They didn't keep him in a real prison — not yet. It was a holding facility near the outskirts of Seoul, a place built for petty thieves and drunk college kids, not rebel idols who'd lit a fuse under an entire city's youth. But the gray walls were just as cold, the stale air just as heavy.
They gave Minjun a thin blanket, a metal bunk bolted to the wall, and a flickering fluorescent light that buzzed overhead like a mosquito stuck inside his skull. Jiwoo was somewhere else in the same building — Minjun could hear him sometimes, his muffled cough echoing through the pipes when the whole place fell quiet at night.
Minjun wasn't afraid of the cold floor or the stale rice they called meals. What gnawed at him was the silence. No guitar. No rooftop wind in his hair. No bass line vibrating through his chest like a second heartbeat.
No chorus waiting in the dark.
The first few nights he lay awake, replaying the raid in his mind like a broken tape — the subway echo, the sudden slam of boots, Jiwoo's guitar lost again. Every time his eyes drifted shut, he saw Seojin's smirk behind every uniform. The machine trying to smother him.
He forced himself to hum, to keep the melody alive in his mouth even when his throat was dry and raw. He'd hum so quietly that only the cracks in the concrete seemed to hear him — and he liked to imagine they were carrying the notes down the pipes, out into the cold Seoul dawn, where kids in hoodies and knock-off sneakers might catch a piece of his voice in the wind.
On the fourth day, they brought him to an interview room — gray walls, gray table, gray-suited man on the other side. Not Seojin, of course. Just another well-paid mouthpiece. The man flipped open a thin folder with Minjun's name stamped in harsh black letters across the top.
"Minjun-ssi," the man said, polite to the point of mockery. "I'm here to help you understand the options you have. You don't have to make this difficult for yourself. Or your friends."
Minjun leaned back in his metal chair. The cuffs clinked against the table edge. "What do you want me to say?" he asked, his voice a rasp — not from fear, but from singing too quietly to himself at night.
The man smiled the way a wolf might smile at a lamb. "A simple statement. You admit you were misled by bad influences. You apologize to the company for defamation. You promise to cease all unauthorized performances. In return, you'll be released immediately. A press tour, maybe a solo project to redeem your image. We can rebuild you. The right way."
Minjun snorted. The laugh scraped his throat raw. Rebuild him. They still thought he was just a product. An image to polish and market. A pretty voice in a box.
He leaned forward until his breath fogged the cheap plastic pen on the table. "Tell Seojin," he said, slowly, so the man couldn't pretend to misunderstand, "he'll have to build his own damn voice. Mine's not for sale."
The wolf's smile slipped for just a second. Then it came back, tighter this time. "Then you'll stay here until you change your mind."
Minjun shrugged. "Then I'll sing here."
And so he did.
At first, the guards told him to shut up. But Minjun had learned the trick of quiet rebellion: he didn't shout. He didn't pound the walls. He just sang — softly, all the time. Snatches of Rooftop Anthem. The raw edges of unfinished verses Jiwoo had strummed out by the river. Hooks that only existed in his head, spinning out on the cold floor under the flickering light.
When the guards shouted, he lowered his voice to a whisper. When they slammed his meal tray down, he hummed over the clatter. When they threatened to cut his visits or his call time, he just kept singing.
One night, a guard — older, weary, the lines under his eyes as deep as the cracks in the cell walls — paused by Minjun's door. He didn't yell. He didn't tell him to stop. He just asked, almost shyly, "Was that…your song? The one from the rooftop video?"
Minjun nodded. The guard looked away, embarrassed, but before he left he muttered, "My daughter… she plays it on her phone every night. Drives her mother crazy."
Minjun grinned at the ceiling long after the man's footsteps faded. Even here, behind these bars, the chorus was alive.
By the second week, the kids outside had turned his cell number into a rallying cry. Miri, always two steps ahead, had found safehouses, organized flash protests, hacked dorm intercoms to play Minjun's grainy rooftop recordings at 3 AM when half of Seoul was asleep.
Graffiti spread across bus stops and school gates: FREE MINJUN.KEEP SINGING.NO VOICE IN CHAINS.
Inside, Minjun felt the echoes. The same guard slipped him old scraps of newspapers folded into paper cranes, headlines half-erased by cheap coffee stains: Subway Raid Backfires — Underground Chorus Swells.Starline Faces Boycott Threat.
Seojin must have been furious.
On the fifteenth night, the door to his cell swung open. Minjun squinted against the sudden flood of hallway light. Jiwoo stood there, thinner, bruised but grinning like he'd just won a lottery neither of them bought a ticket for.
"You ready, rockstar?" Jiwoo asked, voice half-hoarse, half-laughing. "Your bail's paid. Don't ask who — let's just say you've got more fans than Seojin has lawyers."
Minjun stepped out into the hall. His knees shook for half a heartbeat — not from weakness, but from the sudden rush of freedom.
He didn't look back at the cell. He didn't have to. He'd already left something behind in those cracked concrete walls — a hum, a chorus, a seed no one could uproot.
Outside, the city felt bigger than ever — louder, rawer, alive with new graffiti and kids in black hoodies waiting on street corners with cheap speakers blasting the rooftop anthem.
The Jailhouse Ballad wasn't just a rumor anymore. It was a promise.
Minjun squeezed Jiwoo's shoulder as they disappeared into the cold dawn, the chorus swelling all around them. The label had declared war — but he'd turned the prison into another rooftop, and now the whole city was singing.