Work Text:
As a gift for receiving twenty thousand followers, Jimin, by request, posts an unedited picture. Normally, the blog is exclusively aesthetic, a long stream of photos of frilly socks peeking out over floral combat boots, the camera angled down a smooth leg with the edge of a skirt peeking in at the top of the frame, edited so the colors are softer or dulled. There's pictures of people - not Jimin - in the distance, standing in the middle of a road with the wind blowing their clothes and hair, or sitting with smoke from a cigarette hanging loosely between their fingers curling up around pouting lips making them look far more mysterious and serious than Jimin knows them to be. Occasionally, Jimin will show up in a photo, but normally she prefers to take them. When she does, she's never smiling, and usually staring off into the distance. She chooses odd angles, side profiles that cut out her cropped hair that won't grow fast enough or block out her irritatingly flat chest. Every picture on her blog is edited and chosen with scrutiny. Jimin spends hours pouring over her SD card after a photoshoot, finding only the most aesthetically pleasing and well produced pictures to share with her followers, usually, ones that reveal as little as possible about her and her friends.
But, when she hits twenty thousand, her oldest followers beg to see a good photo, a real photo. Nothing with filters or careful framing, just a selfie, or something, and, Jimin appreciates their constant support for her hobby, and, the fact that they helped fund her move with generous donations, so, she prepares herself for the hate she expects and posts one.
She posts it right before she goes to bed, so she doesn't have to see the reactions. It's totally unedited, as they asked, but not a selfie. It was taken by someone else, a rejected photo from their recent shoot in the fields a few blocks away from her apartment, when she gave up the camera for a few brief seconds. She's wearing a strapless sundress that shows off her toned arms and muscled shoulders. Her collarbone and adams apple are exposed as she stares up at something out of frame, smiling widely at it. The sun is shining brightly behind her, and she's framed just perfectly so it creates a ray of light around her but doesn't cause a glare and wash her out.
When she wakes up, it has ten thousand notes. She glances at the tags, quickly, and is surprised to find they're all kind. It's a lot of, "oh my god who is this", a pleasant amount of "oh my god who is she"s and a few annoying "oh my god who is he"s, but nothing like the response she expected. Most of them, whether they misgender her or not, are calling her beautiful. It's so nice, it gives her the courage to check the 99+ messages she can see her inbox boasting at the top of the screen as she scrolls through the reblogs. While she was safe in tags, she doesn't expect her messages to be quite so kind.
Jimin is wrong, again. There's a few of what she thought she might get, though less violent, just confused, "didn't you say you were a girl"s and "boys arent meant to wear dresses" and a few rude, "lmao so you arent really a girl" but Jimin mostly ignores them because she is a girl, even if it took her seventeen years to figure it out, and she has an entire folder of pictures of her boyfriend to prove that boys are definitely meant to wear dresses.
Other than a few bad eggs, the rest are a lovely mix of anon and not. Old friends telling Jimin how amazing she looks in that picture, new followers shocked to find out they were following such a pretty girl, a lot of requests for more pictures like that, because, wow, that have Jimin blushing and considering her camera roll full of selfies. The overwhelming majority of the messages, though, ask what she's looking at. Some of them talk about how in love and happy she looks, and they all want to know what - or who - could cause such an expression.
She ignores them, at first, but the post goes around further and further, and she gets more and more questions about the photo, and once it breaks one hundred thousand notes, Jimin finally replies to one of the messages with another unedited picture. It's her and her in the same dress as the first one she posted, only you can see more of it. It's tight around the top and flares out at her hips, falling down to just above her knee. It's a soft pink that looks beautiful against her tan skin. Next to her, in the picture, is her boyfriend, wearing a similar style of dress only with straps and colored white, dotted with sunflowers. They're both wearing flower crowns, and Jimin is smiling with her eyes closed while he kisses her cheek. She captions the photo with 'my boyfriend was the one to take the picture' and tags it with 'hoseok is a demiboy, he uses male pronouns, don’t use she just because he's in a dress'. She posts another set after it, with a couple more pictures of her and Hoseok from other shoots she's convinced him to participate in. Those are nicely posed and have the colors touched up, so, she adds a couple selfies too. She includes her favorite, an old one from around when they started dating, right after Hoseok taught her to flawlessly wing her eyeliner because he was always so much better at it than her.
A week later, she had hundreds of people calling them the world's cutest couple, wanting to know more about Hoseok, begging for more photos. She gives in, mostly because she loves Hoseok and will take any excuse to talk about how he's so full of energy and love, no one has ever made her feel so special in her life, and how when they met Jimin was having an intense gender crisis and Hoseok calmly walked her through learning her own identity, and how she's never known a better person, and how falling in love with him was the greatest thing she's ever done.
She cracks, and makes another photoset, answering a portion of her questions with a few quick stories about how they met (Jimin was dancing on the street while his friend Yoongi tested out his new songs on the general public, who were relatively uninterested, but they made like, eight dollars, and a new friend when Hoseok suddenly joined Jimin's dancing and started and impromptu dance battle), and how long they've been dating (four years), and where Hoseok bought his dress (Forever21).
Jimin attaches a couple photos from the same shoot to the long post, so the dress in question can be seen, but it's hard to narrow down. Even though she only posts a few, she has a hundred outtake photos from their day in the field that she doesn't have the heart to delete, like the ones of Hoseok doing dances just to make her laugh, or the ones of them pulling silly faces at each other, or the one of Hoseok spinning in a circle that shows off his boxers where his skirt flies up around his waist or the one immediately following, Hoseok's mouth opened wide in a laughing smile as he holds his skirt down in front of his crotch, and a lot of pictures of just Jimin while she's walking and talking or trying to set up a shot that, when she asked Hoseok about later, he said, "you were too beautiful to be ignored".
They're all good photos, she decides as she scrolls through, but she wants to keep those memories just for herself.