora read every face in that line with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this a long time. "That's what I thought."
She shook her head. Slowly. The disappointment sitting visibly on her.
"I have to say," Robin said, stepping in with the quiet gravity she carried so naturally, "I'm deeply disappointed. Not just in the performance — but in how you all responded to an emergency situation. Did it not once occur to any of you that what was happening might be your challenge? Because looking at you right now — looking at all of you, June excluded — it's very clear that it didn't."
"The theme of tonight was How to Adapt," Lorelei said, her tone carrying that specific kind of firm that doesn't need to be raised to be heard. "We never said it would be limited to technical mishaps. Adapt means adapt — to anything. To the uncontrollable. To the unexpected. And a medical emergency? That is as unexpected and uncontrollable as it gets." She let that breathe for a moment. "There will be times in your careers — and I promise you this is not hypothetical — where someone needs help in the middle of your performance. A crew member. An audience member. Someone who paid their hard earned money to be in that room and watch you perform. Or God forbid, one of your own groupmates. And we needed to know — when that moment comes, who are you going to be?" Her eyes moved down the line. "Tonight, only one of you answered that question well."
Dora's gaze found June.
Softened. Completely and specifically.
"June, baby."
"You did an amazing job handling that situation. An amazing job."
"Thank you," June said, bowing with the quiet dignity he seemed to carry everywhere.
His teammates were doing the thing where you keep your face perfectly still while the inside of your head is a different situation entirely.
"As for the overall performance—" Dora paused. Pressed her lips together briefly. "I genuinely cannot bring myself to talk about it right now. Because I am just. So disappointed." She looked at Robin and Lorelei with the energy of a woman who was choosing to stop before she said something that couldn't be unsaid. "And I know my sisters here feel the same. So." A breath. "We're done."
Cat stepped in graciously and sent them off.
They were walking back — June slightly ahead, the gap between him and his teammates apparently a permanent fixture at this point — when the leader's voice cut through.
"Way to make us all look bad." Low. Edged. The voice of someone whose pride was sitting somewhere painful. "You could've at least given us a heads up before you decided to play hero on stage."
June stopped walking.
His teammates stopped walking.
And June turned around.
No raised voice. No heat. Just a calm, clear, direct expression — the look of someone who had been patient for a very long time and had arrived, quietly and without drama, at the end of it.
"I did try to get your attention," he said, simply. "Multiple times. You just never gave me the time of day." He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. "So don't come at me with that excuse. It doesn't hold." A beat. "Maybe — and I say this with genuine sincerity — instead of projecting your insecurities onto someone who has done nothing to you, you focus on yourselves." He looked at them. All of them. One last time.
"What a waste of talent," he said quietly.
Then turned. And walked.
Behind him, nobody spoke.
Not because they didn't have things to say — but because for the first time, the words weren't there. June had been quiet for so long that they had collectively, unconsciously, stopped expecting him to have a voice at all.
He did.
He'd just been choosing, this whole time, when to use it.
And they were only now understanding what it meant that he'd been holding it back.
For their sakes.
****
And finally — finally — it was Liam's team's turn.
And let's just say that out of every first performance delivered that evening, Liam's team came in and took the lead. Decisively. Unapologetically. With the energy of a group that had gone through a whole week of shouting matches, near-unconsciousness incidents, chloroform-adjacent CPR, and Mikko's 9.99 masterclass — and had somehow come out the other side genuinely, authentically tight.
Because that's the thing about going through it together. It either breaks a group or builds one. And this particular collection of chaotic, potty-mouthed, sleep-deprived disasters had, against reasonable odds, been built.
They'd also clearly paid attention to every team that performed before them — because they walked out onto that stage and simply performed. No bracing. No anticipating. If a mishap came, it came. Until then? Full commitment. Every note, every step, every eight count.
Well. For most of them.
For Zen, the internal monologue was running its own separate program entirely.
Rodeo, rodeo, rodeo, rodeo, feeling myself...
Clap clap... shoulder hips, shoulder hips...
Mime having a seizure...
Okay NOW — aura farm!
Now. What Zen was doing in his head during the aura farm moment was, in his vision, giving fierce wild tiger. Perhaps lion. Something powerful and untamed and vaguely dangerous.
What came out on stage was a snow-white house kitten trying desperately to be feral.
The commitment was there. The execution was — how to say this lovingly — not that. It was so aggressively, helplessly, almost offensively adorable that the audience felt it physically. Cuteness aggression, activated across the room. The kind where you need to squeeze something but nothing is available so you just suffer.
In the waiting room, Jeremiah had both hands on his face.
"OH MY GOD," he cooed, at a volume that was completely unnecessary. "YOUR BROTHER IS SO CUTE—"
Somewhere in the same room, Yen had been watching his twin with a smile so wide and so helpless that it had taken over his whole face — the smile of someone watching a person they love try their absolute hardest and fail in the most perfect way imaginable.
Mission failed successfully. If that saying had a visual representation, it was Zen aura farming on that stage right now.
And then Jeremiah spoke.
The smile disappeared from Yen's face like someone had flipped a switch.
"Don't even think about laying your hands on my brother," Yen said. The tone was calm. The subtext was a different situation entirely.
"Dude, chill," Jeremiah said, with the unbothered ease of a man who had assessed the threat and remained unbothered. "Even I know your brother needs to be protected from the general population. He's too pure for my particular brand of chaos. Now — once he gets a little nasty nasty on him, then we can revisit that conversation. But right now? I'm behaving. So stop glaring at me with your bro-con energy." He inspected his nails. "It's not a good look."
"...What's a bro-con?" one teammate asked, head tilting.
"Brother complex," another answered. "Like sis-con but for brothers."
Louie stared at both of them with the largest question mark his face had ever produced.
Some things, this industry just expected you to know.
Thankfully — blessedly — Liam's team was among those spared a mishap on their first performance. Everything landed the way it was supposed to land. Clean. Solid. Good.
The moment they hit their final pose and the music cut, the team absolutely lost it — in the best way. Hugs everywhere. Congratulations flying in every direction. Arms around shoulders, bright faces, the collective exhale of people who had worked for something and gotten it. They looked, to any outside eye, like the most harmonious team of the evening.
Which they were. Comparatively. And some teams in particular — yes you, June's team, this author is looking directly at you — set a very low bar for that comparison.
The coaches were happy. Which was, ultimately, the best result imaginable.
"I dare say," Robin said, with genuine warmth, "you had the strongest first performance of the night."
"THANK YOU!" came back from the whole team simultaneously, bright and unified, arms still around each other.
"Zen," Dora said, and her whole face was doing something warm and delighted, "baby, you were so cute up there that I genuinely wanted to reach out and pinch your cheeks."
Zen's face did something small and complicated.
A pout appeared. Subtle but present. The pout of a man who had been going for lion energy and received cheek-pinching energy instead.
"Why do you look disappointed, sweetheart?" Dora asked, genuinely curious, smiling.
Zen picked up his phone. Typed. Slid it to Mikko.
Mikko read it.
A snort came out before he could stop it — involuntary, immediate, completely beyond his control.
Zen turned to give him the most unconvincing glare in recorded history. The glare of a snow-white kitten trying to be intimidating.
"Zen says," Mikko managed, composing himself by approximately sixty percent, "that he was going for sexy. Not cute."
The waiting rooms lost it.
On stage, Dora's smile became radiant.
"Baby," she said, with complete sincerity that somehow landed even warmer than intended, "you were absolutely sexy in your own way. Don't let anyone tell you different."
One might reasonably assume this was kindness dressing up as honesty.
Zen received it as pure, unfiltered truth.
The pout dissolved. A bright, genuine, full smile replaced it — the kind that had absolutely no defense mechanisms around it. He did a small, happy little bow to say thank you, because the feelings were too big for anything else.
Mikko, watching all of this happen, reached over and ruffled Zen's hair before he could think about it.
Because what else do you do.
And so the first round of performances came to a close.
The overall verdict? More decent than excellent. Which — and this author wants to be very clear — decent was not going to cut it going forward. Not even close. Because the second round of performances was coming, and everyone in that building needed to perform like rent was due.
Because it was.
Not literal eviction — nobody was getting thrown off the island for one decent performance. But every stumble, every missed opportunity, every moment of playing it safe instead of going for it? That was currency. And it was being spent whether anyone intended to spend it or not.
The debut spots were not guaranteed.
The clock was running.
And Rick Astley had, presumably, gone home for the evening.
Presumably. Don't quote me on that.