wip/things i will literally never finish dump

[onetenths]

i write in two or three different programs over both my laptop and my pc, and all of them are so cluttered from all the shit i start and don't finish that it's genuinely starting to hurt my head. if i was a better writer and also didn't have the worst fucking attention span in existence some of these might have made it past the initial stages, but unfortunately i am neither of those things so now they just exist in Never Getting Finished purgatory.

i dont mind some of these and some of these i absolutely despise but i need to get rid of them somehow without completely losing them to the void, so. heres the collection. enjoy them maybe or tell me how dogshit they are i wouldnt mind either-way

each wip is listed with it's working title + current wordcount + basic tropes and ideas i was running with during the brief time i cherished and loved it before throwing it in the trash. none of the fics are formatted with italics and such because that takes too much time so use your discretion in picking those things apart ^^

eunreum

close binary system, 8k, non-linear childhood friends to strangers(?) to lovers

What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that
the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every
one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear
furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself
out—and we have only just begun.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

—


“So we talked about angular momentum earlier, right?” Her professor continues from the front of the lecture room, pacing back and forth in front of the white board.

The room is in the type of quiet where it’s not silent, but where everything is brought to a sharp amplification that makes even the slightest noises reverberate in her skull. Someone’s typing thuds dully in her ears, the creaking seats rattle around in her brain, her classmate next to her shuffles her papers, takes a sip from her coffee, and Yeoreum spins her pen around lazily. It’s close to four pm.

“Stars are born out of what are essentially big clouds of cold gas. As we know, the interstellar gas contracts and collapses, forming around a centre that gets progressively hotter as the shrinking fragments of cloud heats up. This is what starts the formation of protostars.”

Her professor stops in the centre of the whiteboard. He has his hands clasped in front of him, eyes flickering across the collection of half-dead university students; a futile effort if he’s looking for someone to respond. Yeoreum squints slightly to see if the stain on his shirt is from food or sweat. Her brain is about two hours into the future, taking inventory of the fridge inside her apartment. She hopes Dayoung hasn’t touched her mom’s kimchi.

“These protostars rotate rapidly— angular momentum, everyone. What do we know about angular momentum?” No one responds. Yeoreum’s eyes drift down to the clock on her classmate’s laptop. 3:50pm. “Right, well, the law of the conservation of angular momentum states that total angular momentum can never change, not unless it transfers angular momentum to or from another object.”

He starts pacing again. Yeoreum watches him like she’s watching a tennis match, but with none of the focus. “Let’s talk about binary star systems for a second. This momentum is, partially, the reason why there are so many; when these molecular clouds break up and form into protostars, a lot of them end up being quite close together. Gravity, as gravity does, then pulls these two protostars together, but they don’t crash. They don’t crash because of angular momentum— each of these pairs have a certain amount, and as a result they end up orbiting around each other.”

“Isn’t that romantic,” her classmate says from next to her, dryly and wholly uninterested. “Astronomers are so dramatic. You have anyone like that?”

3:53pm. “What?” Yeoreum responds belatedly, turning slightly. Her professor is still saying something, but if she’s being honest, most of what he’s been saying went in one ear and out the other anyway.

“Binary stars or whatever. I’m being weird and philosophical like the astronomers, you know?” She waves her hand vaguely. “Someone who orbits around you. Or who you orbit around. Your other half.”

“We major in physics.” Yeoreum points out, and her classmate snorts.

“Yeah, astrophysics. I’m practising. So do you? Have the second star in your binary system, I mean.”

Yeoreum turns back to the front of the room. She spins her pen a few more times, and the minute ticks up by one in the corner of her eye. Dust motes drift in the sunlight that pours in from a window.

“No,” she hums.

Her professor’s still talking, and Yeoreum’s still not really listening; brain chugging along a different axis, thoughts drifting around the romanticism of binary star systems. Two stars orbiting each other until there’s no more mass left to sustain themselves.

“That kind of surprises me. But hey, being a star would probably be really depressing anyway.” Her classmate leans onto her palm. “Having to live for billions of years before exploding into nothingness. It’d be lonely.”

The dust motes dance around each other. Almost looking like they defy gravity, falling gently in a non-planned waltz to the floor. “Aren’t we all made of the stars?” She replies absentmindedly.

The dust glitters.

There’s a snap of a laptop from next to her, and her brain stops chugging to wake up fully. She blinks a few times when the quiet in the lecture room shifts into murmured conversations and tired groans, and she pulls her phone out to text Dayoung and Yeonjung to not eat her kimchi.

“You’ve got the philosophical part down,” she says to Yeoreum, who only laughs slightly in response. Her classmate hoists a bag onto one shoulder, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, and her screen lights up with a notification with a heart on it as she waves slightly. “See you around.”

“Yeah, see you.” Yeoreum nods, shifting all her books and papers into her bag. Her eyes catch on the section of her textbook her professor was reading out of, and makes a mental note to go through the chapter properly. When she’s not running off less than eight hours of sleep and busy worrying about her kimchi.



✶


There’s a pergola next to the playground. (i never got around to writing this part)


✶



There is less than one years difference between her and Juyeon. 228 days, if she’s being specific, between May 27 1998 and January 10 1999. It takes 365.25 days on average for the Earth to go around the Sun, so if a new rotation were to start on the day Juyeon was born, then there’d be 137 days left for the Earth to make one full orbital revolution by the time both of them are born.

Yeoreum is still born in January of 1999, though, so she’s relegated to the year below Juyeon and has to call her unnie and use honorifics and watch her skip back from middle school with her uniform worn incorrectly, grin plastered on her face as she hops the small fence next to the playground in front of their apartment building.

Evening sunlight streams across, soft honey yellow that glints off their hair as Yeoreum kicks up from the rubber crisscross patterned on the floor, shoes scuffing roughly as she swings backwards, then forwards, Juyeon coming ever the closer as the weightlessness ruffles her hair, settles in her stomach.

“Yeoreum-ah,” she calls, skipping precariously in front of where the swings would arc high and wide, if it weren’t for Yeoreum skidding to a halt, shocking her system. “I’m back.” She says simply, hands tucked in the pocket of her cardigan.

The weightlessness lingers as she stumbles off the swing set. “Hi, unnie.”

Swings aren’t the most thrilling activity in the world, but they’re enough to have light adrenaline buzz under her skin, making her legs heavy and her steps clumsy as she picks up her bag from next to the swings. Or maybe she was just on them for too long. The back and forth, up and down, gravity weighing against her on the way down making her brain fuzzy and light.

Yellow light bends on the side of Juyeon’s face, twinkles in her eyes stretched wide with a smile. “You weren’t waiting long?”

“Not really,” Juyeon’s quick to link her hand through Yeoreum’s outstretched one, swinging leisurely as they drift towards the building. “How was school?”

“Boring. Mom wants me to start going to hagwon soon.” Juyeon sticks her lips out in a pout, huffs slightly with puffed cheeks that makes Yeoreum giggle into the side of her fist. “I have to but I really don’t wanna.”

“Doesn’t that mean you’ll get back even later?” Yeoreum pauses, “Doesn’t that means you’ll need to study?” She gasps after a beat, using her free hand to clutch at her cheek, eyes and mouth open wide in shock.

Juyeon knocks their shoulders together, whining. “I can study if I want to, I just don’t yet. I’m still having fun with everything, y’know?”

“No fun allowed in middle school.” Yeoreum says with a grin, breaking character to push at Juyeon’s forehead.

“You sound like all the teachers. If you want to get into a good high school, and a good university, you have to start studying properly now.”

Juyeon’s rolling her eyes dramatically, but theres a furrow in her brow that Yeoreum tilts her head at; whether it’s out of preteen frustration or something else entirely.

“Well,” Yeoreum shrugs, watching their hands swing and the movement of the shadows cast downwards. “You’re only in your first year, if you’re going to slack off now’s probably the best time.”

“Right! You always get me.”

“You should still go to hagwon though.”

“Okay maybe not all the time.” Juyeon corrects, but the bitterness is light and her eyes are crinkled at the side. “Can’t you graduate sooner? I miss having you around.”

“You just want me around so you can get away with not wearing your uniform properly.” Yeoreum snorts, poking at where Juyeon’s tie is loose, her top button surreptitiously undone. “Five penalty points for not having your tie done up, Son Juyeon-ssi.” She says sternly, like she does with the fourth graders when they do something ridiculous.

“Hey, that’s not true.” Juyeon pouts again, and metaphorical dog ears practically flop down on her head. “It’s lonely without you. Wait— actually that reminds me.”

Juyeon skips in front of her, spinning around so that she’s walking backwards, setting sun bathing the crown of her head in gentle oranges. Yeoreum just blinks at her. “What?”

“Today, in science. The teacher said something that reminded me of you, and ‘cause you’re still in elementary school—”

“I can’t just graduate quicker, unnie.”

“— I couldn’t tell you about it at lunch.” Juyeon smiles cheekily, and Yeoreum lets go of her hand to shove at her. “Sorry! Come back,” she complains while she stops walking, holding out her hand again with a frown. “Let me tell you what my teacher said.”

“Make it interesting, unnie.” Yeoreum sighs, relinking their hands, but the corners of her mouth twitch in a way only Juyeon can see, somehow.

“You know the big bang right? How the entire universe was supposed to have been formed in like, a big explosion or something?” Juyeon grins, excited, “Well stars do the same thing, but less dramatically. Our teacher said we’re all made out of the stars, ‘cause once they die they explode and then they release a bunch of particles into the galaxy that fall to Earth.”

Yeoreum hums, contemplating. She’s heard her mom say this before to her, late at night before she goes to sleep, whispered stories and bedtime tales as she buries under the covers. We’re all made of star stuff, they say.

“Why did this remind you of me?” She asks as they come to a stop next to entrance way of the building. They’re parallel to it, and the sun still glows behind Juyeon, sunset painting the background of the bushes and trees a gentle gradient.

“I don’t know,” Juyeon scratches at the base of her neck. “But you reminded me of them— the stars—” And then Juyeon’s eyes are lighting up, like she’s just had an epiphany. “If you’re the stars, then you can be the Sun, and I can be the Earth.”

Yeoreum stares at her blankly. “Unnie. What?”

“Well the sun is a star, and it gives earth all the light and warmth it needs, right? And the Earth orbits around the Sun,” she makes a motion with her finger, a slow circle in the air that Yeoreum watches curiously. “Kinda like us.”

“I feel like you’d be the sun,” Yeoreum tells her after a second, since she doesn’t really get what Juyeon’s saying at all. She knows about the stars, the galaxies and the moon and the earth, the centre of the universe and the gas ball in the sky, all the gravitational pulls in elementary terms, literally, but she doesn’t really get how that applies to her and Juyeon.

“Really?” Juyeon scrunches her face up, like she’s thinking through it, looking for the answers. “I feel like I’m waiting for you a lot though?”

“That’s not how orbits work.” Yeoreum says with a laugh, tugging them inside the building. “Learn how the stars work first and then make bad comparisons, unnie. I’m hungry.”

“Hey! It was a good comparison. How about you get to middle school and figure out what I’m saying?” (this part was highlighted to remind me to go back and change it entirely cause it sucks ass lol)

Yeoreum ignores her in favour of jamming at the elevator button, jumping on her feet. Her mom’s making samgyetang for dinner since her grandpa’s making the three elevator floors up trip, like he does most weeks, but still. Samgyetang.

“Are you coming over for dinner?” She asks Juyeon when the elevator finally comes, lifting their still twined hands together to press the button to her floor.

She can practically envision the dog ears perking up. “Yes? Your mom’s cooking is so good. You should learn to cook like her.” Juyeon stumbles dramatically like she’s been wounded when Yeoreum knocks her elbow into her ribs, and they both laugh into the air of the elevator. “Oh also, you have to come over tomorrow, my mom said she misses you too.”

“I came over two days ago?” Yeoreum replies, stars and earth and sun forgotten as the elevator doors ding open.



✶



There’s a burn in her leg that travels up her taut muscle, one that prickles and stings as it reaches the base of her thigh, flame licking her tendons. She counts the seconds as she leans forward; both of her hands clasped behind her foot, one leg out straight while the other bends inwards in a triangle.

Yeoreum enjoys it, the almost meditative nature of stretching. She holds that position for as long as she can, head bent forward onto her knee, strands of her hair floating just out of her direct field of view. Watches it dangle with stars prickling in the corner of her eyes. Her physiotherapist from middle school probably wouldn’t be happy with how long she holds each movement, something to do with effectiveness and increasing her chance of re injury, muscles pulled long beyond their usual range of movement, but she was never able to help it, the way she loses herself in the flare of her sinews.

“Hey, did you hear about Juyeon-sunbae?” someone says from next to her as she goes to straighten, and she stills in the movement. She doesn’t have to, university is big and there’s countless people and Juyeon isn’t an uncommon name in the slightest, but it still itches at her brain enough for her to come to a halt.

“What?” another guy says in response. Yeoreum doesn’t recognise either of them, thankfully. “Which Juyeon?”

“Son Juyeon. In the student council.”

She does have to, apparently. Her tendons twitch uncomfortably as she completely freezes.

“Oh that Juyeon-sunbae? No, what about her?”

“I was talking to Minseok-hyung the other day, and it’s crazy, apparently she’s, well.” He trails off for a second, conspiratorially, and Yeoreum can hear his friend shove him with a loud what? Tell me already, punk.

She’s almost there with him, breath trapped in the back of her throat, waiting.

“No, wait, I’ll tell you.” He recovers. Yeoreum stretches forward again. A distraction for herself. A way to make it look like she’s not listening. “Fuck, dude. According to Minseok-hyung she’s a lesbian.” He spits the word out like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth, and then laughs afterwards.

It burns. Her physiotherapist would definitely not be happy. “Shit? For real?” The other guy whistles, and the stars in the corner of her eyes from staring upwards at her hair return, this time from not blinking. “That’s a damn shame, she’s so pretty.”

“Right? And she’s hot.” The flames in her thigh scald through her entire muscle. “It’s a disease, honestly. Always the pretty girls, shouldn’t you leave that shit in high school?”

His friend barks out a laugh. “She’ll realise eventually, that’s how life works. All girls need a man—”

“Hey, if you’re here to dance then you need to stretch too. Stop talking.” A voice bites out coldly from above her.

She doesn’t risk moving from her stretch, yet. The burn isn’t soothing anymore, it groans up the entirety of her leg, rages as it bites at the tendons pulled tight, wraps around it’s fraying rope with a ferocity. Her hip pounds dully.

“Shit— sorry seonsaengnim!” They amend quickly, and she can hear them scrambling away.

It’s not soothing anymore, but she can’t help leaning into it. Not until there are hands on her shoulder pulling her back straight, and she blinks up at Kim Jiyeon’s face.

“You know you’re not supposed to hold it for that long,” she says with a smile, sitting down next to Yeoreum, bumping their shoulders gently.

“Huh? Oh.” Yeoreum rubs at the top of her thigh, trying to abate the prickling feeling in her skin. “Thanks, ssaem.”

“Unnie.” Jiyeon grins at her. Her hair swishes in it’s ponytail as she leans back on her palms, tied high, neat and composed just like the graduate student herself. Who, for some reason unknown to Yeoreum, still agrees to help manage and teach the dance club when she can despite the lovely array of characters it gets. “You’ll hurt yourself if you do that often.”

Yeoreum pulls her two legs together, placing the soles of her feet against each other. She presses down on her knees to help ease the pain in her hip. “I know. I just got distracted.”

“Right, but you shouldn’t listen to them.”

“What?”

“Those guys. You know, I’ve wanted to kick them out since the start of the year.” She says with a sigh. “They really don’t have a brain and they can’t dance. How they managed to get into this university is a mystery. So,” she drags out, tapping Yeoreum’s knee so that she stops pressing down on them. “Don’t listen to them. Juyeonie wouldn’t.”

Yeoreum’s head snaps to Jiyeon’s at the name drop. Jiyeon only cocks her own. “You know each other, don’t you? There’s a picture of you two on her wall.”

“I— well.” Yeoreum starts, before shutting her mouth, words failing her. She’s not surprised Jiyeon and Juyeon know each other— although she was unaware they were that close— but she is more surprised that Juyeon still keeps photos of them. “We went to the same schools growing up.” She eventually responds vaguely.

“Juyeon said you were a close friend when I asked.”

Yeoreum snorts. Goes back to rubbing at the numbness in her thigh. “Juyeon-unnie and I haven’t really talked since the start of high school.”

“She mentioned that too,” Jiyeon says, more to herself than anything. “But not in a bad way. You were close once though, right?”

Once is a weak word for it, Yeoreum thinks.

She thinks of her classmate and the stars. Binary systems; the transfer of mass until one of them dies out.

“Once,” Yeoreum echoes. “In elementary school and middle school. But we seriously haven’t talked in a while.”

“Hey,” Jiyeon pats her knee kindly. “You know Juyeon’s at this university too,” She does, and it’s hard not too, with Juyeon’s popularity, with the way she still occupies parts of Yeoreum’s mind, unbidden, reminded of by loud laughter and sunlight and bloody lips and the stars themselves.

“You could always reconnect.” Jiyeon tells her, like it’s the simplest thing in the world.



✶



Yeoreum’s dad didn’t leave her with much. If someone were to ask her where he is, how he is and what he’s up to, the most they’d get is a apathetic shrug with one shoulder and an I don’t know. It’s the most he deserves really.

But if there was one thing he left as a parting gift, it would be the stars. Not directly; Yeoreum never knew what he did for work, and she never bothered to ask her mom after he packed up and left, leaving her alone with a baby and a seven year old to take care of.

But indirectly—

“Are you hungry?”

Yeoreum jolts from where she’s bent over her textbook and notes, absentmindedly reading through the chapters she’s meant to. She’s in the student council office, so she’s technically supposed to be doing work for it, but she’d finished that long ago and decided to just spend the rest of their allocated meeting time to look through the work she’d ignored.

“Unnie?” Yeoreum puts her pen down, sitting up straight as she stares at Juyeon, who’s standing in front of her with her hands in her jacket pocket. Head tilted, waiting expectantly.

Entirely casual. Like it hasn’t been three years since the last time they talked.

“Hey,” she grins, and Yeoreum thinks that should’ve been the first thing she said. Actually, there are a lot of first things she thinks Juyeon could have said to her, probably should have said— a list of questions Yeoreum has for herself, more than anything.

Office was a generous word for the room allocated to the student council. It’s located on the top floor of the student union building, with carpet floors and a spread of desks and a white board with dried ink badly rubbed away, a worn couch with a questionable blanket folded on top pushed up against the wall underneath the window, where dust floats on the sill. The air inside is almost intolerably stuffy, heating having been blasted for the past few hours, and the lights above them flicker a garish white fluorescent making Juyeon’s necklace glint harshly, her skin cast in a coarse paleness.

Making her eyes feel impossibly warm against the white. Soft, as she asks again, “Are you hungry? I know it’s been a while,” a hell of an understatement, Yeoreum thinks, letting her textbook fall shut gently, “But you only joined the council recently, so I thought I should help you… assimilate, or something.” Juyeon scrunches her face up, rubbing at the side of her neck.

“Assimilate,” Yeoreum repeats, amused. “I was in a club before this, unnie. I’ve been assimilating for the past year.”

“Hey, okay. You got what I meant.” Juyeon huffs, scuffing her shoe against the carpet before pausing, looking at Yeoreum curiously as she slips some of her things into her bag. “What club were you in before?”

Yeoreum tilts her head. “Dance. I thought Jiyeon-unnie would have mentioned it.”

“Jiyeon-unnie likes keeping things to herself for her own enjoyment.” Yeoreum chuckles at that, since, despite not knowing all that much about the grad student, it seemed to fit into her character. “How come you left? You were always really good.”

Something churns underneath her skin at the were. Like it’s just remembered who her and Juyeon are. “I damaged my hip again.”

“You— what?”

The hip in question aches a little as she stands. She slings her heavy backpack over a shoulder, Juyeon’s arm twitching forward like she wants to help. “My hip. I overextended it during practice and re-ruptured it.”

“Are you okay?” Juyeon’s brow furrows, and an old part of Yeoreum wants to rub it away. It’s a little annoying, if she’s being honest, reconciling between the old and the new.

“Mostly,” she says airily. “I’m not allowed to dance for a while and it hurts sometimes, but otherwise it’s fine.”

“Give me your bag then,” Juyeon says first, making a grabby motion with her hands as Yeoreum leans backwards slightly, away from the offensive motion. “And isn’t that why you joined the student council in middle school too?”

“My hip, unnie. My shoulders are fine,” Juyeon gives her a pleased look when she hands it over anyway. Lips pulled up in the corners, eyes crinkled at the sides. It’s heavy, and Juyeon’s arms aren’t lanky string beans like they were when they were younger. Not that she’s noticed.

What Yeoreum does notice, annoyingly, when their seniors stand up with a groan telling everyone good work for the day, providing a break in the conversation that Yeoreum takes advantage of to avoid talking about middle school, is that reconciling the old and the new is easy when there hasn’t been much change.

That it’s easy when the two of them have always just been outside of each other’s reach: Juyeon’s dyed brown hair—faded light at the top made more obvious by the harsh fluorescent— doesn’t come as a surprise when she’s seen it on old classmates’ instagrams, the lean muscle isn’t surprising when she’s passed Juyeon on campus before, always, pointedly, keeping her distance, the stressed furrow in her brow that’s stayed the same, the familiar cat-like smile in her eyes.

“Okay, Yeoreum-ah. Whatever you say,” Juyeon sings, and Yeoreum tries not to notice the way she’d missed hearing her name out of Juyeon’s mouth. “You haven’t answered my question, by the way.”

Yeoreum knocks into her shoulder from beside her, making Juyeon stumble forward with a whine. “Why would my shoulders be bad when I’m twenty-one.”

“I saw the way you studied, you’re all hunched over. Which is not good for you. And my question.”

And still. The familiar concern laced behind nagging, the way Juyeon turns to face her when she waits, being around her, up close, makes the old churn under her skin; an intimate precipice of emotion she’s stood in front of before, waiting, waiting for Juyeon to push her over, reeling up through her chest in moments of realisation.

“Sure, I’m hungry.” The new responds, pushing on Juyeon’s back so she can finally escape the stuffy heat. “As long as you make it interesting, unnie.”



✶



“I think I’m doomed.” Dayoung exclaims, dumping her tray of food onto the table with a loud thunk. The metal on wood clatter makes Yeoreum’s ears throb, and she leans away from where soup has splashed onto the table, pulling her tray with her.

Yeonjung slides into the seat next to Yeoreum, raising an eyebrow. “Why?”

“The science test. I can’t do chemistry for the life of me,” Dayoung bemoans, but she’s entirely focused on picking up as much kimchi as possible with her chopsticks that it all kinda falls flat. “I need your brain Yeoreum. Just like, for a period.”

“Please stop chewing with your mouth open,” Yeoreum grunts back. The assortment of side dishes is, at that moment, far more appealing than whatever high school-related complaint Dayoung has. Yesterday it was that more boys should be interested in her. The day before that was her telling Yeoreum she should change the uniform rules to let her have blonde hair.

“We’re all in the same homeroom, Dayoung. If you had Yeoreum’s brain she’d end up failing the test.” Yeonjung points out. Dayoung sends her an petulant look across the table, and Yeoreum chews on her kimchi. Saltier than yesterday’s, less spicy.

“Yeoreum’s ranked in the top ten for our year level for like, forever. She would fail one test so that her dear best friend can pass science, right?”

“You’re fine, Dayoung-ah. Stop worrying,” she says lazily, watching pale green leaves float down from the trees beside the window. “You two should stop acting like you’re at the bottom of the rankings. You’re both smart.”

Yeonjung points her chopsticks, metal, that makes Yeoreum squint when the light hits it the wrong way. “I’m not worried about anything? My ranking’s fine. I know I’m smart, it’s just Dayoung—”

“Hey, Yoo Yeonjung. Shut it. I can be—” Dayoung pauses mid sentence, looking somewhere over Yeoreum’s shoulder. “Heol, is Juyeon-sunbae being confessed to again?”

Yeonjung perks up next to her. She spins around fast, and Yeoreum’s face is greeted with the whip of Yeonjung’s hair. It stings a little, and Yeoreum ignores all the chaos in favour of stirring her soup.

“By a girl?” Yeonjung asks around a mouthful of rice. Yeoreum pauses her stirring, the soup swirling counter-clockwise like a whirlpool around her chopsticks. Something twists uneasily in her stomach.

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.” Dayoung huffs.

“I’m not— I didn’t mean it like that. I was just surprised they’d confess so publicly.” Yeonjung waves her chopsticks. “I don’t have a problem with it, I think it’s cool.” She turns back to her food, and scoops out another bite of rice from her tray. Like she was just talking about the weather.

Yeoreum resumes her stirring. Soup splashes over the side slightly onto the metal tray, droplets trembling from the motion. She tries to subdue the way her guts sit heavily in her stomach, the imperceptible breath she has to let out.

Dayoung sighs, leaning her head against her palm. Her other hand uses her chopsticks to pick up a pickled radish with an ear-grating clink, her crunching loud even amongst the disarray of the cafeteria. “Well,” she says, mouth half full, grounded up radish on display to everyone. Mostly Yeoreum. Her nerves tick slightly. “It looks like she said no. Either she doesn’t like them or she doesn’t like girls.”

“I thought she had that thing with Kyuhan-sunbae?” Yeonjung muses casually next to her. Yeoreum just focuses on the swirling of her soup, ominous, almost. Her skin prickles, everything around her amplified as she tries to calm the way her heart wracks against her ribs, dull, bruising.

“No? Kyuhan-sunbae is dating someone. Hey, Yeoreum-ah,” she jolts when Dayoung calls her name, everything around her returning to a sick clarity as she looks up from her food. “You okay? You look like you’re going to throw up, or something.”

Yeonjung leans into her space placing the back of a hand on her forehead. “You don’t have a fever at least…” She says, concerned. It’s nice Yeoreum thinks, it’s all nice, but her nerves feel so frayed, so electric and wired, fizzing under her skin that she jerks away from the touch like she’s been burned.

“It’s— I’m fine, guys.” Her knee bounces frenetically under the table. Both of her friends look like at her like she’s grown two heads in five minutes, and she curls her free hand not holding chopsticks into a fist, squeezing it tight, before letting go. Breathes out with it. “I’m fine.” She says again. “Dayoung just reminded me of exams is all.”

“Ew,” Dayoung dumps the rest of her rice into her soup, mixing the contents together into a strange watery mush. “You are not okay if you’re already thinking about exams. You sure you don’t want to go to the nurse? We’ll take you.”

Yeoreum lets the noise of the cafeteria return to normal, everyone going back to the important things, like the banchan, and the soup. “You just want to get out of class.” She replies dryly, chopsticks back to swirling, round and round.

“Hey, if you threw up on Dayoung at least she’d miss the science test.” Yeonjung pipes up.

Dayoung screws her nose up. “Gross. Too far, Yeonjung.”

“Too far? Remember the time you—”

“Please stop talking about throwing up.” Yeoreum cuts in. The roiling in her stomach might actually amount to something if the conversation continues the way it is.

“Sorry, Yeoreum-ah.” Dayoung says while leaning over to pluck some of Yeonjung’s untouched banchan out of her tray.

She can feel eyes on the back of her head, and it’s almost scary, the way she can recognise them without turning around. She doesn’t. She picks up her soup bowl, puts it to her lips, and lets the liquid scald down her throat, hot and sharp and terrible.



✶


Juyeon’s late to her graduation.

Not her graduation, as in Juyeon’s, who graduated from middle school last year in a flurry of excitement and drama only Juyeon could manage, but Yeoreum’s. Late might not even be the right word, considering Yeoreum’s been sitting in the crowd, jiggling her knee and tugging at her skin for the last hour, the sharp pinch, over and over a distraction from not knowing if Juyeon was even going to be there.

Heat drapes itself over the still crowd. Sweat prickles at the nape of her neck. The humidity is hot and stifling like a damp blanket, and Yeoreum can practically see the heatwaves wobbling on the stage, cicadas buzzing distantly as her principle drones long and boring into the microphone. She rubs at her neck. Her mom and brother are attending at least, although her brother—six years younger—definitely spent most of the bus ride complaining about how he doesn’t care and how he should be allowed to stay at home and play Pokémon.

Yeoreum shifts in her seat. She’d rather be at home playing Pokémon too, honestly. Or reading. Or doing anything that isn’t cooking slowly like a raw chicken on a spit under the unrelenting sun. She cranes her neck backwards briefly, catching her mom sitting patiently, and she’s glad to see the small electronic fans in their hands. Her brother is half-asleep on her mom’s shoulder.

She still can’t see Juyeon anywhere.

Yeoreum looks back at her principle. Tall and commanding and terribly uninteresting. Yeoreum doesn’t even bother pretending like she’s not irritated by Juyeon not showing up. 228 days behind, she always knew that Juyeon starting high school, and Yeoreum stuck in her final grade of middle school, would be a harder crack to bridge compared to elementary school. A fissure between them; two different schools, two different hagwons, two different schedules; days and nights.

The pressure’s not the same and neither are the classmates, the expectations. Juyeon, 228 days ahead, comes back to their apartment building taller, lankier, baby fat slipping away day by day, carving herself into someone different. Her high school friends that come over coo at Yeoreum like she’s a kid, Juyeon pinching her cheeks, talking about how cute she is, so short and her uniform so perfect, middle school student council president badge that stares mockingly at her when she rolls over to sleep at night, the fracture— splitting and splitting.

228 days is not a long time in the grand scheme of things. Time works differently when you’re 15 and 16, though.

“Are you going to stay out here for a while?” Her mom asks, pausing next to the playground in front of their building. Cicadas still buzz, constant and endless, the sun almost set behind the trees.

“Probably.” Yeoreum hums, handing over her certificate. Gold lettering shimmering. “I’ll be up soon. I’ll help cook too.” Since she’s learned how to do that, under the guidance of her mom. It’s nicer than she thought it would be, methodical, almost scientific with it’s measurements and recipes almost like equations, but still unfettered with it’s need for a loving touch.

Her mom tsks, fondly, gentle intake of sharp breath through her teeth as she ruffles Yeoreum’s hair. “You graduated today. I’m not going to let you help me cook.”

“Yeoreum’s cooking is worse anyway mommy. Stop letting her help.”

“Noona,” Yeoreum bites out to her brother, pushing him lightly in the shoulder. “I’m older than you.”

He sticks his tongue out, a breeze ruffling his hair as he hides behind their mom. The heat is still unbearably heavy on all their shoulders. Her mom clucks her tongue at the two of them, tells them sternly not to fight, and Yeoreum laughs lightly into the scarce respite of a breeze as she watches them drift away past the playground.

She doesn’t know why she stays. Why she perches herself on the swing set, kicking back and forth off the rubber, torn slightly where her feet have skidded over it countless times. Like a pendulum. Back and forth. She saw this in one of her preparatory workbooks at hagwon, the rise of the swing, potential energy, the fall, kinetic energy.

“You graduated.”

Yeoreum drags her feet along the rubber. Energy that goes flowing through her system and into the ground, jarring. Juyeon comes to a stop in front of her, tossing a bouquet of flowers between her hands, cheeks tinged pink from the heat, ponytail tousled and unkempt.

She smiles lightly, holding out the bouquet. “Congrats, Yeoreum-ah.”

“Thanks.” Yeoreum says while pulling the flowers towards her. She turns them around in her hands, letting the ribbon stare up at her, neatly tied. They’re fresh. New. Yeoreum can smell spring in the roses, in the tulips. “You didn’t come.”

Juyeon kicks at the displaced rubber, Yeoreum slipping off the swing set to stand in front of her. She’s not done growing yet, Yeoreum can tell, from the awkward lankiness in her legs, the disproportionate length of all her limbs. She still has to peer up at her.

“I know,” she says, softly. “I’m sorry.”

The sun, orange and pink and almost gone from the sky, hits the edge of both of their faces, and Yeoreum hates it. Hates the way it bathes Juyeon, strands of her hair floating delicately, brow furrowed, tentative.

“Why?” is all Yeoreum can ask. Emotions churn in her veins, and she wants to say they’re volatile, angry, but they’re not. Not really. Mostly just regret and confusion and longing and then— something else entirely.

Juyeon won’t meet her eyes, looking somewhere over Yeoreum’s shoulder. Worrying on her lips. “I’m sorry, Yeoreum-ah.” She says again, weakly.

Yeoreum hates it all. “Why?” She presses, standing closer.

“Look,” Juyeon breaks, finally meeting her eyes, dark brown and hesitant and the sun catches in their depths. “It was an accident, I was with Eunbi and Soojin and I just—lost track of time.”

228 days apart isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things. High school is, though. She wishes what flowed through her veins was angry.

“Okay,” she accepts, stepping backwards. “Okay. Thanks for the flowers, unnie.”

She waves them, listens to them rustle in the quiet, the type where it feels silent despite the constant drilling of the cicadas, the occasional whisper of the trees. Yeoreum doesn’t bother trying to place why it all grinds deep under her skin, the catching up.

“I’m serious,” Juyeon tries, hands clenching, brow furrowed. “I’m serious. I didn’t want to miss it, Yeoreum-ah. I really didn’t.” Her hands flinch forward, and then back to her side, half-moons embedded into her palms. Yeoreum can’t tell if she’s trying to convince her, or herself.

“Let’s go inside?” She inclines her head towards the building in lieu of a proper answer, walking backwards before turning around.

She doesn’t bother trying to place it, not when there’s that something else, this thing that’s been wrapping around her chest, choking her from the inside. Making her stand on this precipice in front of the expanse of an endless galaxy, where Son Juyeon settles behind her, a hand splayed on her neck, waiting to push.



✶



“Why astrophysics?” Luda asks, half-slurred, having had approximately half a bottle of soju since the start of the council’s drinking party. “Physics is so… boring. Too much maths.”

Yeoreum pats her shoulder gently. The bar they’re in is one of those small ones, with long metal tables and wooden benches, neon lights on one wall that seem to get brighter and hazier after each shot, the other wall grey brick with a collection of terrible drawings and signatures and indecipherable writing that makes Yeoreum’s brain hurt trying to read.

Her head pounds dully, flush in her necks and cheeks. “You do chemical engineering, unnie. The maths isn’t that different.”

“No we only had to do basic physics in first year. It’s all easy math after. And I’m not good at math. I have to,” Luda bangs her fist on the table slightly, like she’s hammering a nail down. “Force it to stick. Why would you willingly choose to do physics.”

“It’s not that bad,” Yeoreum laughs, spinning her glass around in her fingers. Luda wasn’t even a member of the council—she was Dawon’s friend, and by extension Yeoreum’s when she came to the council office once and offered to help with her chemistry work. “The maths isn’t the hard part.” She tells her, letting one of the seniors pour them more shots, conversation flowing thick through her ears, everything warm and fuzzy.

“Yeah but it is a part of it. Hey, is there soda anywhere?” Luda leans backwards in her seat, looking up and down the bar, before waving a hand to someone. “Dawon-ah, do you have soda?”

Yeoreum tips back her shot while Luda goes hunting for sprite, not particularly interested in the strange concoction she’s determined to make. Liquid courses down her throat; peach, a little biting, mostly sweet, and despite avoiding drinking parties where she can, she’s always a little more extroverted when she’s probably 2/3s of a bottle in and letting her chatty peers pour her more when she she asks.

“Did you get your soda?” Yeoreum looks at a proud Luda, amused. There’s a bottle of sprite clutched in one of her hands.

“Dawonie always brings some.” She says contently, before placing the bottle on the table and clapping like she just remembered something. “So why did you choose astrophysics?”

“It’s really not interesting.”

“Okay? That’s not what I asked.” Luda replies bluntly. Yeoreum watches her make her drink, equal parts soju and soda in a glass, carbonated bubbles fizzing to the top.

“Well,” she hums vaguely, leaning onto a palm to look down the table. Her elbow resonates with each glass clunked onto the metal, travelling up her arm and into her skull. “I don’t know. I just like the stars.”

Juyeon’s sitting further down the table, a bottle of beer held in one hand as she tilts her head back with a laugh, loud, one that ripples through the airwaves. Her eyes are wide as she hits the table before pointing at someone, same grin as always plastered from cheek to cheek .

“So do I but you don’t see me sacrificing my sanity to study astrophysics.” Luda sniffs, unsatisfied. “All you space people love having weird backstories.”

“We’re not aliens, unnie.” Luda squints at Yeoreum, disbelieving, before taking a sip out of her fizzy potion. “It really is just because I like the stars.”

Despite the loud conversations and laughter and slamming of shot glasses, Juyeon turns slightly to look at her, an eyebrow raised imperceptibly as if to ask you okay?

Yeoreum scrunches her nose slightly .

“That’s so boring.” Luda deadpans, hitting Yeoreum’s shoulders, who just looks warily at her drink before pushing it away a safe distance away. “We’re here surrounded by terrible drunk university men and you’re not helping.”

“You’re drunk too, unnie.”

“Not yet,” Luda says, pulling her drink back towards herself. “No one’s come and confiscated my phone yet which means I’m fine.”

Yeoreum gives her a bewildered look. “Why would you need your phone confiscated?”

“I text people I love you when I’m drunk. It’s horrible actually.”



✶


“Do you want hotteok? Or tteokbokki.”

Juyeon’s hands are buried deep in the pockets of her padded coat, white scarf wrapped high around her neck, to the point where Yeoreum can barely see the tip of her nose around the condensation wisping past. The tips of her ears are pink from the cold.

“I don’t know,” Yeoreum puffs into her own scarf, watching the way her breath still ends up swirling into the air in front of her. “Something warm. It’s so cold.”

Juyeon makes a noise of agreement, kicking a pile of leaves up into the air as they walk. Yeoreum blows into her palms briefly before shoving them back into her coat. The latter option seems warmer and less painful on her lungs, cold air writhing through her ribs like a sharp knife each time she breathes in deep.

There’s a street close to their apartment building, where on one end there’s a CU—door and windows covered head to toe in posters of EXO and Psy and other various celebrities all endorsing different cheap products Yeoreum has tried— and on the other a small park, in between the two a multitude of pojangmachas and restaurants run by kind ahjummas that pinch their cheeks and crow about how nicely they’re growing up.

“I forgot to get money from my dad,” Juyeon grumbles out of the blue, leaves falling behind her as she continues to scuff her shoes in every pile she sees. “I have, like, 10,000 won in my wallet.” She groans into the air, silvery grey mist wrapped around her face— tipped back in frustration— for a brief moment before dissipating into the chill.

Yeoreum laughs at her, barely able to see over the collar of her jacket. “10,000 is enough. Everything’s cheap and I have money too.”

A breeze sweeps through Juyeon’s hair, making her curl deeper inside her jacket. “We still need to choose what to eat.”

Yeoreum can smell the food stalls before she can see them, turning a corner on a small street that intersects straight into the middle, crowded even on a sunday in the dead middle of winter. Trees line the pathway, leafless and bare. There was snowfall, a few days ago, and parts of it still settles around the corners and bases of the foliage, melting slowly out of existence, waiting for another flurry to eventually come and cover it all.

“There’s always fish cakes if you really don’t want to spend your money.” Yeoreum says, speeding up slightly, weaving her way through the flow of people.

“We should get fish cakes anyway,” Juyeon jogs forward, reaching out so that their arms interlink. “Stop walking so fast. The food’s not going anywhere.”

It’s warmer, the two of them together. Yeoreum pulls out a hand to jam it into Juyeon’s pocket, who links their fingers together with only a mild complaint about how Yeoreum’s hand is apparently cold, despite only being in the air for a second. “Sorry. I’m hungry.”

Evening nips on the heels of the afternoon, restaurant owners starting to push small plastic stools off metal tables in the small sections allocated outside of their doors, streetlights casting a faint glow like a poor attempt to mimic the moonlight, at six-twenty pm. Yeoreum buries her hands deeper, Juyeon squeezing the one still inside her pocket softly.

“There’s bungeoppang too,” Juyeon points out, coming to a stop in front of one of the stalls.

Yeoreum puffs out a breath, amused, the warmth expelled in waves from all the pojangmachas grouped together dispelling the condensation. Yellow street-light warm bulbs hang from their ceiling, swaying gently, steam wafting up in clouds. “There’s everything, unnie. We’ve lived here for how long?”

“I know, I’m just saying. What do you want to get?”

“Something warm,” Yeoreum repeats, savouring the sporadic blast of an outdoor heater shoved unceremoniously against one of the metal poles and red plastic curtains. “I’m not picky. You should choose since you probably don’t want anything sweet.”

“Street food sweet is fine. You should pick because I’ll say something and then you’ll say you don’t want it.” Juyeon scans the options, shifting on her feet to keep the heat from escaping.

Yeoreum just sniffles, nose cold-tinged pink.

One of the ahjummas recognises them, waving enthusiastically behind her grill top where hotteok batter almost swims in oil as it gets pressed down into neat circles. Repetitive, circular metal tool pushed down in practised motions, over and over. Juyeon grins, and Yeoreum’s being tugged along to say hi.

“Oh, Juyeonie,” she crows, shuffling to the side where it’s free for them to mill around. Her white hat rustles with the flower patterned scarf wrapped around her head when she leans over to ruffle Juyeon’s hair, who practically preens at the attention. “How nice to see you.”

bell chimes across water, 1.7k, NYC college radio au

WKCR As You Wish (이루리) wkcriruri
Providing a diverse range of Korean music on the NYC radio airwaves (89.9 FM) as well as online at WKCR.org.


*


The view from Yeoreum’s dorm room is admittedly, not that bad.

She can’t say it’s the best either, but she thinks she’d be hard pressed to find something better. Her other options are limited to the rest of Columbia’s first year dorms, or moving back home to Seoul, where the view from her family apartment is mostly that of other apartment buildings.

So in comparison, a fifth floor view of the lawns outside, visions of vibrant grass from the past spring months and bustling with the excited comings-and-goings of new and old students, is pretty good, actually. From her desk pressed against the wall all she needs to do is turn her head slightly to the right, and she can see out over the entire top of it. All that sprawling green.

It makes the fact she’s alone in seeing it tug a little harder at her chest.

She’s been in New York City for less than a month. Summer has already started to settle into the air, and despite that she’s generally spent the last week and a half inside her dorm room, staring out at the lawns between slowly, painfully, parsing through summer reading. Outside there are always small groups holding picnics on the grass. Laughter spilling upwards and inwards through the window. She’s only a little lonely.

She didn’t expect to adjust instantly, of course. She’s more practical than that. Coming out of her shell is not something that ever came easy to her even in Seoul, let alone in a foreign country.

But it’s been harder than she expected especially since she thought she had it under control. She’s a planner at heart so when she knew she couldn’t dance anymore she buried those last seven years into the scars on her knee and transferred schools. Spent all her new free time between textbooks and TOEFL courses; read first hand accounts from other people who’d done the exact same as her and tried to listen to advice to just branch out, strike up conversations with people in dorms and dining halls and lectures— to just go for it, what’s there to lose?

Which, she’d like to say, she thinks she’s very good at, if her previous decision to pursue a notoriously difficult career path was anything to go by.

But it still turns out to be a lot harder in practice.

Hence, staying inside.

She misses Seoul; misses it as much as she knows she never could have stayed.

For the first two weeks she thankfully had her family around. Her mom, determined to help her adjust as easily as possible, and her younger brother, who was mostly just ecstatic to be overseas.

They’d done all the tourist things, seen the Empire State Building and gone to the Met. Walked around Central Park not far from her dorm. Her brother took photos of everything and laughed when she and her mom started crying as she saw them off in a taxi.

Moving fourteen hours across the ocean was difficult but at least at the start she wasn’t alone. At least then she had her mom around to tell her in the gentle lilt of Seoul, wow, what a nice view you have.


*


The end of her first summer passes by in a whirlwind of absolutely nothing and the new semester starts much the same way. Yeoreum emerges with approximately one new friend, and Dayoung and Yeonjung have both made it known during their sporadic phone calls at abhorrent times of the day exactly what they think of that.

Which is to say, they’re immensely disappointed.

“You’re in New York City,” Dayoung had squawked at her once. “You’re annoyingly kind and and cute and drop-dead gorgeous, so if you don’t take advantage of that in New York, I will actually fly over there and kill you. I’ll do it. I will. I’ll find a way,” she had paused for a moment then, before tacking on, “also I need you to have a cute college romance, or something. We have a dating ban and you know what the company is like so I’m trying my best to live vicariously through you.”

Yeoreum does remember what Starship was like despite the years that have passed, but she still has to regretfully remind her friends that no, actually, she doesn’t really want to go to any of the house parties, and that yes, starting a conversation with people in her dorm’s lounge will make her break out into hives.

They at least seem to approve of her biggest achievement; befriending Song Yuqi in the basement laundry room at two am after Yeoreum found her crying in front of a drying machine and offered her a bottle of water. Dayoung and Yeonjung have begged her no less then five times to let Yuqi join one of their video calls.

Yeoreum has said no. Mostly because she doesn’t want to know what disasters Yuqi and Dayoung could create together given half a chance.

Like Dayoung and unlike Yeoreum however, Yuqi actually has the social wherewithal to make more than one friend, meaning Yeoreum still spends a fair bit of time alone. It doesn’t bother her as much now that classes have started and she has something to keep her busy, but she’s still not immune to it either. The silence of her dorm room against the endless chatter of South Lawn.

It’s worse on the days the homesickness hits the hardest.

Those days she tends to slip back into old habits. Either overworking herself as much as possible, leaning into the comfort of a bone-deep exhaustion enough to distract her from the heavy ache in her chest; or skipping meals in favour of shutting herself inside her dorm room, curled up on her bed with the voices of Dayoung and Yeonjung and Luda and all the people she had to leave behind filtered through her headphones.

It’s not the same as hearing it live.

She supposes the homesickness is a part of why she’s always doing it, keeping an eye and ear out for any sliver of home.

Which is how she finds it the first time.

If she’s being honest she almost misses it entirely, too absorbed in tapping out a message to her mom while trying not to crash into any other people. Two weeks into the semester and she’s pretty proud of her ability to get around campus.

Her calculus lecture isn’t the closest to her dorm so she often goes a littler earlier than normal just to make sure she isn’t late. It’s a straight walk down campus to get there, and it’s between finishing her text and glancing upwards to ensure she isn’t getting in someone’s way when something in the corner of her eye catches her attention.

It’s on a notice board outside a hall she’s never been in, making her pause for a moment, curiosity piqued, before turning on her heel slightly and walking over. There are several of these boards scattered around campus, and she hasn’t ever stopped to look properly, but she does know they’re generally used for student organisations to pin advertisements, or for departments to pass along messages about certain dates just in case someone doesn’t check their email, for some reason.

When she stops in front of it she can see various posters half-heartedly stuck up. There’s a couple badly sticky-taped in a row for an open mic night at a restaurant nearby and another announcing something for a club, and Yeoreum skips over them until her eyes settle on one pinned neatly in the bottom right corner.

WKCR 이루리 the biggest heading reads. It’s followed by the English title As You Wish in brackets, and Yeoreum guesses the large hangul is what she somehow noticed. Her curiosity grows when she scans the short paragraph below it, and realises it’s written entirely in Korean, the short spiel stating that As You Wish is a radio program hosted as a part of WKCR-FM, or Columbia’s college radio. It goes on to discuss how as a part of WKCR’s initiative to emphasise overlooked media by commercial stations, it promises to provide an eclectic mix of music created solely by Korean artists.

And then most interestingly— As You Wish is hosted entirely in Korean and can be found at 89.9 FM or online at WKCR.org, the final line reads.

Yeoreum blinks briefly in surprise before skimming it again. There’s an English translation below it she completely ignores.

Entirely in Korean. A radio station at her college, hosted by another student, in Korean. The time slots written on the poster are extremely awkward, either early in the morning or near midnight, which she guesses is to offset the part where it’s in a foreign language, but still. But still.

She reads through it twice more and doesn’t manage to find any information about the student in charge which makes her deflate marginally, but it doesn’t stop her from quickly snapping a photo, favouriting it in her gallery and tucking the information somewhere in the back of her mind. It lingers there the entire walk to her lecture and doesn’t go away during, despite all the numbers crowding her head like gunk.

Wednesdays from eleven pm to one am, and Saturdays from five am to seven. The program only has two slots. She recites them under her breath like a prayer that night and falls asleep with a resolve to listen the next time she can.


*


It takes her more than a few accidental early evenings and Saturday morning sleep-ins before she’s finally able to catch a broadcast.

Not for lack of trying on her part, considering the moment she even saw the poster it had settled itself somewhere deep in her brain and refused to leave, but a part of her was inexplicably hesitant to sit down and make the conscious effort to open a new tab and type in all four letters of the website.

In the same vein, though, the longer she left it, the more it felt like she was avoiding something bigger than herself.

So that Tuesday after an admittedly mind numbing lecture for one of her mandatory humanities classes, Yeoreum sits down at her desk and opens her laptop. It’s barely nine pm so to kill time she fishes out a notebook from her backpack and a textbook alongside it, unplugs her headphones from her phone and re-plugs them into the side of her laptop, presses the big yellow button that says LISTEN, and waits.

firestorm, 7.1k, friends with benefits au (only implied sexual content nothing explicit)

Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary.
And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear.

Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up.

― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts







Later, when the damage has been done and there’s nothing left to give, Juyeon will ask, “Do you regret it?”

Right then Yeoreum will think, you look unfair, with those eyes and those lips and that personality that burns. Right then she’ll think, in a different universe, maybe, maybe we could’ve done everything right, right then she’ll think, right then she’ll say—







But that’s later.







Son Juyeon might be the type to end a night sleeping with a girl she doesn’t know but Lee Yeoreum certainly isn’t, which is why the start of the whole thing has never made any sense.

So: the beginning. Whichever one you choose. Five days before, when Yeoreum and Dayoung and Yeonjung all finish their final exam for the year and Dayoung exclaims, “we should go out afterwards!” before falling ill with the worst cold she’s ever experienced. Or five days after that, with a recovered over-hyper Dayoung crowded around Yeoreum’s wardrobe, making a mess of her bed by throwing twelve thousand different clothing articles onto it in pursuit of finding Yeoreum the hottest outfit she can, while the victim in question just watches hopelessly from her desk.

Or the moment Yeoreum steps into a Hongdae club and decides it’s the worst decision she’s ever made.

“Come on,” Dayoung is saying. She’s got makeup on to kill with a chequered miniskirt in tow and her blonde hair falls so perfectly around her face Yeoreum knows she’s about to break the heart of every man in this club. “It’ll be fun. You don’t have to talk to anyone. Just drink whatever me and Yeonjung give you, dance a bit, and let loose for once!”

“I really, really do not want to drink whatever it is you and Yeonjung give me,” Yeoreum replies, already wondering when she’ll be able to leave without facing the wrath of her closest friends.

Dayoung’s dressed her in a black skirt of her own with a crop-top that ends too high, and Yeoreum hates the way the tag of it scratches against the nape of her neck, how she has to keep pulling each part of her outfit down whenever she takes more than five steps.

The club Dayoung chose is like most clubs— if not slightly below average; the type to be dark and loud with the constant boom of heavy bass, strobe lights on the dance floor and bodies pressed against each other in one sweaty, jumbled mess. There’s spilled alcohol baked into the floor making it feel like Yeoreum’s feet stick when she walks.

She very sincerely wishes she weren’t there.

Unfortunately she is anyway, so the night starts with her gloomily following Dayoung and Yeonjung to the bar to do exactly one shot before she somehow loses them in a wave of people, leaving her to pay for everything while lamenting the rising price of alcohol and her poor bank account. After, she goes to do the single most boring thing to do in a club, which is to stand at a standing table and watch her friends from a distance to make sure they don’t end up missing or dead.

During that time she texts Luda four times asking to be saved and receives one no thanks but good luck lol in return, fends off drunk men with what Yeonjung would tell her is too much niceness, almost has beer spilled on her twice, and then has her table taken from her.

She scowls.

It’s taken by a group of three, one of them terribly skittish and looking like she wants to be there as much as Yeoreum does, which is to say, still not at all. Yeoreum half-heartedly says a prayer mentally for her before she leaves them to whatever hyping up ritual they’re inevitably going to force the hapless woman through.

Or at least, that’s her goal until one of them stops her with a tentative hand on her elbow and an apologetic, “Sorry, we’re not taking your table, are we?”

Yeoreum blinks at her in mute surprise. She’s caught off guard at first by the fact that one of them noticed her at all, and then is subsequently distracted by how the girl is wearing entirely leather. Blazer, crop top, pants and all. Yeoreum’s impressed it works as well as it does, figures it’s because this girl is ridiculously pretty, and then realises she’s staring.

“No! No,” she scrambles to say. “You’re fine. I can go somewhere else.”

The girl gives her one long look. Gaze sweeping painfully slow from her head to her torso to her feet and then back up again, making Yeoreum suddenly feel entirely too exposed under the hazy club lights. “You could,” she tells Yeoreum, rounding the table to stand next to her. “But I’ve decided that’s boring.” She gives Yeoreum a smile that’s utterly too charming for a club and works far too well for her liking. “I’m Juyeon. Son Juyeon.”

“Lee Yeoreum,” she gives in kind.

Juyeon’s smile widens. “Pretty name.”

“Ah—thank you,” Yeoreum replies, flushing slightly. It’s a tired line and one she’s heard more times than she can count, but—well. What can she say. Son Juyeon’s prettier up close, with eyes that are equally kind as they are intense, and the sort of easy confidence Yeoreum would be jealous of if it weren’t making her mouth strangely dry.

“You definitely get that a lot,” Juyeon says with a laugh, leaning her forearms onto the table. “Okay, so. Which one do you get more: that suits you,” Juyeon asks, pointing her forefinger upwards like she’s counting, “or; pretty name, for a pretty girl.”

“Is that really your name?” Yeoreum answers.

Juyeon laughs bright again, tipping her head back slightly as she does and it takes everything in Yeoreum to not focus on the way it feels like a slow acting drug under her skin, hopelessly addictive.

She should go. She really should, because she might be averse to ever making the first move but she knows when someone’s flirting with her.

Instead she stays, feet stuck to a linoleum club floor while Juyeon gives her smiles that should be illegal and talks enough to make up for Yeoreum’s abysmal social skills. She tells Yeoreum she’s there for the same reason every other uni aged student is, to have fun for once after finals week, and then points out her skittish friend to explain, that’s Hyunjung-unnie, she’s absolutely horrible with girls so Sojung-unnie—the one who looks like she wants to die—and I are making her do exposure therapy. Juyeon’s born the year before her and convinces Yeoreum to call her unnie less than ten minutes into the conversation. She studies design and takes electives in music and theatre at the university they apparently both attend, and Yeoreum spends the whole time painfully aware of the cut of her collarbone and the heat radiating off her body, how close they are.

Juyeon’s tactile, too. More so than Yeoreum is when she’s comfortable with someone. Juyeon presses her hand into Yeoreum’s shoulder when she laughs, lets her fingers linger at the bone of Yeoreum’s elbow, always brings her face closer when she’s interested in something Yeoreum’s saying.

A smarter version of her would find Dayoung and Yeonjung wherever they are in this mess of a club and tell them she’s going; would apologise to Son Juyeon and her devastating eyes and say, this was nice, but I have to go. I hope you have fun tonight.

Yeoreum should go and knows she won’t.

“I have a question, though,” Juyeon asks sometime later. Neither of them have drank anything since they started talking and somehow Yeoreum still feels drunk, woozy off Juyeon. “How come you’re here alone?”

“Oh, I’m not actually,” she replies. “My friends dragged me here to ‘let loose’ and then I lost them after getting one drink.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t really want to come then?”

The tag of her top scratches against her again when she shifts on her feet, and she reaches behind her to pick at it, annoyed that it’s definitely rubbed a red rash into her skin. “No,” she mumbles distractedly, trying to adjust it. “I don’t like drinking or clubbing that much, to be honest.”

She’s still tugging at it, trying to flatten it against the material of her top when Juyeon steps the slightest bit closer. Yeoreum stills; Juyeon reaches up towards her, slowly, and Yeoreum realises she’s giving her the chance to move away. Draw a line.

“I’m glad you came, then,” Juyeon says, before pushing the hand Yeoreum has at the top of her neck away and replacing it with her own.Yeoreum feels her smooth the tag out with a finger underneath and is hopeless to do anything but watch, hopeless to do anything except let her eyes drag over the curve of Juyeon’s jaw, the deep pink gloss of her lips.

Yeoreum should— if she were smarter—

“Hey,” Juyeon murmurs, bringing her face closer, and Yeoreum feels like she’s gone numb everywhere that isn’t the hand still on her neck or the hot breath against her ear. “Do you wanna get out of here?”







Live wires. That’s how she feels pressed up against the door of some motel, like live wires, like her nerves are running so electric one spark will have her ignite from the inside out, like she can feel her heart in every shuddering breath she takes, and Juyeon—she doesn’t even really know Juyeon, except for how she smells like citrus and ash and tastes like dry beer and how her lips and hands are everywhere, pressing against Yeoreum’s ribs and scratching along her lower back and mouthing at her neck and—

“Lee Yeoreum,” Juyeon breathes against her pulse. “Has anyone ever told you that you think too much?”







As a child Yeoreum had a deadbeat father and then eventually no father at all, and once that happened she was left at eight years old to wonder why, to think herself into spirals about how it must have been her fault he didn’t want to stay, there must have been something she’d done to have him come home emotionless like a ghost that had realised it was dead, until one day he didn’t come home at all.

Her parents must have been in love at some point, right? Something must have gone wrong along the way, right?

Her mom liked to tell her when she was younger, tapping on her forehead, you’re so bright up there. Her mom tells her now, you have so much to give, so much potential to do things right.

Yeoreum does think too much. Always wants to do things perfectly.

Perhaps that’s why she was doomed from the start.







Yeoreum wakes up the next morning before the sun. Manages to succeed in fulfilling every bad college trope no one ever pictured her capable of because she’s Lee Yeoreum, softhearted-too-good-for-this-world-aegyo-filled Lee Yeoreum.

She knows she has bruises littering her neck even if she can’t see them yet. She knows she’s in a motel she didn’t pay for because she probably should have clocked from the outfit and jewellery that Juyeon has money; knows they’re in one because it was closer and easier and Juyeon is apparently the experienced type, with this. She knows Juyeon is still asleep next to her, one hand sprawled across Yeoreum’s stomach and curled around her hipbone while her breath fans Yeoreum’s neck.

Yeoreum knows there’s nothing wrong with this, and yet. And yet.

Once she’s fully collected her bearings, she works through what she’ll do next. She’ll do what every guilty party does in the movies and dramas and that’s slip out as soundlessly as possible, pick her clothes up from the floor and pointedly ignore Juyeon burying her face dead-asleep in the pillows behind her. She’ll stare blearily at a string of indecipherable drunk text messages on her phone before looking once at Juyeon, and then leaving like it never happened at all.







“Okay, so you had sex with someone,” Yeonjung says to her when she’s finally walk of shamed her way back to their apartment. “Why is that a big deal.”

“It’s not,” Yeoreum mutters. She’s staring at herself in the bathroom mirror pulling at the skin around her neck before deciding it’s a lost cause. Dayoung is never letting her live this down.

“You’re acting like it is.”

She’s trying not to. It’s not a big deal. People hook up all the time. Juyeon probably hooks up with girls all the time.

But she’s still softhearted Lee Yeoreum, gentle to the core. She can’t help it if she’s still stuck on Son Juyeon, can’t help but replay every moment, every smile and every laugh and every touch in her mind until it tastes like dust under her tongue.

It’ll pass. It’s only one night with someone she’ll never see again.

“I’m not,” Yeoreum finally says, before opening her phone and searching how to get rid of a hickey.








The pastor at her local church liked to say to her once Mass was over, God has funny ways of making himself known.

Yeoreum remembers when she was five not getting what he meant at all, remembers wondering if it was God in the flare of her father’s nose and the rise of his voice and the clink of a bottle. When she’d asked, how do you know? All he said was,

You just do.

Truthfully Yeoreum grew up and realised he was trying to tell her wrecked child-self, God is in all the good things. The big ones— He’s in the university acceptance letters and the small white puppy quivering in a bush, a younger brother brighter than the sun—and the small ones, Im Dayoung remembering to buy groceries, a meal cooked for friends. A night clear enough from smog to see stars and the silver exhale of moonlight through her window.

But in that same vein, he was right to say that God is funny in his appearances. That according to the cardinal rules of a religion she only clings to the scraps of, God gives and takes and exists in whole. God’s in the soft hugs from her mom. God’s in the laugh of a girl from one class over. Yeoreum remembers wondering if it was Him in the lingering thoughts about her class president she shouldn’t have, Him in the guilty swirl deep in the pit of her stomach during sleepless high school nights.

God’s good luck and bad luck and spindly fingers that you never see reaching until long after.

God is also, apparently, Im Dayoung.

“I want to throw a party,” she tells Yeoreum through a haze of smoke a week and a half into their winter break. “Here. In our apartment.”

Yeoreum looks at her from the kitchen, sprawled as inelegantly as possible across the couch and only replies with, “Please stop vaping inside.”

“I’m addicted. There’s nothing you can do about it. Also, doesn’t it smell really nice,” Dayoung makes an exaggerated, dramatic motion of waving the smoke into her face like some pretentious wine taster. “Mmm. French Vanilla.”

“You can get French Vanilla vapes?” Yeoreum asks at the same time Yeonjung grunts, “I’m going to kill you.”

“You’ve been saying that since high school and I’m still alive so clearly that means you love me, because I one hundred percent believe you’re capable of murdering someone.”

Yeonjung positively glowers from the dining table. “I’m going to suffocate you in your sleep before the vapes do.”

People always say to never move in with your best friends. For Yeoreum, though, when one of them is from Jeju-do and clingier than out-of-date slime and the other likes to pretend she doesn’t care when she really does too much, that’s what she ends up doing in her second year of university.

Their apartment is what Yeoreum likes to describe as far too expensive, requiring two jobs for her to pay her third of the rent, buy food, and have enough money to splurge on her dog. Dayoung picks up shifts with her at the restaurant occasionally and then pays the rest of her share off with Tiktok influencer money. Yeonjung is an enigma, to Yeoreum, even when they’ve known each other for so long, and she’s half convinced the girl pays her third through money laundering.

The point is: their apartment is big, pretty, and perfect for a house party.

Dayoung whittles them down over three days until Yeonjung first relents with Dayoung’s compliance to stop vaping for a week, and Yeoreum caves after with the promise of having half of her rent next month paid off by Tiktok influencer money.

She spends the entire day of fretting over making sure everything is clean, while wondering if it’s too late to install a lock on her bedroom door, because Dayoung knows everyone and anyone and that means by the end of the night their apartment is going to be filled with drunk young adults Yeoreum definitely doesn’t trust near her room.

“It’s not going to be that many people,” Dayoung lies directly to her face that morning. There’s so much alcohol on their kitchen counters and in their fridge Yeoreum’s starting to wonder if she should buy puke bags and hand them out at the door. “Also, did I mention my cousin and her friends are coming?”

“Oh, my god.” Yeoreum weeps.

God has funny ways of making himself known. She should’ve predicted somehow, an hour and two beers into Im Dayoung’s winter break party, that God would show up in the orange hair of Chu Sojung blazing through the door.

“Oh, Sojung-unnie is here!” Dayoung chirps from next to her, which is when Yeoreum swears her soul leaves her body.







The truth is.

The truth is that Yeoreum is fairly sure you’re not supposed to be as caught up in a one night stand as much as she is. At night when she lies there with too many thoughts running marathons through her mind, she tells herself like a prayer, over and over, to stop thinking about Son Juyeon.

It was just one night; she’ll never see her again.







Like a tidal wave, the moment she steps through the entranceway behind Sojung she has the command of both Yeoreum and the entire room’s attention, terribly, horribly attractive with her newly dyed silver hair and bewitching smile. Too kind, intense eyes.

Juyeon’s not wearing an outfit made entirely of faux leather this time, but it doesn’t make her any less distracting.

“Oh, my god.” Yeoreum weeps again when Dayoung drags her to the entranceway.

Everyone at their age and above are apparently alcoholics so less than a minute in Sojung and co. are already in the kitchen scouring the drink options. Dayoung crows so loudly while they approach Yeoreum swears she might go deaf in her left ear, and then she steels herself to pretend like she has no clue who any of them are.

“Yeoreum-ah,” Dayoung says, coming to a halt. “This is Chu Sojung. My cousin,” she waves a hand between them while Yeoreum gives Chu Sojung her patented pressed-lip smile. “Unnie, this is Yeoreum, my roommate best friend and probably the only reason I’m still alive.”

“Hi!” Sojung says with a grin, and Yeoreum thinks the girl might actually already be drunk.

Yeoreum gives her a polite half-bow, says, “It’s nice to meet you,” and ignores how she can see Juyeon looking at beer in the corner of her eye.

Sojung and co. are bigger this time around. Juyeon, of course, is there, with a hand slung around Hyunjung’s waist, who to her credit looks less uncomfortable here than she did in the club. On one side of Sojung wearing the most pleasant smile Yeoreum’s ever seen is a taller woman she doesn’t know, and on the other is a shorter girl who has a look in her eye like she wants to incinerate the ends of Sojung’s hair when she’s not looking.

“This is Dawon,” Sojung introduces, motioning to the pleasant woman, before jabbing a finger to her right. “And this is Park Soobin.”

Yeoreum’s moment of reckoning arrives faster than she’d like, because after the introductions and the litany of colourful insults Soobin gives Sojung—having deciding that how Sojung introduced her was a slight against her character— Dayoung starts to say, “Oh, by the way. Yeoreumie was with us the other night, she just disappeared before you got to meet her.”

“Oh shit, seriously?” Sojung says, as Yeoreum freezes like a deer in headlights. “Wait, I brought more people with me. Juyeon-ah!” she calls with a half-turn. “Hyunjung-unnie!”

Yeoreum might die. Yeoreum might die because when Juyeon turns around, bottle of Terra in hand, she can practically see all the realisation washing across her features. A curious look. A blink. Eyes flickering over Yeoreum’s face as she processes, a dangerous smile starting in the corner of her lips.

She might die because Juyeon’s worse up close in the kitchen of her apartment. Worse as she approaches to slip between Sojung and Dawon, and Yeoreum has no real idea how the whole after-the-one-night-stand thing is meant to go, but there’s a truth she doesn’t want in the line of Juyeon’s shoulders under her sleeveless shirt, the curve of her neck, the inquiring tilt of her head.

“I have to go,” Yeoreum suddenly declares into Dayoung’s ear.

“Wha—where? To do what?”

Yeoreum desperately scans the apartment for something that Dayoung would find believable. “To save Luda-unnie from compsci men,” she decides, before pushing her way through the crowd to where Lee Luda is busy drunk-arguing with compsci men.







The problem with playing party cat and mouse with Son Juyeon, Yeoreum learns, is that she’s bad at it and Juyeon can be impossibly committed.

To do what, Yeoreum isn’t sure. What she is sure of is that every time she drifts from location to location, living room to balcony to kitchen and back again, she can feel a gaze piercing the back of her head, is always sharply hyper aware of where Juyeon is relative to herself.

The problem, is that she’s really bad at it. The problem, is that Juyeon exists with the sort of gravitational pull that Yeoreum’s weak to, so finally running into her in Yeoreum’s too big but not big enough apartment was always going to be unavoidable.

Juyeon finds her that night standing in front of a closed door, busy sending the strongest most withering glare she possibly can through it at whoever’s currently hogging her bathroom. Juyeon is probably lucky she finds Yeoreum like that, because it’s enough to distract her for a moment from the fact Juyeon’s next to her at all.

“You know,” she says conspiratorially, leaning over Yeoreum’s shoulder and making her jolt out of surprise. “It is closed.”

“It’s my bathroom,” Yeoreum whines. “I pay for its existence. They’ve been in there too long and now I’m suspicious.”

Juyeon gives her a considering look. Says, “yeah, you probably should be,” before stretching upwards over Yeoreum to knock on the door.

The door stays shut. Yeoreum thinks it’s mocking her.

“I tried that already,” she says through a pout.

“Well. It was worth a second try. Plus, I thought you were just too nice to bother them since you’ve been standing here for like, five minutes.”

Yeoreum stares at the door a brief beat longer, before all her senses are returning to her like someone’s set off an atomic bomb through her nerves. She turns slowly on her feet to face where Juyeon’s retracted herself to lean backwards against the wall.

Juyeon’s still a picture against the backdrop of her apartment. It’s strange, to reconcile the exactly two versions of her Yeoreum knows inside her mind. She can see the entire stretch of Juyeon’s pale arms, thinks briefly of what it was like to trail her hands down them, and forcefully dispels that thought by shoving it into the dusty untouched corners of her brain.

“Unnie. Hi,” she says hesitantly, because she can’t really just stare at Juyeon for hours.

“Hi,” Juyeon replies, with a tilt of her head. Yeoreum watches the consequent ripple of silver as it falls over her shoulders like wings. “Nice to see you again.”

Yeoreum opens her mouth, and then shuts it. She has no idea what to say. What does a person even say in this situation.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight,”Juyeon continues. “But it is nice. Seriously.”

“… I live here.”

Two weeks doesn’t change the reality of how staggering the effects of Juyeon’s laugh was. Is. This time around, at least, her eyes seem softer in the hallway dim. Her smile spreads wide enough for Yeoreum to notice the whiskers that dimple above her right cheek.

“Dayoung and I don’t know each other that well, and she never mentioned the name of her roommates,” Juyeon explains. “I really didn’t know. But it’s good for me since it means I don’t have to wait until next semester to talk to you again.”

Yeoreum might die.

“Oh,” she says, eloquently. And then, “you wanted to talk to me again?”

Juyeon just looks at her long and intense, brown eyes glinting like she’s trying to work something out. “Is that hard to believe?”

Yes, Yeoreum thinks, conscious of how her heart wracks against her ribs. She wishes not for the first time she could have even a modicum of Yeonjung’s indifference. “I’m not really the most interesting person,” she hedges.

“I don’t think so,” Juyeon fires back.

“Well…” Yeoreum mumbles, absentmindedly pulling at the skin of her hand. “You seem like the type of person that finds everyone interesting…”

It’s at that point the bathroom door finally bursts open and a couple drunk girls stumble out. Both of them look—fine, other than some tear tracks, so Yeoreum relaxes at the prospect of not having to grieve the innocence of her bathroom. The problem, is that Juyeon’s stepping across to stand next to her so there’s enough space in the hallway for the girls to pass both of them by.

“Sure, but is it still really that surprising I want to talk to you?” Juyeon asks again, slipping her hands into her pockets. She’s so much taller than Yeoreum that she has to look down; Yeoreum has to crane her neck slightly.

There are two ways she could answer this question, Yeoreum thinks. There’s the more intelligent but less satisfying way, which is to continue down the route of ignoring the massive elephant in the room, the incessant pressure at the back of her skull. Or there’s—“I left,” Yeoreum says, ripping the scab off just to see how it bleeds. “After. I don’t know. I thought we wouldn’t meet again.”

Juyeon shrugs all casual, like she was waiting. Letting Yeoreum draw lines again. “I was disappointed, but not really surprised.”

“So why would you want to…”

There’s a beat where all Yeoreum can hear is distant raucous conversation and music, muffled like it’s a world away.

“I don’t normally stay the night,” Juyeon says carefully, like it explains anything. As if Yeoreum’s ribs aren’t now bruising from the rapid hammering against her bones. “But, you’re cute. Funny, even if you don’t think so, and you’ve got a lot going on up here,” she knocks on Yeoreum’s forehead with a knuckle. “I wanted to know you.”

Yeoreum doesn’t say anything. Only keeps her eyes trained on Juyeon’s fiery own, bearing heavy into her. There’s a truth she doesn’t really want to know here, inexplicable, bigger than her and her gods.

“Nothing has to happen.” Juyeon presses on quietly into her silence. “We can pretend like we met tonight, as friends.”

They could, the same way Yeoreum could pretend she didn’t make her decision the moment Juyeon stepped through her entranceway, the moment she left that Hongdae club.

“Unnie,” she finally says. “Do you want to know something about God?”







Sleeping with someone who has no prospects of dating you once is fine but sleeping with them anymore than that is a recipe for disaster, Yeoreum will realise later. Once you can get away with. Water under a bridge, nothing more than a fun time.

Anything more, is a different matter. That choice should always be made with either the ability to stay so wholly unattached to anything that happens you can escape the fallout unscathed, or;

A clear set of rules. Boundaries. Terms of the agreement. A contract, even.

It’s not romantic but nothing about casual no strings attached sex ever should be.

What Yeoreum will realise is that nothing about her and Juyeon was ever going to be without strings. That she made her choice with neither of those things, and rope tying every limb and vessel apart of her to a cross.







But hindsight is always 20/20.







“You know I’m buddhist, right?” Juyeon says rough with sleep to the side of her head the next morning, after Yeoreum has been awake for what feels like less than ten seconds. She can’t really tell what time it is with her eyes shut, but her alarm for work hasn’t rang yet and she can’t hear any movement from whoever’s inevitably passed out drunk in the living room, so she figures it’s at least before seven.

“It’s about the principle,”she mumbles. She’s still too groggy to do anything that isn’t bury her forehead further into where she’s using Juyeon’s arm as bad pillow. She smells like faint lemon and Yeoreum’s bed sheets.

Juyeon just hums.

Yeoreum lies there for a moment longer, letting everything process in chunks. The rumble of cars outside her window. Birds filtered through glass. Juyeon’s free hand tracing invisible patterns on her upper back, the slow rise and fall of Juyeon’s ribs under her arm. Juyeon, in general, which is when Yeoreum finally turns onto her cheek, peeling her eyes with open extraordinary difficulty to squint upwards.

In the quiet lull of morning Yeoreum decides it’s entirely unfair for Juyeon to still look as good as she does. Her hair is mussed from sleep in a way that has strands falling in front of her eyes, half-closed implying she’s about as awake as Yeoreum is. Rolled onto her side, her cheek squishes into the pillow slightly, and there’s the faintest hint of a smile playing at her lips that is terribly too cute for before seven am.

At that thought, Yeoreum rolls over and off Juyeon’s arm.

“Oh, why—” Juyeon complains with a low whine.

“You’re too warm,” Yeoreum says, knowing full well she runs cold and Juyeon’s like a heater. Her bedside table is void of her phone leaving her to purse her lips, because it means she’s going to have to find wherever her jeans are, and that it’s also probably on the verge of dying. “Do you know where my phone is?”

“If you don’t then I don’t.”

Yeoreum makes a disgruntled noise somewhere in the back of her throat before sitting up, sheets pooling around her waist. The light spilling through her curtains is still airy and gray, early sunrise colours, and she watches the dust motes drifting through the soft beams.

Holidays means she’s working double, mornings at the café and evenings at the restaurant, and even the idea of it is making her bones tired, makes her want to live in the dawn stillness.

There’s rustling behind her as Juyeon sits up as well, and then there’s an arm curling around her stomach and a nose pressing into her shoulder. “What time is it?” Juyeon says into her skin.

“Early. My alarm hasn’t gone off yet, I think.”

Juyeon hums again, vibration spreading wide through her back. It makes her hair prickle. “Go back to sleep then.”

“I can’t,” Yeoreum says, busy feeling proud of herself for skilfully managing the equilibrium of definitely-not-caring about Juyeon being in her bed and letting herself lean into the comfort of her touch. She pats Juyeon’s hand while taking stock of her floor and where her jeans are in the mess.

And then her balance is being shattered by the feel of Juyeon’s lips trailing across her back.

“Yeoreum-ah,” Juyeon’s murmuring against her nape, and Yeoreum has to clamp her eyes shut, pull a face, and think about Im Dayoung and her stupid vapes to violently suppress her shiver. “It’s too early to be up.”

“I have to go to work,” she tries, aiming for nonchalance and utterly failing. Juyeon nips at the first knot of her spine. Yeoreum thinks she’s despicable. “Ah unnie, seriously! I do. And you—”

“Can’t stay?” Juyeon completes for her, smile all manner of cheeky when Yeoreum turns her head to scowl at her.

“Yes,”she huffs. Deftly dodges Juyeon’s attempt at kissing her cheek before using her arm as a counterweight, leaning over the bed to grab her shirt and jeans off the floor.

Letting Juyeon stay is just asking for all kinds of trouble. For her sanity, and also because she lives with menaces who she’s surprised haven’t already barged through her door at even the slightest hint of someone else being in her room.

“You’re so cold,” Juyeon grumbles, flopping backwards into the pillows while Yeoreum pulls on her shirt and thumbs open her phone. “Dayoung said you were nice. An angel. Instead you’re kicking me out of your apartment and leaving me to fend for myself. Who even works the day after a party?”

“Me. And I am nice,” Yeoreum says with a sniff. And then, because she feels guilty at the sight of Juyeon’s pout, “I’ll make breakfast, if you want. I have an hour before I need to go.”

Juyeon gives her the biggest cheek-splitting grin she’s ever seen, dimples on full display, and Yeoreum’s starting to discover she’s doing a lot of burying, something poisonously sweet beginning to writhe through her chest she squashes down, and down, and down.







“Do you ever think about dad?” Her brother asks her out of the blue that day, between her shifts. They’re on Yeolmu’s mandatory long walk of the day, weaving through the park close to her mom’s apartment, the fringes of last snowfall melting away at the edges of foliage.

Yeoreum gives him a look. “Not really,” she says. “He was a long time ago, and not worth your energy. You were a baby.”

“He died,” he responds quietly. “Doesn’t that bother you sometimes?”

Yeolmu yaps from in front of them. Pulls on the lead to sniff at one of the bushes.

“He was dead long before he—” Yeoreum clenches her jaw, purses her lips as the white curl of Yeolmu’s fur become dirt-stained. “Ah, really. Don’t think about him. He’s in the past.”

Her brother looks upwards to the sky. Breathes out a cloud of condensation from his lips, the mist stilling for a moment, before diffusing into the air. “I think it bothers mom, sometimes. She gets this look on her face. I fought with her about it the other day.”

“Hey.”

“I know, I know. Just,” he scuffs at the ground with his shoe. “Do you know what happened? Between them? Mom doesn’t want to tell me, just says the same thing as you. That he doesn’t matter anymore.”

“He doesn’t.” Yeoreum says, clipped. “And apologise to mom, when we get back.”

“Doesn’t he?”

“No. Just leave it alone, Bom-ah.”

Her brother sighs. “If he doesn’t,” he eventually says as Yeolmu moves on. “Then why—”

Yeoreum looks at him again out the side of her eye.

“Then why, does it feel like he’s always haunting you?”







Yeoreum spends the rest of that day ferrying wine and fine dining meals around, headache growing in the back of her head while the conversation with her brother slinks back into her thoughts the minute she gets the hint of a break, like a carrot on a string, just begging her to bite down.

Juyeon’s number newly slotted into her phone doesn’t help either, weighing hot in her back pocket, scalding through.







손주연언니 🐶
yeoreumang~

이여름
what?

손주연언니 🐶
what
r u doing
right now ^^


After the party, one thing Yeoreum learns very quickly is that Son Juyeon can be phenomenally clingy.

Physically, yes, considering Juyeon was so attached to her she had to kick her out of the kitchen and to the dining table so breakfast could actually be made, but also digitally, apparently. Yeoreum may be questionably good at responding to her messages, but that doesn’t stop Juyeon from asking her how she is, what she’s up to, whether or not Yeoreum can send her any more photos of Yeolmu, how work was that day.

It’s both surprising but unsurprising, given what she’s gleaned from Juyeon’s personality, and Yeoreum’s starting to find she doesn’t mind it in the slightest.

There’s also the texts telling her to take it easy, ones sent at sporadic times of the day asking if she’s eaten something substantial, and then the—other ones.


이여름
right now?
nothing
i dont have work today

손주연언니 🐶
r u hungry?
im ordering food
:)


The first time Juyeon invites Yeoreum to her apartment she’s lured over with food.

It might be a commentary on Yeoreum’s personality that it even works so easily, but Juyeon’s promising her thai and the opportunity to relax for once because reum-ah who works this much, so she decides no one should blame her for agreeing.

“I hate eating alone,” Juyeon tells her in lieu of a greeting, after Yeoreum’s been buzzed up to her apartment. “Seriously.”

It hasn’t been long since Dayoung’s party, but Juyeon’s hair has already started to fade into something more lavender than silver, and there’s a faint line of black starting near her scalp. She’s wearing one of their university’s sweaters and a loose pair of jeans and it takes Yeoreum a moment to respond because,

“Heol, unnie,” she says, reaching up to poke at Juyeon’s face. “You wear glasses?”

Juyeon flushes, taking them off and looking at them like she hadn’t realised they were there. “Only when I’m reading or working. I forgot I was wearing them…” she scratches underneath one of her ears with a thumb, still tilting her glasses back and forth.

“They’re cute,” Yeoreum says through a small giggle. Takes them from Juyeon’s hands to put them back on her. “Were you reading or working?”

“Both, I guess. I was reading a play for the drama club,” she takes one of Yeoreum’s hands to pull her past the entranceway. “An American play. Long Day's Journey into Night.”

Yeoreum hangs behind Juyeon slightly as they stop in front of her dining table. The apartment is an L-shaped studio, clean in the sort of meticulous way that has Yeoreum guessing Juyeon’s a clean freak, books on side tables and shelves neatly stacked, framed paintings hung in ways that are aesthetically pleasing. There are various space-saving compartments scattered around while her bed presses against the window in the small alcove.

There’s also lots of blue, which Yeoreum finds strangely endearing.

“Are you performing?”

“Me? No,” Juyeon laughs, organising the table with her free hand before spinning around to lean against it. Absentmindedly she runs a thumb over Yeoreum’s knuckles. “They are putting on a performance but I’m just helping out behind the scenes. Why?” She grins. “Would you have watched if I was?”

“I mean,” Yeoreum twists her mouth slightly in thought. “If you asked I probably would. I go to Yeonjung’s musicals when I can.”

“Yeonjung does musicals?”

“So many. She’s so good she has to turn down some and she keeps awards for them in her room,” Yeoreum boasts, because she’s seen Yeonjung go from community and middle school musicals all the way to proper sold-out productions. “Do you know about the Crash Landing musical?”

Juyeon gives an affirming noise, tugging her forwards so she’s being bracketed by her thighs. “Not much though. Just seen some advertisements. Why, is Yeonjung in it?”

“Yeah. She’s playing Seo Dan.”

It was a big deal when Yeonjung told her and Dayoung about the role. The three of them had gotten incredibly drunk off soju as a celebration. CLOY happened to be one of her biggest and longest running gigs, which Yeoreum is thankful for, because so far her schedule has not been generous in letting her go to see a performance.

So in that regards, she doesn’t really expect Juyeon to say, “Cute.”

Yeoreum blinks. “Yeonjungie?”

“No,” Juyeon chuckles, bringing her free hand upwards to rest against Yeoreum’s neck. “You. You’re like a proud mom.”

Yeoreum can practically feel the heat rush through her neck and to her face. Admittedly, she expected this to happen once Juyeon had told her to come to her apartment and not eat out at a restaurant, but it still doesn’t placate how easily she’s undone simply by being this close. Stretched out against the table makes Juyeon’s eyes level with her, and the lingering gaze on her lips when she chews at the tip of her tongue doesn’t escape her, makes her lightheaded.

“I mean,” she says quietly, adjusting Juyeon’s glasses so they rest at the top of her head. “I am proud. Very proud.”

“I can tell,”Juyeon replies, just before Yeoreum leans in to close the gap.

Kissing Juyeon is not something she thinks she’ll get used to. She’s rough and she’s soft and right then she’s something in between, lips hot against Yeoreum’s as she frees a hand to pull her closer, lets it settle full of weight onto her lower back. She licks at Yeoreum’s bottom lips and Yeoreum’s happy enough to let her mouth open underneath, arms wrapping around Juyeon’s neck.

“Wanted to do that at the door,” Juyeon says against her muted whine when she pulls away, presses a kiss to the corner of her lips, before down to her jaw.

“You could’ve,” Yeoreum admits far too easily. Everything’s too easy with Juyeon it’s worrying, but she still closes her eyes and tilts her chin upwards so Juyeon can bite at the expanse of her neck, suck a bruising mark into it that makes her burn atom outwards.

Juyeon stays there a moment longer, clearly preening over each soft noise Yeoreum makes into her hair before moving back up to kiss Yeoreum some more, long and bruising. “Could’ve or should’ve,” she murmurs between kisses.

“Should’ve,” Yeoreum decides with a ragged breath. Juyeon’s hand slips under her shirt as she does, scratching a nail across her lower back before sliding up and she’s weak for it. “Why didn’t you?”

“Waiting on you,” Juyeon murmurs.

kwenhfiujk w, 762, hanahaki idol au

Yeoreum fell in love for the first time when she was ten years old.

The way she tends to remember it is like this: when Yeoreum visited a bookshop in a nearby department store—grumpy and tired from being hustled from one shop to another by her mom—she decided as all petulant children do to sit down in a chair and refuse to move. Her mom, well aware that Yeoreum was Yeoreum and too gentle of a child to really cause any trouble, had no real qualms about this and left Yeoreum to her own sulky business as she perused the rest of the bookstore.

And then Yeoreum saw the music video for B2ST’s Bad Girl.

She’ll be the first to admit that both the song and its video didn’t age incredibly well over the years, made more amusing by the fact that now she knows how it feels to cook like a roast chicken inside low-budget sets comprised of a singular cube and some flashy lights. That doesn’t change how it felt back then, though, inside that bookstore in the summer, seated in front of a pixelated monitor enraptured by the white suits and glinting jewellery and the way their feet moved when they danced.

She wanted to move like that too, she thought. To glide over those same shining floors like her body weighed nothing; have such control over her limbs it’s as if they had minds of their own. It wasn’t the first time she had ever seen idols on stage, but it was the first time she’d sat down and focused, and realised they were called idols for a reason.

“Mom,” she remembers saying, having stumbled off the sticky leather chair at the end of the music video to tug at her mother’s sleeves. “That group. Can I buy their album with my pocket money?”

“Are you sure—” her mom had started trying to say, interrupted by Yeoreum’s fervent nodding before she’d scrambled to pick up an album off the music shelf.

What came after was—obsession, in the most gracious of terms. What came after was Yeoreum hijacking the family computer, whacking B2ST into the Youtube search bar and replaying all of their stages and music videos over, and over. Until she had the lyrics committed to memory and dreamed of the dances in her sleep. What came after was ever so slowly convincing her mom to let her join a dance academy, whittling her down day-by-day until she finally relented with a generous deal of taking cooking classes for a month first.

What came after was standing in the middle of a practice room for the first time at ten years old and realising there was something there. Something in the sharp aching of her chest as she finished a choreo, the sweat trailing down the side of her face. The way she needed to breathe so hard her lungs pressed against the wall of her skin. The shake of her scrawny arms as she held that final position, how her legs felt like they were weighed down by lead the days after. The sheer exhilaration of it all.

She could make something out of this, she’d thought. God knows she wasn’t good, not yet, but she could be.





[There’s something romantic about falling in love with a person who has the entire world at their feet, Yeoreum thinks, hunched over a toilet watching lilac tulips swirl, around, and around.

How ironic it is to not be loved by a person who loves in abundance. ]


[When Yeoreum walks into practice the next day she barely makes it past the doorway. Has to stumble her way back up the stairs, hand clutching her mouth and jaw so hard she thinks it could bruise.

It hurts, as she skitters her way down one of the shadowed hallways into the bathroom. This writhing in her chest, the way the vines scrape across her ribs, compress against her skin until she’s slumping on top of the cold ceramic of a toilet. The stall door rattles with the force she’s shut it with. She can barely hear it over her retching.

When she presses her eyes shut all she can see is Juyeon. Like she’s burned into the underside of her eyelids; Juyeon laughing like she’d swallowed the sun, hands around waists and noses pressed to noses.


When Yeoreum peels open her eyes it’s to the sight of tulips. Not full ones, not yet, but they may as well be. She slouches against the door and cards a hand through her hair.]

ask summer, 3-4k ish, college advice column au

ASK SUMMER: YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW THIS, BUT LOVE IS COMPLICATED;

So what do you do when you’re in love with your best friend?

To, I think I was a cat in a past life, I’d like to start by saying sorry. Everything you’ve sent me in your letter sounds like it, well, sucks. I normally like to start these columns off with a bit of personal experience; I’ve found that sharing my own thoughts and feelings tends to help offer a different perspective, and maybe, helps stop someone from falling deeper into their own cycle of negative thinking. In this case there’s nothing I can really provide in the way of personal anecdotes. Since I have—as far as I know—never fallen in love with my best friend.

drafted 1:10pm


Yeoreum has never actually been sure how she became the newsletter’s permanent-for-the-foreseeable-future advice columnist. For one, she’s not a literature major of any sort. Not that you need to be one to write, but it just seems like something an over-eager university student obsessed with books and writing and just, words in general, would do for extra credit. Yeoreum likes books well enough—reads them in her spare time much to the horror of Dayoung—but her major is also under science and she and takes dance for her culture & arts credit, so not only does running the advice column not give her extra credit for anything, she is also not obsessed with writing and, words, in general.

So writing the advice column is both pointless and still something she only vaguely knows how came to be. Though—like most things in her life for the past few years—it had something to do with Son Juyeon. A lot to do with her, actually, because Juyeon is inexplicably charming, annoyingly social and horrendously ‘down bad’ (again, according to Dayoung) for any pretty girl, and had developed a crush halfway through Yeoreum’s first year of university on the newsletter club’s president: tall, gorgeous, model-proportioned, overwhelmingly sweet, angel in the form of a human, Nam Dawon.

Yeoreum doesn’t blame Juyeon so much as she’d rather laugh at her for being so disastrous with her crushes. Yeoreum is also not immune to Nam Dawon propaganda, and had the habit of nodding sagely and understandingly during Juyeon’s lovesick rants on the floor of her bedroom.

Either way, like the toppling of dominoes or the enigmatic effects of a butterfly’s wing: Juyeon gets a crush on the newsletter club’s president; Yeoreum becomes the advice columnist after a position opens temporarily.

Which is what leads to the final domino: her spinning around in her desk chair, pouring over her response for a column whose deadline is marked at least a month into the future.

“Do you think Hyunjung-unnie knows I write Ask Summer?” She muses mostly into the open air, because Yeonjung is currently the person sprawled across her bed and Yeonjung has the attention span and listening capabilities of a small child sometimes.

Yeonjung blinks up at her from her phone a second later. “Huh?” She replies, so eloquently. Yeoreum repeats what she said. “Oh. No, probably not. Most people don’t.” She sits up straight while narrowing her eyes, because this is now the train of thought she’s latched onto, and has thought of seven million different incorrect reasons as to why Yeoreum is asking this question. “Why? Do you want Hyunjung-unnie to know? Why would you want her to know?”

Yeoreum spins around a few times. Waits patiently for Yeonjung to finish her line of still very incorrect questioning. “No, I don’t have a crush on Hyunjung-unnie.” She says at the end of it. “Someone just sent a letter that reminded me of her.”

“Damn that’s boring. What’s it say?”

“That’s confidential.”

Yeonjung stabs a finger at her. “No it’s not. You literally post the letters alongside every column.” Which is, true, but if this is actually Hyunjung, Yeoreum thinks she should probably refrain from letting Yeonjung-who-sometimes-doesn’t-think-before-she-speaks get involved in something she shouldn’t.

“Confidential until it’s posted, then.” Yeonjung pulls her face back, pursing her lips, making it known what she thinks about that. “It’s not from Hyunjung-unnie. It just reminds me of her,” and Soobin-unnie, but she leaves that unsaid, “and you still can’t read it.”

Mostly this theory comes from the second part of I think I was a cat in a past life’s letter. The part that goes: I’m extremely co-dependent to a probably unhealthy level on my best friend.

We do everything together; we stay up for hours talking to each other about anything, we call or text 80% of the time we’re not together, and almost everything nowadays reminds me of her. She’s my emotional support. My soulmate.

Yeoreum thinks it’s sweet. If she were more interested in dating, she’d probably be a little jealous too. Not particularly of the part where the writer’s in love with their best friend, which sounds like a abysmally painful experience, but the part of knowing that someone is indubitably, with you for the long run, regardless of all your flaws.

She has Dayoung and Yeonjung, to an extent—they’re close and have been since Dayoung declared three days into middle school they would be best friends forever—but to get the three of them opening up to each other without the guise of jokes or passing words involves at least extreme sleep deprivation or two bottles of soju.

Her phone buzzes with a message as Yeonjung whines about how boring and not-fun Yeoreum is from her bed. From Juyeon, who is messaging her to announce that she has just woken up. It’s one-pm.

“I resent that you think I’m not fun.” She responds while pulling open kakaotalk.

juyeon-unnie
yeoreumieeeee
guess who just woke up
me! ㅎㅎ
what r u doing rn ^^

yeoreum
…good morning?
writing
yeonjungies with me

“I came to hang out with you and you’ve literally spent the last two hours spinning around in your chair.” Yeonjung refutes. Yeoreum just shrugs. Writing the columns took more time than people expected, especially when it came to things she had little experience about in the first place. At least she had a month for this one.

“You didn’t have to come hang out with me. You just decided to come sit in my room because you were bored.”

juyeon-unnie
say hi to yeonjung for me:]
what r u writing abt

Yeonjung flops back down onto the pillows. “Okay, well, Dayoung’s not here and I wanted to hang out with Jiyeon-unnie but she has work, so really you should be honoured you’re with me at all.”

“Wow,” Yeoreum says dryly. “I really feel honoured being third pick after your crush and Dayoung. Juyeon-unnie says hi by the way.”

“I don’t have a crush— whatever.” Yeonjung tries, indignant. Yeoreum snorts. “Tell her I say hi back.”

yeoreum
she says hi back
this ones abt love

juyeon-unnie
oooooh interesting
what type of love
have u eaten yet btw?

yeoreum
romantic love?
unrequited love
idk
i had auntie annes in the morning

Yeoreum spins back around to stare at her laptop screen. “Where is Dayoung?” She asks absentmindedly, typing something onto the document.

What type of love?

“I don’t know, probably with Sojung-unnie. Are you going back to writing your column?”

juyeon-unnie
u need to eat more >:(
lets get food
lunch
since i just woke up ㅋㅋㅋ

yeoreum
im trying…..
what do u want to eat

juyeon-unnie
try harder
or ill come and feed u ^^
hotpot?

yeoreum
okkkkkk

Yeoreum snaps the lid of her laptop shut, stretching as she stands. “No, I’m going to get lunch with Juyeon-unnie.” She sends a pointed look. “This means you have to get out of my room.”

“I’m always getting ditched for Juyeon-unnie,” Yeonjung wails mournfully, splaying herself dramatically over the covers like she’s just been murdered. It’s objectively ridiculous. Yeoreum just stares at her. “Fine. Does this mean you’re not cooking for us tonight?”

“I’m just getting lunch?”

Yeonjung clucks her tongue, springing off Yeoreum’s bed in a flourish. “That’s what you always say,” She starts, and Yeoreum preemptively sighs,“But then lunch turns into hanging out at Juyeon-unnie’s house, and then it’s eating dinner with her family because you love her mom and her mom loves you, and then Dayoung and I are left to starve because delivery is expensive and we’re broke and you’re our greatest source of food with actual nutritional benefit.”

She can’t really rebut anything Yeonjung said about Juyeon, considering as of late that’s exactly how they’ve been; attached to the hip like there’s some weird gravitational pull between the two of them they’re required by nature to abide by. She thinks briefly of I think i was a cat in a past life, before wondering if moving in with two of her closest friends from childhood was the greatest idea.

“Have you two ever,” she begins, “considered learning how to cook properly? You have access to the same fridge and pantry I do.”

Yeonjung skips out of her room instead of answering. “Enjoy your date with Juyeon-unnie,” she sings. “If you come back to a burned apartment that’s on you.”

“Never mind!” Yeoreum tries, before her door shuts loudly. Maybe she should cook something for them before she goes.


//


Yeoreum might not know how she became the writer of her university’s advice column, or even be particularly suited to the job, but that doesn’t mean she dislikes it. In fact, she rather enjoys it, even if sometimes her advice could probably be considered mediocre at best. She’s twenty. She hasn’t had much experience in the way of life.

Neither has Juyeon really, but when the advice-giver needs advice herself, sometimes she has to settle for what’s available.

“If you had to choose,” she starts, now busy spinning around in Juyeon’s desk chair. “Who would you consider to be your best friend?”

Juyeon—having sacrificed her desk for Yeoreum—looks up at her from where she’s leaning against her bed, hand stilling over her laptop keyboard. “Aren’t you getting dizzy doing that?”

There’s a certain comfort in being in Juyeon’s house. A familiarity with it sometimes she doesn’t find in her own apartment; Juyeon’s room with it’s modern grey walls, photos and paintings scattered across them she’s seen grown in size since they first met in high school. She can see the four-cut they took once, both drunk out of their minds after escaping from one of Sojung’s drinking parties back in her first year of university barely a few months after she could legally drink.

Yeoreum spins around again. It’s rather fun actually, the feeling of weightlessness as she kicks the side of the desk, and Juyeon’s tiny room spins past her in a blur. “Nope.” She replies, and kicks the desk again.

“You will later,” Juyeon huffs at her, but she’s grinning so Yeoreum knows she’s not really being serious. Maybe the familiarity is just Juyeon. “You’re not going to throw up my mom’s cooking from motion sickness are you?”

“You’re the one who gets motion sickness, unnie.” She says, and pushes again because once you start, you can’t stop, she’s discovered. “If I got motion sickness from spinning around in your desk chair I’d probably just be impressed.”

“Okay well I’m getting motion sickness just watching you.” Juyeon responds with a groan, stretching out her shoulders.

Yeoreum wags a finger at Juyeon. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“My best friend?” Juyeon asks, though her neck has fallen backwards onto her bed with her head splayed on the edge, so her voice comes out a little strained and stilted.

“Yeah. If you had to choose.”

Juyeon hums.

Evening sunlight spills from the window onto her hair sprawled out across the bed sheets, golden and delicate. It matches the fading brown dye starting to turn a dirty blonde. Yeoreum watches the dust motes drifting in the light while Juyeon mulls the question over.

She spins around once more, for good measure. It’s so weirdly fun.

“I would say,” Juyeon says after a minute. “You, probably.”

The chair comes to rest. Yeoreum raises an eyebrow. “Not Eunbi-unnie?”

“You told me to choose,” Juyeon whines, lifting her head back off the bed as she shuts her laptop. She pouts. “Do you not want to be my best friend?”

“I never said that. I was just expecting you to say Eunbi-unnie.” Juyeon stands while she responds, padding over to lean on the back of the chair. The hair tickling the side of her cheeks makes Yeoreum scrunch her face up.

She bites at the finger attempting to poke her cheek. “Eunbi is too, but she’s not cute like you.” Juyeon coos, grinning cheekily. It’s Yeoreum’s turn to huff.

“Is being cute my only redeeming trait?”

Juyeon shifts behind her to lean backwards on the desk, and Yeoreum follows, turning the chair slowly. “’Course not. It’s just a benefit,” She tells her, crossing her long legs between the wheels. She presses a finger to Yeoreum’s forehead. “You’re the one I tell everything to, remember? And the person I make come with me to all the exhibitions, and help paint my walls, and call when I think you’re bored, and whine to, and—”

“I get it,” Yeoreum grumbles, smile twitching in the corner of her lips. She bats away the finger.

Something registers between her column, and Juyeon laughing in front of her, head tilted back and dirty blonde hair spilling messily over her shoulders.

Right. She was supposed to ask for advice on what to do about being in love with your best friend.

“Therefore,” Juyeon says, spreading her hands in a gesture as she straightens. The sunlight looks like it’s trapped itself in the strands of her hair, in her twinkling eyes. “You’re my best friend, you know?”

Yeoreum peers up at her, craning her neck. I think i was a cat in a past life, lingers distantly in her thoughts. Does she know? Yeoreum’s never really thought about it; Juyeon was always just reliable, always there, an outstretched hand away, steadfast by her side without much thought.

Familiarity settles strangely under her skin, Juyeon caught in the hazy rays from the window.

“Therefore? How many essays have you been writing?” Yeoreum asks, deciding she doesn’t want to think about her column anymore.

Juyeon moves again to drape herself dramatically over the back of the chair, hands clasped underneath Yeoreum’s chin. She’s always like that; either intently focused on one particular thing, thoughtful and devoted and impossibly quiet, or on the go like she can’t afford to stay still. Never in the between. “Too many,” she moans. “I’m going to die, Yeoreum-ah, seriously. The semesters barely started.”

Yeoreum pats her hands. Wiggles her fingers a bit so that Juyeon will un-link them and take her own. “Fighting, unnie.” She says, pumping her free fist weakly. “Sorry for distracting you.”

“No it’s fine,” Juyeon says, voice muffled slightly. Yeoreum’s neck is still craned upwards, and she can see Juyeon’s head planted lazily on the top of the chair, cheeks puffed out almost like a cat. “I needed a break anyway. Why were you asking?”

“What?”

“My best friend.” Juyeon clarifies, tilting her head, cheek squished against the chair. Yeoreum pokes at it. Kinda like slime, but softer.

“Oh that,” Yeoreum purses her lips. She’s not sure how much she wants to explain, even if Yeonjung was right about the letters being included in every post. She did want to ask Juyeon for her opinion, more out of instinct than anything considering she usually tells her about what she’s writing, but for some reason thinking about the letter adjacent to Juyeon was, strange. Inexplicably. She doesn’t want to think about it. “It was just something to do with the column I’m supposed to be writing.”

“About love?”

“About— yeah.” She completely forgot she mentioned that part. She waves her free hand vaguely, as if it could magically dispel the awkwardness in her voice. “Just, you know. Love can be more than just romantic.”

This is Juyeon. Juyeon whose moped about her crushes and is hopelessly romantic and has talked about love in pathetically drunk philosophical rants to her on the floor of Yeoreum’s bedroom. She doesn’t know why she’s so hyper aware of the thumb rubbing lazy circles in the middle of her palm, or the sleepy eyes above her always so focused on her, or the sunlight, or— just, Juyeon.

“Don’t you have work to do?” She blurts out, Juyeon’s mouth halfway open to saying something. She shuts it with it a pout. Yeoreum can practically see the metaphorical dog ears flop sadly on her head. “I feel like I’ve distracted you for too long.”

“But I don’t wanna do my assignments.”

“You can’t just finish all of them in two days like you do every other time.”

“I always get good marks though,” Juyeon says with a stupid grin, shaking Yeoreum’s hand playfully. “And, you never answered my question either.”

Yeoreum squints up at her.

“Do you not want to be my best friend?”

Her voice is casual, eyes still lazy, head still squished on the top of her chair, like she’s just asking Yeoreum whether she wants coffee or juice from starbucks. It probably is like that for her. Yeoreum’s pretty sure the odd feeling twisting undercurrent in her gut is unique to her, and not the cat-dog-human looking expectantly at her.

“I think you should do your assignments,” She says, squeezing Juyeon’s thumb.





//

[ASK SUMMER: YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW THIS, BUT LOVE IS COMPLICATED;

I might not have any experience in falling in love with my best friend, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any experience with love at all. Here’s the thing that everyone knows: love is undoubtedly a complex emotion. Love can take so many forms, like cooking food for your friends so they don’t starve or burn your shared apartment down, like offering a shoulder when times are hard, eating hotpot with one another or even just giving a hug. I won’t define what love is for you. How you experience and receive love is entirely unique to you, and your relationships, and that’s perhaps one of the reasons why it’s so hard to determine whether or not you’re really in love with your best friend. You wrote to me that you think you love them. That’s already difficult—to first even have the realisation that perhaps, this person that’s already your other half, might be someone you love more than that. Where do you go from that? How are you meant to cope with this axis shifting, world tilting realisation?

drafted 5:27pm]

[Yeoreum is dizzy. Yeoreum is so dizzy. The world kinda tilts sideways when she stands, or sits up straight, so she decides that’s probably not a good idea. She’s also incredibly warm, cheeks and ears and neck flushed red, wooziness practically flooding through her veins.

Outside of her immediate circle of three, Juyeon, Dayoung and Yeonjung, and then their extended circle of ten, including herself, Yeoreum doesn’t know that many people. She can be chronically awkward sometimes, lying between introverted and extroverted and just generally finding the idea of meeting new people terribly tedious.

There were few exceptions to this; one of them being Song Yuqi, who Yeoreum met not through friends, or class, or however university students normally make friends, but rather when she found Yuqi crying in the corner of a drycleaners surrounded by a pile of wet clothes and offered her some water. And how to use the washing machines.

Actually, that probably is how university students make friends— bonding over mental breakdowns.

“Oh my god,” she groans into her palm, entire weight of her head resting in it as she watches Yuqi from next to her, looking equally as terrible but still downing shots from whatever drinking game she’s playing with the first years. They’re both lightweights. They both don’t drink that often. Why is she doing this again? The first years aren’t even from her university, they’re from Yuqi’s, along with everyone else at this drinking party— some last minute gathering Yuqi begged her to come to so she could meet her friends.

Yuqi throws her arms up sloppily with a cheer, clearly having won whatever it is she’s playing. Yeoreum lost track a while ago. She lost track of a lot of things a while ago, caught up in the fuzzy atmosphere of the stuffy bar and the feeling of liquid burning down her throat. She has to squint to focus on Yuqi turning to her.

“Wow you look like shit. Do I look like shit? I feel like shit.” She tells her, brightly, despite the declaration of ‘feeling like shit.’ “Where’s Soyeon-unnie?”

Yeoreum just shrugs lazily. “Your face is so red.” She opts to respond, pointing at Yuqi. Her arm feels like it’s been weighed down by several heavy textbooks tied around her bicep. “Also I don’t know. Isn’t she your girlfriend?”

There are hands clasped on her shoulder that she goes cross-eyed trying to look at. “Not my girlfriend yet. I’m working on it, I think.” Yuqi half-yells into her face. “Where’s your girlfriend. Wait, I didn’t invite her.” Yuqi moves her hands from Yeoreum’s shoulders to squish her cheeks. “You should have brought her too!”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Yeoreum drawls out, grabbing Yuqi’s wrists to pull them off her face. Her head is still spinning. Yuqi’s yelling that she definitely believes is a normal volume of speaking doesn’t help. “I literally have no clue who you’re talking about.”

“Ju…” Yuqi repeats a few times, before she pauses, staring off into space. And then, “Juyeon!” She exclaims, and several anvils are dropped inside of Yeoreum’s brain.

“Yuqi-ah,” she whines. “Please be more quiet.”

A hard request, for someone who is loud in general, and also positively out of her mind. “She’s not your girlfriend?” She gasps dramatically, not listening, and Yeoreum would be convinced it’s a joke if it weren’t for the genuine sincerity written on her face.

“No.” She says, still squinting blearily. “What?”

“Could have fooled me. You always talk about her.”

“She’s just— we’re close.” Yeoreum says, letting go of Yuqi’s wrists that she only just remembered she was holding onto. “Shouldn’t you be worrying about your not-girlfriend?” She doesn’t know why she’s trying to redirect the conversation, but it feels right, amongst everything that doesn’t feel right. Like her entire self.

Luckily, Yuqi seems to only be capable of managing one train of thought in her current state. The train was derailed so long ago. “I still don’t know where she is— oh!” She stumbles off the bench to crow at someone, and Yeoreum decides she’s lost Yuqi for the foreseeable future.

Everyone at their table seems to have petered off over the evening, conversation now splling to the tables around her and the streets outside. She’s suddenly alone, Yuqi’s friends—Minnie, Miyeon, she thinks she remembers a Shuhua, vaguely— she’d been talking to having split off amongst everyone else, and Yuqi herself laughing loud and distant behind her. Her head still spins as she blinks slowly at the grey brick wall.

Except— she’s not alone, and there’s someone sidling up next to her. “Hey,” the voice says, and Yeoreum wishes a real anvil could drop on top of her. God how nice that would be.

“Hi.” She responds dryly, not bothering to turn to the boy that’s joined her. This is why she only drinks with Juyeon around, or Jiyeon, or Luda, or literally anyone that wasn’t her or Hyunjung, both too awkward and nice for their own good to tell people to go away. Though, she’s never seen Hyunjung drink that often. Or that much. What was her alcohol tolerance again? Two shots?

“So, what’s your name?” The guy says, breaking her out of her grey wall induced train of thought. She has to shift away to avoid the shoulder she can feel approaching, and prays Yuqi, or literally anyone she knows, will come and keep her company instead.

Normally when this happens, Juyeon—like she has some sort of Yeoreum-in-distress telepathic signal built into her— would be the one to help field the strange people away, and also make sure Yeoreum doesn’t drink as much as she has tonight. So chivalrous. Yeoreum misses her, she belatedly realises when she has to shift down the bench a little more, not at all listening to the noise entering her ear. Why do men talk so much?

She’s starting to sound a bit like Luda, she thinks, staring blankly at the bricks still.

“Do you need something?” Another voice asks, this time from above her, cold and sharp and decidedly very Juyeon-like. Yeoreum crumples from relief internally first, before trying to hazily figure out when and how Juyeon got there. The Yeoreum-in-distress signal is not an actual thing. She thinks.

“Unnie,” She turns with a slurred whine, the world spinning terribly as she does. Juyeon, standing in front of her, tilts slowly from side to side, and Yeoreum sways a little to get her to straighten in her line of vision.

She can hear noise from next to her again, and scrunches her face up. “Hey, we were in the middle of something.” The guy tries, except Yeoreum’s stumbling off the bench not unlike Yuqi from earlier, and Juyeon’s there to wrap an arm around her waist to keep her steady. So chivalrous. Yeoreum grins dopily into her shoulder.

“How much did you drink?” Juyeon asks her, amused, shuffling them along gently to where Yeoreum’s bag and coat lay haphazardly on the bench.

“Too much. So much. My head’s spinning.”

“Let’s go home then?”

Yeoreum just nods dumbly, brain gone approximately three-ish hours ago. Maybe less, maybe more. She doesn’t know. Juyeon’s warm, in the comforting way, and she leans against her a little more when they manage to make it outside of the bar. ]

jnihjghbgh cvw, 3.6k, small coastal town/dreams au

The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

- Richard Siken, Birds Hover the Trampled Fields

When Juyeon dreams, she dreams of the forest. She dreams of green leaves fluttering a whisper above her. Her feet, silent on what should be the angry crunching of an expanse of brown twigs, auburn leaves. Dead leaves. She’s an intruder here. Always she stills at the entrance of a clearing, never moving past the boundary line of head-tall shrubbery, violent thorns and red berries a startling vision among endless green.

In her hands she holds a gun. Sometimes it’s a line of string; sometimes on the other end there’s a trap, waiting. Waiting.

There’s a fox. Always a fox. It skulks around the borders of the clearing, vivid orange fur darting in and out of the foliage, forest floor crackling between each leap. Juyeon waits, always waits, for it to settle in the center where the sun cuts down a halo through the trees and lick at its paws, tilt its snout up to the silent breeze in search.

She’s an intruder in the forest, the breeze doesn’t carry her scent. The fox yawns, wide and sleepy, squinted eyes and wicked sharp teeth Juyeon can see through crosshairs.

There’s a finger on a trigger; she wakes before it explodes.

*

There are three scars on Juyeon’s right knee. Beyond the fact that her knee is her body, a part of the thing she lives and breathes and ambles around in—ambles, because walking still hurts, sometimes—Juyeon knows there are three scars on her right knee because she created them. It was a slow effort, considering, and she allows herself a pat on the back for that at the very least. Though, the actual moment itself wasn’t slow in the slightest despite her brains best efforts to replay it on 0.5x speed each time.

A poor step, the vicious thrums of a crowd, the weight of a nation and a knee shocked taut. Rubber band snapped.

If she were to obsess over it, which she has been—there’s not much to do otherwise when you’re trudging around half-conscious and drug-addled, watching the world in glossed over eyes and half speed—she could replay the moment in excruciating detail. Juyeon, in the centre of a Parisian court. Juyeon, surrounded by eighteen-thousand people, an earthquake of stomps rumbling under her feet, shouts and cheers an ocean roar in her ears. Juyeon, and an orange and blue ball; an American spiker with vengeful eyes and a rocket hurtling towards her.

What she remembers most isn’t the way her spine locked up, the numbness in her knee before the burn that scalded bone-deep came, the guttural noise that teared itself out her throat as she crumpled down helpless to the wood; what she remembers most is watching the ball roll away. Past a polished white line— one point to the USA.

But—really, it was a slow thing. Something eighteen years in the making.

When Juyeon opens her eyes she sees a forest. The glass of the bus window has gone warm from where her forehead is pressed against it, and outside the yellow-green of summer leaves rush by in a blur, the brown of oak interspersed between. She keeps her forehead there for a moment, before sitting up slowly, stretching out the creaks in her bones and the stiffness in her lower back.

The bus journey from Central City Terminal to her hometown lasts four and a half hours. A nondescript coastal town, though big enough to necessitate both a high school, and a middle school and elementary school crammed together. To one side of her home stretches a limitless blue, the other bordered by mountains and valleys, the small town a self-sufficient organism that birthed in their wake.

Something like that anyway, Juyeon thinks, sliding her phone out of her jean pocket. The clock on its cracked screen reading 2:23 tells her she still has another hour left until she reaches her stop, but this is something she’d figured out when she watched yellow fields shape themselves into familiar mountainsides. She has it all memorised, a map in her mind spider webbing from a small house a ten minute walk away from the beach, out into two years of high school and then three years of university in Seoul, into volleyball between that, KIXX, the national team— Paris. Out, and then back into the crumbling hillsides of the mountains, the feeling of foam over her feet.

She has to have it memorised, considering how long she’s been away. So that thinking of home feels less like looking through memories trapped beneath dusted sea glass.

Yoo Yeonjung—a girl one year her younger, and yet someone who possessed an unearthly sort of hunger for success enough to slip into advanced college classes for courses she didn’t even take, and consequently meeting Juyeon—asked her once how she did it. How did you get out? As if her hometown were some sort of purgatory, a place barely worth a pin on the map that needed to be escaped.

She asked this over two bottles of soju and the sizzling of pork over a grill, and Juyeon remembers rattling off some blasé answer along the lines of I got on a bus, obviously, with smoke stinging the corners of her eyes. After that she grinned something stupid, before changing the topic entirely—hows Sojung-unnie, huh?

But perhaps there was some truth to what Yeonjung was asking, Juyeon thinks idly, tapping out a message to her parents that she’d be reaching the terminal soon. There are only two other people on the bus: a mother and her small child. Like, small child, given by how it’s decided that moment to start wailing fiercely, forcing Juyeon’s eyes up to peer over the back of leather upholstery.

It stares back at her, face blotchy red with a trail of gooey snot trailing down and over its chin, which just further convinces her that children are a pursuit for much, much later in the future. She scrunches her face in kind, tries her best to entertain it three aisles down as its mother placates it softly.

Juyeon doubts they’re going to the same place she is. No one ever really moves to her hometown; just leaves, or returns.

It doesn’t escape her that she’s only travelled this route twice over the past ten years. She could blame it on busy schedules, on the constant travel between stadiums and countries, and if not that, then the exams and classes, but to do so feels some sort of disingenuous. Juyeon is many things, but she tries her best to never be that.

So maybe there’s a kind of truth in Yeonjung’s question. Or at least, the implications in and after. Or maybe, it’s the wrong question entirely.

Why, would be a better one she thinks, leaning her forehead back against the window. Breaths in once, and then out; watches as the forest fogs over from the warmth of her breath.

*

For all the time Juyeon has been away, nothing much seems to have changed.

The bus terminal hasn’t at least, the only evidence of passing time the creeping in of moss in neglected corners Juyeon can see as she clambers off the bus, suitcase in one hand, duffle-bag slung over the other shoulder. It’s the first thing she notices anyway. From what she can tell the more she stands still in front of it, the tin roof has started to bend inwards on itself on one side, the small cork noticeboard now lays empty of any posters.

Below the small openings on the side walls, green shrubbery winds around the metal poles. Like nature’s spindly hands.

Down closer to the southern end of Korea the air always feels more humid than in the city. Sticker, the type to bear down on her shoulders like a strange welcome home hug. It rains more as well, and she can see the remnants of a recent rainfall in the ovals glittering on surrounding ivy. It’s this air she breathes in slowly, heavy with crisp fauna and petrichor as she slumps into the rusting metal bench.

She doesn’t particularly want to sit down any longer, her skin feels itchy enough with dry restlessness, but she doesn’t really have anything else to do since her dad’s last message telling her Sorry Juyeon-ah ㅜㅜ we’re running a little late. Across the asphalt ferns wave from a fleeting breeze before quieting again, and she watches them for a moment before the wobble of heatwaves settles back on the road.

Juyeon lasts approximately five minutes like that— still, watching, before dragging a hand roughly through her hair and down her face, leaning backwards into the plastic wall. When she tugs her phone back out of her pocket she’s met with the same cracked screen and no service, which is to be expected this far out of nowhere.

She unlocks it anyway; scrolls upwards in the open group chat with her parents. Mostly one filled with animated cartoon emoticons, chat log filled with video calls Juyeon made possible where she could. Scroll up far enough and she knows she could find the one she made half lucid in a hospital bed.

Her dad had been the one to pick up. Her mom’s face poking into the pixelated screen a minute later, worry evident despite how the 4G connection in a Paris hospital turned them into a 10 frames per second blur, made worse by the salt of her own tears.

Juyeon-ah, her father had said, so soft she felt like he’d barely even said it at all. Strange, how that was enough for the desperation clawing at her sternum to tear itself out of her body with, hysterically, a laugh. A hysterical laugh. It has Juyeon snorting at herself even now, months and a surgery later. We saw, they told her after.

Juyeon remembers seeing the articles too—South Korean outside hitter Son Juyeon tears ACL during Olympic final match against USA. Titles branding a seam into her mind. One point to the USA. One set. Three to two.

It’s gone, she had croaked out, folding inwards into herself on a sterile white bed, something terrible uprooting itself in her chest then. Anxiety scratching across her ribs when she realised in a sick moment of clarity, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know—

“Juyeon-ah?”

Juyeon’s head snaps up from her phone. It’s her dad, stepping out the driver’s side of his ancient white car. For a second she doesn’t really know what to do, just stares dumbly at the widening smile on his face, wondering if the forest had conjured some benevolent looking spirit from the green lush regardless of the fact she knew her parents were coming, and as far as she was aware, in this world the only things the forest conjured were dreams about foxes.

But he’s very real, given by her father’s resounding—“Oh-hoh! We seem to have rendered our Juyeonie speechless,”—and the crinkle of her mom’s eyes as she rounds the other side of the car.

“Hi,” she finally makes out, floundering herself upwards off the seat and into the spread open arms of her mom. Despite the relative tallness of her parents, she still has to bend over slightly to bury her chin in the swirling curl of her mom’s tartan scarf, inhale her familiar floral perfume. “Who wears a scarf in summer?” She asks, with the gentle twinkle of laughter in her ear.

It hits her, paradoxically, both slowly and with the force of a runaway train, how long it’s really been since she last saw her parents in person. When her dad pulls her in for his own hug—roughly, with one of his hands burying a knuckle into her hair—she can feel how much frailer his shoulders have become underneath his clean-pressed shirt; the messy strands of white weaving between the ash of his hair. Her mom is the same when she frees herself of her dad’s bear-hug and is assaulted with bonier fingers tugging at her cheeks—“Aigoo—, you’re still so skinny, look at this honey, isn’t she like a skeleton?”—more smile lines creasing around her eyes than the last time Juyeon was here.

“Mom,” she scowls lightly, pulling her face away before it’s re-shaped into a permanent squishy circle.

The last time she saw them wasn’t even at home— her parents taking a trip to Seoul for a V-League final several years ago. It only took those several years for her dad to no longer tower above her, age bringing his eyes down closer to her own. For her mom’s hair to thin into soft silk.

“It’s definitely been a while,” her dad sighs out once they’d all piled into his car, speaking in that way dads do: coarse voice with the corner of his mouth pulled up, fingers drumming a rhythm on the steering wheel as the car sputters to life. Juyeon brushes a finger along the armrest before pressing her thumb into where light dust sticks to her skin. “Everyone was very excited when they heard you were coming back.”

Juyeon raises an eyebrow at this, regardless of the fact that neither of her parents can see her face from the front. “Everyone?” She asks, grinning, brushing the rest of the dust away in a small cloud. “Even Mr. Kim? You have told him my plans to buy out his entire stock of spicy ramyeon, right.”

“Well, no,” her mom replies through a bright chuckle. “I was under the impression that half that duffle-bag is full of ramyeon.”

“Only a third is, actually,” she tells them blithely. Below them the car trundles along a winding road, afternoon sun yawning through the shadows of the leaves in patches of spotted golden yellow. Juyeon pulls one of her knees up to her chest, leaning her cheek against the jut of her bones, keeping her head still there despite how the occasional pothole forces her teeth to bash against each other painfully.

Absently she wonders if Mr. Kim’s grocery store—the only one in their entire town—still looks the same as it did four years ago.

“How has Seoul been, by the way?” Her father asks. For a moment she doesn’t know what to reply with, instead rolling her head so that her chin rests on her knee and she can see the shadowed asphalt in front of the car.

What could she say? Seoul was where she spent the last ten years of her life, moved away from the sea and the forest alone at sixteen just to gamble her chances at a sport she might not have even made it in, gritting her teeth as the entire city seemed to sneer at her; the blocker on the other side of the net.

Seoul felt like—desperation. Seoul felt like running constantly, stumbling around in that same brown floored forest she dreams of.

What’s gone? Her parents had asked her that day in Paris while sobs wracked her body. Juyeon-ah, what’s gone?

“I’d imagine it was much faster paced than down here,” her mother continues in the silence she left, snapping her out of the memory she keeps dredging up. “Lots of things to do, places to see.”

Juyeon falters again, chin cracking her teeth together some more as the car grinds over cracks in the road. “I—well. Yeah there is. It’s a big city, but my knee kinda— in the last few months— you know.” She barks out a rough laugh, carding a hand through her hair with a sudden feeling of tiredness stretching her ligaments taut under her skin.

Her mother casts her a backwards look, and the pity swirling in the brown of her eyes jerks down her spine so heavily it’s as if someone had pulled the back of her shirt gaping wide and pressed an ice cube directly on top of the first knot of bone.

“But that was just while I was recovering,” she starts abruptly, shuffling her leg back down so she’s sitting straight against the upholstery. “Seoul has been good. I have lots of film photos, if you want to see. I think a bunch were taken by Sojung-unnie.”

“Oh, Sojungie!” Her mom exclaims softly, as Juyeon forces herself to exhale all the vines in her chest.

*


That night Juyeon doesn’t dream of anything at all.


*

The thing about small towns is that returning feels like stepping into a film reel being developed in real time. Like you’re disturbing something that had been thriving without you, and until you settle back into the landscape of each frame like you had been there all along, you have to exist awkwardly first like an opaque white line cutting across each negative.

At least, that’s how it feels for Juyeon when she finally drags herself out of the mattress setup haphazardly on the floor of her childhood-bedroom-turned-office. Nowadays she wakes up late, noon light more often than not spilling through the open window, leaking across messy stacks of journals and papers littered across almost every surface possible.

Waking up takes time. It’s good for her, then, that everything in her hometown takes time. Her knee still complains at her if she doesn’t spend at least ten minutes every morning working it through a series of stretches, extending it outwards and inwards on the hardwood floor, muscles stinging in their own form of protest as she pulls them tight for long seconds she loses herself in. After that it’s remaking the bed, drawing the bottom corners of the sheet firm underneath the mattress’ weight before smoothing the wrinkles out with her hands.

Each long, drawn out minute working through this routine—brushing through her dishevelled hair at the mirror, picking out knots before pursing her lips at her own reflection, fussing with overgrown bangs; tripping over the bed she just made to rifle through her suitcase and bag for a clean sleeveless shirt and a pair of gym shorts; zoning out the window at the gentle wave of her mother’s garden’s flowers, before finally lumbering out the door—feels infuriatingly slow for Juyeon, but would probably be considered less than five minutes in her hometown’s strange dreaminess.

She wouldn’t go as far to say the town lives in apathy, or sloth; just that it exists in its own sort of being outside of the rest of the world.

Only at some nondescript point after finishing her routine does she, finally, manage to make it into the thin hallway and shuffle her way down. Her childhood home is a small house, an old thing, where half the walls are cream bordered by brown pillars, and the wooden doors leading outside creak in complaint when opened, flake in the summer dryness. Not quite a hanok— but something halfway there.

It’s because of this she can hear the gentle lilt of her mother’s voice through the walls, humming a soft melody over the clinking of chopsticks on a pan; a light crackle of something sizzling joining the low croon of a trot singer Juyeon can’t place over the radio. Her dad is sitting at the small table adjacent to the kitchen when she pads past the doorway, yellow splice of light glinting off the frames of his narrow glasses as he thumbs through a book with the ghost of a smile.

“Morning,” he says when he takes notice of Juyeon’s doorway hovering, smile now something tangible across his stubble. A week later and the softness of it all, the steady routine, is still something she can’t quite get used to. It’s been a long time since she last lived like this. There were slow days, to be sure, back in Seoul, but there were still always things to be done—practices to go to and appointments to be had. “Sorry, should I say afternoon?” He adds with a wink, eliciting a snort out of Juyeon.

“Afternoon,” she replies, peering over his shoulder with a scrunch of her nose. “Hatching & Brooding Your Own Chicks: Chickens, Turkeys, Duc—are you two planning on starting a bird farm?”

Her mom beckons her over with a laugh, holding a spoon of clear brown liquid with specks of oil—broth, of some sort— for her to taste. “You never know. Might be fun, change of pace.”

“I’m not enough of a pace-changer?” Juyeon pouts while licking the remnants off her bottom lip, salt and spice sticking to the sides of her tongue. “This tastes nice.”

“Mm, I’m glad. It’s Mrs. Choi’s recipe—oh!” Her mom claps suddenly, dropping the spoon back into a pot with a quiet clatter. “Juyeon-ah, I was wondering—if you’re not busy, of course—if you could drop something off at her house for me? Nothing big, just some books I borrowed. I think they’re in a bag by the door.”

Juyeon’s—not busy, in the slightest, hasn’t been busy in a long while, her body still harbouring that same antsy restlessness plodding around her hometown running errands for her parents in lieu of doing anything else can’t get rid of. That’s the other thing about small towns. When you come back with nothing to do and no set date to leave, after ten—eighteen—years of chasing something now un-chaseable, you start to remember why you felt the need to leave in the first place.

Something twinges uncomfortably inside Juyeon at that thought; she shoves it down somewhere her mom can’t see. “Never busy,” she grins, pressing a dutiful kiss to her mom’s cheek before slipping away towards the entrance. As she leaves she snags one of her dad’s hats, tugs it down tight with one hand while the other hoists a canvas bag full of books over her shoulder.

The heat hits her like a brick wall the moment she steps outside. It makes the walk to Mrs. Choi’s somewhat miserable, her skin prickling with dots of sweat less than a few minutes into her walk down familiar pathways.


*

[There’s a map Juyeon’s creating in her mind. It spider webs out from sun-kissed skin under the touch of her fingertips, crescent curve of backs, hot breath in her ears and soft laughter laid bare under the graft of silver moonlight; into three moles on one cheek she’s counted under her lips and expert hands folding over gold-buttered dough. It spirals out and out, into the drone of cicadas and the sputter of a fan, ten minute walks to the beach, feet on the pavement.

It ends, as it always does, with a fox in a forest staring down the barrelled end of a gun.]

ivy, 3k, high school magical realism(?) au

The start of Lee Yeoreum’s second year of high school is marked by an explosion of flowers.

Quite literally. It’s not just flowers, either. All over Yeoreum’s room is a cacophony of different colours. Most open spaces are brimming with vibrant greens from the heartleafs that sit on shelves built into her walls, the creeping figs set up on a trellis outside her window. Her floor is covered in soft yellow and baby pink and blue petals from the flowers that usually sit on her desk.

Upon noticing this, Yeoreum gives them a look. Says, “You guys can’t be shedding petals all over the floor. I have to keep my room clean. And it’s bad for you.”

But it’s fun, the flowers say.

It’s not as if the plants really talk to her. That would be borderline absurd. They just sort of, send her feelings, and she listens. Sometimes it’s the warmth akin to a friendly hug blossoming through her skin, a thank you for pruning their leaves and watering them on the daily. Other times it’s sharp prickles up and down her arms, dryness in the back of her throat—water, please. more dirt, please. trim this dead limb off, please. Over time she’s learnt what each feeling meant. The flowers on her desk at that moment flutter lightly in her chest, laughing at her, telling her good morning.

“Not good morning,” she huffs, waving her hand at the vines slithered over her bed sheets. They retract with what could only be described as a plant sulk. Yeoreum has discovered over the last eleven years that plants are extraordinarily good at sulking. “Guys I have to go to school. I don’t have time for this. And mom is going to be so mad— remember the last time mom got mad at you all?”

She keeps ferns in ceramic pots that hang from her ceiling, and while they’re more behaved than the rest of her collection, even they chirp sadly at this, telling Yeoreum that if her mom comes in to scold them all again to at least inform her they were impartial to all the trouble. The heartleafs argue back, expressing to Yeoreum that the ferns started it all, actually, and then her entire room is exploding in the noise of plant shouting.

“O-kay,” she grunts after a moment, stumbling out of bed. The vines move out of the way of her feet as she shuffles towards her cupboard to pull her uniform out. “Be good,” she chides to them all gently. “I’ll be back after I eat breakfast to water everyone. And stop arguing, being mad isn’t helpful for anyone. I keep telling you all that you need to communicate better.”

The ferns bristle. For all their good behaviour they can be a bit emotionally constipated.

“And I can’t help stepping on your petals when you spat them out everywhere!” She calls out as a final remark, stepping out into the hallway and into the living room. Thankfully none of the plants in there seemed to have joined in on last nights chaos. It’s happened before.

Her mom, to her credit, doesn’t look the slightest bit concerned by Yeoreum’s shout. “Plants?” is all she asks.

“Yeah. I think they’re more excited about school than I am.”

“Don’t know why they would be,” she replies, setting the table out with breakfast. Her younger brother trudges to his seat with all the morning grumpiness a nine year old could possibly conjure. “I figured they’d be upset about being left alone all day.”

Yeoreum shrugs. She shovels rice into her younger brother’s bowl first before her own, lets her mom ladle soup into a separate one as she takes some of the kimchi and places it on a small side plate. “They’re not really alone. They have each other, and I think they think I mother them too much,” she says after to the soft twinkling of her mom’s laugh.

“You do a little bit.”

Yeoreum has told exactly two people about her—ability? Of which were her mother and younger brother, and while at first her mom considered sending her to a psychiatrist, she immediately rescinded that idea when Yeoreum brought a succulent back to from near-death in front of her eyes. Yeoreum’s glad for it. For being able to talk about it somewhat normally as if communicating with plants isn’t edging on insanity.

Her brother just— “Noona,” he grumbles. “Your plant grew through my window last night. Tell it to go away.”

Watering has a routine. After breakfast is when she starts, and she knows the plants are going to complain about it for a few days considering it’s slightly earlier than when she was on break. The ones in the living room come first, tall, potted greenery with large lush leaves that would require at least three of Yeoreum’s hands to fully cover. They’re her mom’s plants, and it shows in their personalities. They greet Yeoreum quietly when she comes over, spreading a feeling like sweet honey into her veins when she offers them the amount of water they need, shares with them the escapades of her own children.

“So,” her mom starts after she’s changed into a pair of her light blue work scrubs. Yeoreum only glances at her, before returning to cooing at her favourite succulent by the T.V. “Second year of high school today. How are you feeling?”

Yeoreum pauses. “Um. Good?”

Her mom sighs at this, which she knows means she’s about to either feel very guilty about something, or receive a stern lecture. She pets the succulent’s leaves once when it waves forlornly at her before turning around.

“Yeoreum-ah,” her mom says carefully, and Yeoreum winces slightly. “You know what I’m going to tell you.”

She does, she knows very well, and she thinks her instinctive reaction to lean into the tendrils of comfort the succulent behind her is providing, dispel the worried murmurs of the potted plants scattered around the room, might have something to do with it.

“I have friends,” she coughs out after a moment. “People like me. I’ve ignored more than fifteen text messages from Dayoung this morning.”

“You have two friends,” her mom corrects bluntly. Yeoreum avoids eye contact, shrinking backwards against the cabinet. “Yeonjungie has known you since elementary school and I’m fairly sure Dayoung could make friends with a rock.”

“I like to think I have more emotional intelligence than a rock.”

The problem with being able to talk to plants, Yeoreum has learnt, is that they tend to make better company than most of her peers. Not for lack of trying, of course. She’s tried. Her classmates have tried. And it’s not as if she’s unpopular, people come to her when they need help with classwork, talk to her during breaks, ask her how her weekend has been—it’s just, difficult. Surface level. Yeoreum was not born with the same inclination to social life as Im Dayoung, nor the general extroverted nature of Yeonjung, and came to learn that beyond her two best friends, she’d rather spend her free time with the plants.

“That’s not what I—” her mom huffs out a long breath, rubbing at the top of her eyebrow with her thumb. “I’m just saying,” she says, softer, walking over to stroke Yeoreum’s hair lightly. “It wouldn’t harm for you to have more… human friends.”

The succulent warbles out light concern that sinks into her stomach. She hushes it with a small wave behind her back, smiling at her mom. “I’ll try. I’m sure Dayoung can help.”

“Okay. That’s all I ask.”

Her room when she returns to it is swirling with worry. The plants are quiet now, but not silent, seeking her out in the ways they can. The ferns huff out complaints. The heartleafs croon over her; the creeping figs snake around her wrists. The flowers offer apologies for the petals which makes her laugh faintly.

“I’m okay,” she tells them, patting the leaves of the heartleafs. She’s not particularly upset—her mom is right, she knows she is. Knows that it’s probably not very healthy to have her greatest comfort come from soil and leaves and the words they speak to her.

She waters them carefully, humming a song. Sprays the ferns and the heartleafs while the flowers tell her they’re not that thirsty. The figs get their water from the rain, so she leaves them with a curt reminder to stay off her sheets and out of the house.

Her mom is right, she thinks again, slipping out the apartment and burying her chin into the collar of her shirt, feeling cold without the constant noise of her plants.


*


The second problem with the whole plant situation is that it’s not just limited to the ones in her home. Plants like talking, even if most people don’t listen.

She takes the most industrial route to school possible, through the parts of her neighbourhood with no shrubbery, no weeds to skulk into her mind and no dying bushes to cry out to her in a final bid of desperation. At the bus stop she’s learnt how to push away the feelings the small patch of council mandated greenery expel outwards like snaking tentacles. None of it is a particularly pleasant experience, regardless of how much she’s grown used to it. Saving every plant in Seoul isn’t exactly an achievable goal.

On the bus she takes an empty seat somewhat in the middle, not too close to the loud collection of students in the back nor too near the ahjummas coming back from morning trips to the supermarkets who seem to take a liking to her, for some reason. The middle is from her experience, the most peaceful.

Which is why she finds it surprising when there’s a voice behind her calling out, “Yeoreum, hey.”

“Jungeun-ah,” she says back, relaxing slightly. One of her classmates last year in 1-C, Jungeun was someone who she liked, even if they didn’t talk much outside of pleasantries or occasionally complaining about homework. Distantly she remembers her mom’s message this morning to try and make more human friends. “How was your break?” She asks after a moment of hesitation.

Jungeun scoffs, and briefly Yeoreum thinks she’s messed up somehow, on the very first day, until Jungeun’s jabbing a finger to her right. “Terrible,” she says dryly. “These two have been hounding me about their first year since they graduated middle school.”

Only then does Yeoreum notice the slight girl sitting next to Jungeun. She bows as politely as she can in a bus seat, brown hair spilling messily back over her shoulders when she sits up straight. “Jeon Heejin,” she introduces herself, before moving to the side to give Yeoreum a view of the other girl sitting behind her. “That’s Hyunjin,” she tells her with a grimace when Hyunjin just waves before returning to her phone.

Yeoreum waves back, bemused.

“Ignore them,” Jungeun grunts, turning to Yeoreum and ignoring Heejin’s noise of muted outrage. “I actually wanted to ask you about something.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You visit the greenhouse a lot, right?”

“I go an average amount?” Yeoreum hedges. She’s lying, of course, since she’s been taking care of the plants in the school greenhouse from midway through first year. By accident at first, when she stumbled upon it and felt the misery radiating thick through muggy hair, humidity all wrong, plants over watered and under watered and overgrown all at the same time. She got official permission later since bringing pruning scissors to school wasn’t really feasible and she needed access to the sprinklers.

“An average amount would be not going at all,” Jungeun points out without any malice. “Or like, once, for biology or something. But that’s not really the point. The student council wants to start this new gardening thing on the school roof—some green eco thing, I wasn’t really paying attention— but everyone’s kinda bad with plants, so we’ve been looking for someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Yeoreum considers this, nodding slowly. If she’s being honest it didn’t sound like a bad time, helping with the rooftop garden, especially considering all the benefits that came with a well-kept one. The only problem was—“The student council,” she clarifies.

The student council. The council that Yeoreum has been trying to avoid since first year. The council that Son Juyeon is in. Son Juyeon who is now the head of the student council. Son Juyeon who’s the nicest person Yeoreum has ever met and could probably double as a model and does things like ask if Yeoreum is okay after Dayoung accidentally spilled her lunch all over her and—

“Yup,” Jungeun continues, oblivious to her sudden mental anguish. “Jiwoo made me join. Everyone’s really nice—though I’m pretty sure Luda-sunbae was the type of president to do background checks, so. Anyway, it would be fun.”

The bus comes to a halt at the stop a few blocks down from their school’s entrance. Jungeun shoots her a smile, scrambling to follow an enthusiastic Hyunjin, who’d escaped with a stream of their classmates out the doors. “Just think about it,” she says hefting her bag over her shoulder. “If you think you’re down, talk to Mr. Choi. Or Juyeon-sunbae. She’s usually in the council room after classes.”

Yeoreum manages to nod once before she’s gone.

She contemplates the pros and cons the entire walk to the school building. The pros are obvious; she gets to work with plants, gets to make sure the student council aren’t horribly butchering the poor creatures, if Jungeun’s remark about how none of them are good with plants rings true, and, she’ll probably get to see Juyeon.

Which, well.

Her crush on Juyeon probably started somewhere around when she found the greenhouse to escape. Of course she knew about Juyeon before then, it was impossible not too, with her inherent brightness that had a room paying attention to her even if she wasn’t saying anything. That, and she’s the type of pretty that had people writing poetry. Yeoreum has seen. Yeoreum has read some. They’re not very good, but she understands the sentiment.

She’s not exactly interested in dating—not like Dayoung and her attempts to somehow pavlov Lee Luda into liking her back by breaking every rule possible to get sent to the student council room—so it’s not as if she’s not holding out hope for Juyeon to return her feelings; but it’s hard to ignore the butterflies in her stomach when they just pass each other in the hallways, the blushes that cover her face when she’s offered a smile.

The cons are harder to list. The people aren’t a con, but between the plants and the whichever council members are bound to be helping out, she can’t help but predict it to be trouble. Then there’s trying to balance helping the plants and making it look like she can’t feel every little jabbing complaint they have, and then—ironically, Son Juyeon.

Yeoreum sighs, stops to squint up at the roof, blocking the sun with one of her hands. Maybe it could be good. Maybe she could exposure therapy herself into getting over her crush. Maybe she could finally have one interaction with Juyeon that didn’t result in disaster.


*


“I’m doomed.”

“You’re not doomed.”

“I screwed up.”

“No you—” Yeonjung sighs, and if Yeoreum wasn’t buried head first into the wood of her desk, she’d probably see her rubbing at her face in exasperation.

Fortunately, she’s buried head first into her desk. She just imagines it instead.

“What’s wrong with her?”

Yeoreum lolls her head to the side to see Dayoung scraping the chair next to her backwards before slumping into it without an ounce of grace.

How they managed to be in the same class two years in a row is beyond Yeoreum, but even if both her friends can be loud and disruptive and seem to generally enjoy causing trouble, at least it means she gets to lament all her life’s problem’s during first period when they should be studying.

Hence: “I screwed up,” she repeats, because if there was a non-extensive list of the most embarrassing things to occur in Lee Yeoreum’s one year and one day of high school, tripping over a root and almost face-planting into concrete would probably rank first on that list. Even just thinking about it is making her feel as if she could prove that spontaneous human combustion is possible.

“That doesn’t sound that bad,” Dayoung says with a shrug. She’s dyed her hair blonde and cut it into a bob since the last time the three of them met up, and Yeoreum’s pretty sure it should be considered a crime. “Why do you look like you’re about to die?”

“Because,” Yeonjung starts, and Yeoreum looks up in time to see both the grin spreading over her face, and to send her the most withering glare she can possibly conjure. Unfortunately it has zero effect. “Juyeon-sunbae—”

Yeoreum groans into the table as loud as possible. “Please stop,” she pleads. She’s begging. Dayoung is never going to let her live it down.

“Shut up, Yeoreum. Juyeon-sunbae did what?”

In front of her Yeonjung leans backwards against her desk, crossing her arms behind her head. Says, grin now insurmountable levels of horrible, “Juyeon-sunbae, caught her.”

If spontaneous combustion happens to be possible, Yeoreum would be glad to have it happen to her right now. At least to save her from the misery of listening to Im Dayoung’s ear-splitting cackle.

“No fucking way,” she hears her wheeze. “That's gold. That’s actual gold. Oh, I would pay to see that.”

perhaps the world ends here, 446, post-apocalyptic post-idolhood eternal winter/volcanic winter au

If you weren’t an idol, Juyeon once asked. What would you want to be?


-


Food is easier to come by nowadays, compared to the beginning. Yeoreum likes to prepare meals with the sort of meticulous hand that often makes Dayoung mad. They’ve learned how to make plants grow again, how to tend to green life inside clumsily built indoor gardens and greenhouses designed to keep out the fringes of bitter cold. They’ve learned, so Yeoreum has learned to be careful; how to never let something go to waste, how to slice into vegetables like the skins are golden leaf.

Outside, Seoul is quiet. If she turns her head to the right ever so slightly she’d be able to see out the thin kitchen window. Out into blankets and blankets of white. It’s been years and she’s still in awe of all of it, all that devastating, never-ending snow.

Inside, she keeps her eyes on a cutting board, letting a deft hand chop an onion into clean half-moons. This is what she’s good at, nowadays. Cooking. If there were enough of Korea left for jobs to still be necessary she thinks she probably would be a chef, but the snow is always falling and only the withered roots of society are left, so she’s not. Instead she scrapes the onions off the cutting board and onto a plate so there’s enough space to cleave potatoes into pieces.

She’s waiting for Dayoung and Yeonjung to come back from the jerry-rigged ‘market’ set up on the bottom floor of an apartment building a few streets away, keeps one ear searching for the telltale crunch of ice from the front.

(unfinished section)

-


The next time they come back from the market Dayoung says nothing, does nothing, except slip up the stairs into her room with eyes fogged over and shoulders bent inwards.

“She thought she saw Sojung-unnie,” is all Yeonjung says.


-


Sometimes Yeoreum dreams she’s standing in an empty field.

Or, not so empty. In this world the snow never came, and it’s just her, alive, in a paddy field of yellowed crops. Sometimes there are wires trailing down her neck, through her veins into a back pocket. Sometimes a sticky breeze waves crowds of plants side-to-side while the water sucks her feet down motionless.

In this world the snow never came. She still stares ghosts in the face in a field that’s not really empty, anyway. She sees ghost things, dead things, brown eyes and hair shrivelled from the cold. Pale limbs and rotten skin and creamy eyes whose souls wilt her own down to the marrow.

The field is never really empty.

The birds always hover.

around, 1.3k, post-disbandment au

november

Yeoreum falls in love for the second time in front of a crowd of 15,000.

Give or take a few hundred, anyway. The exact numbers aren’t known to her, and she’s not particularly interested in knowing; not when she’s faced with what feels like a sea of waving wujubongs, and a crowd screaming their names.

The final stops of their goodbye tour are at a stadium in Seoul. A year long venture, from preparation to announcement to each of their performances across seven locations in Asia, culminating in two last dates at KSPO Dome. It’s fitting, Yeoreum thinks, for their last tour to have the biggest turnouts. WJSN have never exactly been SNSD or Twice, but it doesn’t stop them from performing in front of fifteen-thousand people like they are anyway.

To be truthful, Yeoreum has fallen in love countless times before. The world is big and there’s an innumerable number of things to love. Her dogs, her Mom, her brother; the stuffiness of the vocal booths, the smell of her new apartment, the taste of the hotpot restaurant three blocks away from Starship, the squeak of her sneakers against wooden floors.

For the second time, though, Yeoreum falls in love like this. There’s ten of them, and a sea of purple. There’s confetti falling from somewhere in the ceiling, and the energy is so palpable it feels like they could just stay there suspended in time, with the sounds of their music thrumming beneath their feet as they commandeer the stage for one last show without regrets.

“This is the final song for tonight, Ujungs,” Yeonjung had told the crowd, because Sojung was already crying so hard centre-stage she couldn’t speak. “Please sing with us!”

Like this, she falls in love. There’s ten of them, and it’s Yeoreum’s turn for the tears to start streaming down her face, for each individual sphere of purple to turn into a blurry mass swaying as one. She’s holding a banner with her name on it and a microphone in one hand. In the other, another hand has slipped into her own, solid and steady and trembling all the same.

“You said you wouldn’t cry again!” Juyeon’s laughing into a microphone, loud and clear through a speaker despite the booming of Geeminy underneath.

Yeoreum thinks it’s a hilarious choice for their final encore, despite almost everyone’s adversity to it during the setlist meetings. Hyunjung’s thirty-six now, and Yeoreum, Dayoung, and Yeonjung are—equally hilariously—thirty-one. And here she is singing a song called Geeminy like she’s eighteen again.

The first round of tears happened during You & I. The second during the ments, where Yeoreum claimed she wouldn’t cry, despite having cried during every ment of every concert and fan meeting WJSN have ever held. The third happens during Geeminy, with Son Juyeon laughing at her, despite the croak in her voice making it very obvious she’s about to cry as well.

Yeoreum reaches up, pulls confetti out of Juyeon’s hair with their linked hands. “You’re crying too.”

“I am,” Juyeon replies, this time with Geeminy washing over it, loud through their in-ears and the speakers. “You know I always cry when you cry.”

She lets Juyeon twirl her around like they’re twenty-three again after that; hopes the deep breaths she takes to force down the clog at the back of her throat looks like it’s for the tears.

The stage is immutable. The songs change, the dances change, sometimes the people change, but the stage never does. This is where all the work Yeoreum has put in since she was eleven and auditioning for her first entertainment company reaches it’s pinnacle. This is where she stands, ten-aside, Juyeon’s hand still trembling in her right hand with Sojung to her left, and watches as the last fourteen years reaches it’s endpoint.

Like this—

Geeminy comes to a close, as all songs do.

“Ujungs!” They say together, in a perfect ninety-degree bow. “Thank you for everything. This has been WJSN!”



*


Yeolmu is an old dog. Nowadays when she has the time to take all three of her scruffy little dogs home from the care of her Mom, Yeoreum has to go on two walks. A short one for Yeolmu, and a longer one for Yeolmae and Yeolmi.

“We’re home,” Yeoreum sings out loud to her adoring company of three. Yeolmae trots inside as she always does, while Yeolmi scrambles to make a mess of Yeoreum’s neatly aligned couch pillows. Behind the two, Yeolmu lazes by her ankles, only trudging past the entranceway after Yeoreum hangs her scarf on a rack next to the door and steps inside.

For the first time, though, the four of them are back in her apartment for the indefinite future.

“We’re so old, Yeolmu-yah,” Yeoreum tells her, fiddling with her rough curls as she slumps into the couch. Yeolmu is. Yeoreum’s not. Not really. Thirty-one is far from old and she can hear the voice of her Mom in her head, scolding her about how if she’s old, then god, her Mom must be crumbling from age.

In the grand scheme of things, though—

“What do you plan on doing?” Juyeon had asked her months ago, after the stuffy meeting with their CEO and managers and whatever executives the company deemed necessary for putting those fated words on paper. “After.”

Yeoreum had thought it a loaded question to ask, considering a minute prior they were busy deciding what food to order before practice.

“I’m not sure yet,” Yeoreum had told her, because unlike the rest of them, Yeoreum had always felt like she existed inside some strange limbo. She’d need twenty hands to count the accolades of her closest friends, and even then it wouldn’t feel like enough. Jiyeon has had more hit dramas than Yeoreum has fingers. Sojung’s solo music has charted higher than most of their title tracks. Yeoreum’s only visited Yeonjung’s apartment a few times, but she’s pretty sure she’s started a wall for her musical awards.

Yeoreum throws her head back onto the couch, closes her eyes, listens to Yeolmae yawn somewhere distantly, the ticking of clock she hung on one of the walls. Yeolmi is next to her, and she probably should tell the rascal to stop digging into the leather. “What am I going to do now?” She asks to no one in particular, instead.

Yeolmu curls into her lap, nuzzling into her hand with a wet nose. Yeoreum’s not like the rest of her members, with announcements for the new companies they’ve signed to behind the scenes lined up, dramas to be revealed, variety shows to guest on. She’s thirty-one, renewed her contract once with Starship already. Had the last few years to figure out what to do in the after. She could’ve renewed for a second time, if she wanted.

There’s beeping from the entranceway while she mopes, and Yeolmae and Yeolmi are still young enough to instantly rocket towards the muffled cursing from the doorway. Yeolmu makes the effort to lift her head up from where it’s resting on Yeoreum’s stomach, at least.

“Yeoreum-ah, seriously, what happened to being organised? Why are your shoes everywhere— Yeolmi!”

When Yeoreum peels open her eyes to stare upside down at the chaos happening in her doorway, she’s greeted with Juyeon being barrelled over by two puppies, which is a ridiculous visual since Yeolmae and Yeolmi weigh less than seven kilos put together and Juyeon likes role playing as a beanstalk.

“You’re the one breaking into my apartment,” Yeoreum says mildly. “I don’t think you should be complaining about the state of my entranceway.”

“It’s not breaking in if you told me the passcode.”






She could’ve renewed for a second time, if she wanted. But when no one else was, what was the point?

Take away Chocome, take away WJSN, and who, exactly, is Lee Yeoreum going to be?



*

(august 2015

Jinsook had been in the debut team for less than two weeks, and already wanted to die.

시든 꽃 (petal drops), 2.1k, childhood friends to strangers

It rains, when Yeoreum comes home to Korea. A heavy thundering of drops that fall loudly onto the tarmac in front of her. It’s summer. Her mom had told her over the phone, some time around twelve-am the night before her flight to Seoul— considering Los Angeles was sixteen hours behind— that she should prepare an umbrella for when she lands.

Mom knows best, she thinks belatedly as she stares out at the mass of roads that wind round and round each other at the front of Incheon airport. She is, unfortunately, painfully, umbrella-less. A taxi pulls away from the curb, splashing the bottom of her legs with rainwater that had piled up in the crevice. It soaks into her socks slightly.

Her phone buzzes with a message. It’s from Dayoung, telling her ill be there soon !!!!!!

This means Yeoreum has two options: one, hunt around the two stores in the check-in section of the terminal behind her for an umbrella, which she doesn’t really want to do since it means she’d have to lug her luggage back and forth; or two, give up and run to one of the winding roads where Dayoung can pick her up and get soaked in the process.

are u texting while driving she sends back first. please dont do that

It’s summer. The muggy heat that has wrapped around her in a suffocating embrace is starting to seep into her clothes, sweat prickling at the nape of her neck. She rubs at it absentmindedly. Summer heat is different in Korea, and she’s not so used to it anymore. Summers in California were blisteringly dry with a brutally hot sun that would sit high in the sky. Rain barely came, and the air didn’t weigh down on her the same way it does in Seoul, pressing into her shoulders.

It doesn’t help that her non-stop eleven hour flight has left her feeling gross and a little off-kilter; her skin dry in places despite the wetness in the air; her clothes chafing awkwardly, stiff and uncomfortable.

Well, it’s not the worst flight in the world. An Australian friend she met in America had told her about close to fifteen hour long flights from Melbourne to Dubai— and that was only one half of a trip to London. Yeoreum counts her blessings where she has them.

Like how she’s home, in Korea. With the torrid heat she’s not used to and the rain that steeps into the bottom of her shoes.

i wasnt driving whn i sent that Dayoung gets back to her as she shifts on her feet, still staring out at the winding roads. A few people have given her strange looks, but it’s an airport. People wait around. i was getting coffee ㅋㅋㅋ also im in one of the parking lots in front of terminal 1 ^^

Dayoung’s at the airport. This means option one is out of the question, unless Yeoreum wants to endure twenty minutes of whining about how she made Dayoung wait. The insane part of her she blames on shitty american food and culture thinks that might not be so bad; its been four years since she’s heard of one Dayoung’s patented tantrums in the flesh, and maybe it would be nice to hear it at a reasonable time that isn’t eleven pm in the evening with the crackling of kakaotalk phone calls.

She hoists her heavy duffle bag in one hand. Grips the handle of her suitcase tightly in her other.

“Why are you wet,” Dayoung complains when Yeoreum knocks on the window to her car. It looks exactly the same as the other approximately thirty pictures Dayoung has sent since she bought it, though definitely dirtier. “You’re gonna make my seats all gross. Whatever. Put your stuff in the trunk.”

“That’s the first thing you say to me?” Yeoreum calls as she dumps her bags into the aforementioned trunk, where she squints at a stain in one of the corners. Shifts her bags slightly so that they don’t touch it. She ruffles her hair as she slips into the passenger seat, and Dayoung scowls from her left.

“I literally forced you to pay for the internet on the plane so we could keep talking,” Dayoung points out, but leans over the console anyway, pulling Yeoreum into a bone crushing hug. “Welcome home. Your clothes are so fucking gross.”

Yeoreum has to pull a face so that her cheeks don’t split from the shocking sincerity, and Dayoung-ness, of it all. Rain hits the side of the windows, a rhythmic muffled drumming. “You know the wifi was expensive, right.” She says as they pull apart, and the smile comes out regardless. “You’re buying me watermelon juice for the next week.”

Dayoung snorts. “No fucking way. I’m broke.” She turns the key in the ignition, and Yeoreum hums noncommittally.

It’s the little things that hit her the most, even less than a few hours back. Seeing Dayoung sit in the drivers seat of a car, turning the key in a practised motion, a version of Dayoung from when they were eighteen and still baby faced, fresh-eyed, overlapped with the Dayoung of now. A version of Dayoung that couldn’t drive, and a version of Dayoung who comes to pick Yeoreum up from the airport like it’s just another day.

It’s not like she hasn’t seen Dayoung since she left. There’s just a difference between video calls and the real thing. Like California was a universe away from Korea, and the friends she’d left behind were pictures she’d placed on a wall to remember, drawings stuck on a fridge.

The skyline of Seoul drifts past her. The peachy haze of a setting sun weaves in and out of the endlessly tall skyscrapers. Rain still hits the windows, though more gently now, and Yeoreum watches a raindrop as it trails down next to her. A version of Seoul from the day she left, a dim memory of long shadows in the night and flickering neon lights in the distant, overlaps with the Seoul of now, and nothing’s really changed in that regards.

“Yeonjungie wants to throw a party,” Dayoung says after they’d been driving for a while. She fiddles with the radio for a bit, and out of habit Yeoreum keeps expecting to hear one of the english radio voices she’d grown used to. “After you’ve settled in.”

Yeoreum raises an eyebrow. Yeonjung was definitely less consistent than Dayoung at staying in contact, especially with timezones, but she also was terrible at keeping things she’s excited about to herself. “Was that actually her idea or yours?”

“I would never use my girlfriend as a scapegoat, Yeoreum.” Dayoung sniffs. “But also yes it was mine.”

“Wow,” Yeoreum drawls, long and exaggerated. “Is this drinking party just going to be me third wheeling?”

“Obviously not. I would never do that to you.”

Dayoung smiles innocently when Yeoreum gives her a look. “I had to give you two relationship counselling from a different continent, but okay.”

“And we’re both so appreciative of what you’ve done for us.” Dayoung coos, and Yeoreum moves to turn the radio up louder. “No, wait, don’t do that Yeoreum-ah—” She whines, and they scuffle over the volume knob before Dayoung claims that Yeoreum is intentionally placing them in danger and that as a responsible driver—

“I get it, I get it.” Yeoreum grunts. Dayoung positively preens over her victory. “So if I’m not third wheeling, who else is coming?”

Dayoung flicks her eyes to her briefly, tapping her thumbs on the steering wheel. “Well, we were thinking you could meet our friends from university.” She trails off near the end, and it almost sounds like a question.

Yeoreum thinks that’s fair; because if Dayoung and Yeonjung, her mom and her brother, have been reduced to pixels for the past four years, snapshots on instagram and kakaotalk that almost feel fake, then Yeoreum has, too. California was 9545 kilometres away from Seoul. 5931 miles—since she’s grown used to counting in them too—and 1461 days.

Her socks squelch when she shifts in her seat. It makes her scrunch up her face as her eyes trail alongside another raindrop on the windscreen, and Dayoung gives her a wary look from her left.

“My socks are wet.” She clarifies as Dayoung makes a sour expression. “So you’re going to invite your friends to a homecoming party for a person they’ve never met.”

Dayoung shrugs. “You’re, like, my closest friend after Yeonjungie and she doesn’t count,” She tells her bluntly, like it’s just another fact of the world. “I want my friends to meet you now that you’re finally back.”

1461 days ago, there were four of them. Dayoung, Yeonjung, herself and— now. 1461 days later, and Yeoreum had two friends in Korea, Im Dayoung and Yoo Yeonjung, and then a multitude of people she didn’t know. Son Juyeon included.

“You’re weirdly sentimental today,” Yeoreum says in lieu of a proper answer, because thinking about home, 1461 days ago, and Son Juyeon, conjures the ache in her sternum California never managed to get rid of. She doesn’t feel real, with the skyline of Seoul flowing in the corner of her eye. Like she’s in some sort of stasis between whatever constitutes as home now, the crusty air of an aeroplane, and her dorm back in Los Angeles.

She wonders if Dayoung would invite Juyeon.

“I can be sentimental if I want to be,” Dayoung says primly, and Yeoreum snorts. “What? I’m in touch with my emotions, Yeoreum-ah. I’m practically an emotions guru.” She takes a hand off the wheel briefly to wave it sagely. “One of my best friends that ran away to America of all places as soon as she graduated is back home, the sentimentality is justified and I’m expressing it because that’s what friends do, or something.”

“You sound like a bad self-help book.” Yeoreum says dryly.

“That means im doing my job as a guru properly. What do you think about the party?”

Yeoreum picks at a thread on her jeans, watching it coil before straightening out as it pulls away from her leg. “Sure, let’s do it.” She replies easily, because she doesn’t feel real yet.



//



There’s a time before the 1461 days. Yeoreum considers that period as the time with Juyeon, and then like how there’s a time after the 1461 days, the moments after she considers the time without Juyeon.

Being in Seoul hasn’t settled within her, yet. When she enters her family home, head starting to ache persistently at the base of her skull, Korean starting to feel distressingly heavy in her ears and on her tongue, she’s greeted with the full 5’10 frame of her younger brother and she almost thinks she might wake up back in the dusty confines of her dorm.

He’s barely in his second year of high school. He doesn’t look like the kid overlapped from four years ago, and he stares at her like he’s thinking the exact same thing.

“Did you get shorter, noona?” Is the first thing he says, and Yeoreum flicks him in the forehead.

Her childhood bedroom still exists in the time with Juyeon. As though it’s been frozen in the exact moment Yeoreum stepped out of it four years ago; the only perceptible change being the dust that’s accumulated in corners her mom couldn’t reach, objects disturbed slightly by accident. There’s a cork board of pictures that hangs above her desk, and she dumps her stuff to go shower so she can maybe start feeling minutely like a human being.

Her childhood bedroom, her house, the street outside of it and its dim orange glow and the liminal space of the CU two blocks down, all of Seoul and Korea and the pictures that hang above her desk, exists in the time with Juyeon. It feels like a persistent, sickly warmth that slips in and out of her ribs, one that she tries to ignore as she washes away the last traces of California that might linger on her skin.

That’s the thing, about childhood friends. When you grow up with someone, spend every waking minute possible attached to their side, sometimes they become as much of home as the locations themselves. Seoul hasn’t settled within her yet. She still doesn’t feel real, and the four years she spent running away pales in comparison to how much of Juyeon still encompasses her home.

soulmate ft iu, 9.7k, childhood friends college/idol au

In the summers, they go to Jeju-do.

An old family tradition. They own a house a ten minutes walk away from the beach, old and dusty from its unuse during the majority of the year. When they arrive Yeoreum coughs from the dust, complains to her mom, before shirking her responsibilities by slipping down the path overgrown with greenery towards the sand and sea.

Jeju isn’t particularly known for its beaches. It’s the hiking, the tourist attractions and the cheap speciality soju, the seafood and the late night bars that bring in the money.

At thirteen years old, none of that matters to Yeoreum. What matters is that Jeju brings late evenings under the blistering summer sun, Jeju brings crystal clear water to escape to when the stifling humidity becomes too much, Jeju brings bright red fruit that blossoms on the trees in the backyard of their house.

Most importantly, Jeju brings fourteen year old Son Juyeon, already sun kissed and jubilant by the time Yeoreum sees her with her feet buried in the sand.

“Unnie!” She calls out when her own feet hit the sand.

A year has passed since the last they saw each other. In the summers, Yeoreum’s family travels to Jeju-do. In the summers, so do Juyeon’s. Even from a distance away Yeoreum can see the minute changes in her friend, the black hair that has grown past her shoulders, the baby fat slowly starting to disappear from her jawline.

Juyeon stands to engulf her in a hug strong enough to send them sprawling on the ground.

A year since they last saw each other. Seven years since they first met at the beginning of summer. There’s sand getting in her hair as she giggles into Juyeon’s collarbone.

“Yeoreumie!” Juyeon crows, squeezing her overgrown and gangly limbs around her. “I missed you.”

Summer brings a world away from the reality of Seoul. A youth filled with the sand in her hair and her arms tangled with a best friend she won’t see when the season ends. When it does, Yeoreum will have to go back home to the cold winter and endless snow, the chill of a breeze that buries deep in her bones.

“I missed you too, unnie.” She says, at the beginning of summer.

-

Here’s the other thing Jeju-do brings:

At the end of winter during her first year of high school, Jeju-do brings Im Dayoung, hair bleached an eye-sore blonde despite school regulations and a personality louder than anything Yeoreum has encountered before.

They’re almost complete opposites.

Where Dayoung has her tie undone and a hoodie hung around her shoulders, Yeoreum has her blazer buttoned up close to perfect and her hair kept a sharp black. Dayoung skips supplementary class at the end of the day in favour of eating candy from the convenience store nearby, Yeoreum goes to a cram school and studies until one in the morning for the exams coming in several months time.

None of this deters Dayoung from picking out Yeoreum in the back of the classroom and promptly attaching herself to her for the foreseeable future.

Jeju-do brings Im Dayoung, who five years later at the beginning of the spring semester is busy sprawling herself across Yeoreum’s bed like she owns the place.

“Yeoreum, please.” She whines petulantly. She’s hitting the mattress beside her with her fists, and Yeoreum snorts at the tantrum occurring behind her.

While Dayoung is busy messing up her previously made bed, Yeoreum is hunched over her desk, hair tied behind her head as she painstakingly rules what feels like a million straight lines.

“Ask Yeonjung,” she eventually replies when she’s done drawing one of the walls of her design. “I’m sure she’ll go with you.”

“Yeonjungie can’t go, she has her musical.”

Yeoreum lines up her T-Square. Adjusts it to excruciating accuracy. “I have to submit this draft the day afterwards, Dayoung-ah.”

Dayoung lets out a whinge so earsplittingly long it has Yeoreum putting her pencil down with a sigh. “Seriously! How old are you?”

“22 years old,” She says primly. “Please come to the concert with me. The spare ticket will go to waste if you don’t.”

“Why would you get a spare ticket if no one’s going with you?”

“Because you’re going with me!”

Yeoreum turns around and groans at the efficacy of the pout pointed her way. “I’ll think about it.”

This is enough for Dayoung to lunge at her with delighted squeals, and it takes Yeoreum the next twenty minutes to kick her out of her room.

-

Yeoreum knows nothing about the concert she’s dragged to. Yeoreum has made it a point, over the past three years since the group debuted and Dayoung had become obsessed with them, to tune the girl out every time she mentioned ‘The Black’ or ‘Exy’. Yeoreum would rather be at home right then, instead of staring at the bottom of the stage with fansite cameras positioned over her shoulders.

Yeoreum can also admit that Dayoung has really good seats.

“How much did you pay for these?” She asks in mild awe when they slump down into them after hours of mingling outside. Dayoung was looking for photocards, apparently. Yeoreum spent most of the time on her phone.

“Well, not that much. 350k?”

Yeoreum stares at her blankly. Dayoung stares at her in kind.

“For both?”

“For one. I got one of these seats from a friend that runs a fansite.” Dayoung unlocks her phone and takes a picture of the stage, composing a tweet with complete nonchalance over Yeoreum’s gaping mouth.

“You’re seriously…” Yeoreum is a little speechless. There were few things she’d be willing to spend 300k won on, and concert seats were not remotely at the top of that list. “Are you crazy?”

“No,” Dayoung turns to take a photo of Yeoreum who fails to defend herself in time. She has a feeling it’s not very attractive by the delighted glee in her eyes. “I’m Dayoung.”

“That’s the same thing,” She lunges for the phone. “Please delete those.”

“Why would I? This day needs to be memorialised.”

Yeoreum protests loudly, only stopping her attempts to steal Dayoung’s phone when she’s given a dirty look by another fan.

She slumps low in her seat. “Dayoung-ah. If this isn’t good, I’m not baking for you for the rest of the semester.”

Dayoung patently doesn’t care. “That’s a lie. And you’ll enjoy it, I bet I can figure out who you’ll bias by the end of it.”

Yeoreum wants to tell her there will be no biasing anyone, regardless of her enjoyment, but the lights have started to dim and loud music that she can feel in her skull has started reverberating throughout the concert hall.

She forces herself to sit a little taller when four silhouettes make their way across the stage.

When the neon lights start dancing across the stage, and the silhouettes emerge from the shadow, her breath stills in her chest.

She shakes Dayoung. Hard. “The one with the silver hair, who is she?”

“Silver? Oh, Eunseo,” There’s no shortage of delight in Dayoung’s voice. “I knew you would–”

She tunes her out.

-

When Yeoreum was twelve, she sat with her feet buried in the sand with the salty water of the ocean lapping over her ankles. It was halfway through summer, her skin positively tanned, her black hair lightened slightly from the constant sun.

Next to her Juyeon mimicked her position, leaning on her palms. The sun set above them bathing the ocean in a fiery glow of oranges and yellow.

“Do you know what you want to do when you’re older?” Juyeon had asked. The muggy heat of the air always had a way of bringing sentimentality out of someone.

Yeoreum had just hummed. At twelve, there were no real concerns for the future. Just the then and now, how the waves felt on her ankles, how the sand felt in her fingers.

“Not really,” she eventually responded. “My mom just tells me I can do whatever I want.”

Juyeon lifted a hand and watched the grains trickle out of her palm. “I think I want to be an idol,” she’d said when her hand had emptied.

At twelve, filled with childhood innocence and no real concerns for the future, Yeoreum had told her she should do it. That she’d be good at it. The sun had set low by that point, the fire dampened to a mellow glow.

The end of that summer came with Juyeon hugging her as tight as she had always done, and a promise she would try her best in her auditions.

At the end of summer the year after, Juyeon left her with a letter, and a promise she would do her best as a trainee.

The summer after came with no goodbyes.

And then now,

Eight years since the last time they saw each other. Fifteen years since they first met at the beginning of summer. The music roars loudly in her ears. Son Juyeon looks exactly the same and completely different all at the same time.

She’s born to be on stage, Yeoreum thinks. The spotlights shine orange and yellow, and Eunseo dances like there’s fire thrumming in her veins, sings like it’s all she’s ever known.

At the start of spring, Seoul brings her twenty-two year old Eunseo, hair dyed grey, whose eyes crinkle intro crescents at the cheers of her fans, on top of the world.

-

Nothing happens after Yeoreum has her life changing discovery during the first five minutes of the concert. She spends half of it in a daze, the other half committing this new Son Juyeon to memory.

It’s somewhat anticlimactic but Yeoreum is not a romanticist like Dayoung. She’s not expecting stars to fall from the stars and the moonlight to shine on her in the crowd, it’s been eight years, time has passed. She has a draft for her project due tomorrow and her midyear design proposal to start.

When they leave the concert Dayoung forces her to take selfies and photos of each other outside of the concert hall. Most are taken in front of the large crown built around the entrance way, some taken in front of large banners with Exy's face on them. Dayoung begs her to pose in front of an Eunseo version which she begrudgingly agrees to.

The photos aren’t that bad despite the evening light. Perks of being friends with a niche micro celebrity she guesses.

On the subway back home Dayoung asks, “So, Eunseo?” A grin plastered bright on her face despite Yeoreum’s closed eyes and airpods.

“What about Eunseo?” Yeoreum grunts.

“Do you like her? Is she your bias? What did you think of the concert? You’re giving me nothing here, Yeoreum-ah.”

Yeoreum waves her hand vaguely, slouches into her seat further. “She’s pretty. The concert was good.”

She airs enough on the side of genuine for Dayoung to move onto gushing about Exy for the rest of the trip back.

If later, under the comfort of her sheets and the darkness of her room, she searches up The Black Eunseo, that’s her own business.

-

For all Dayoung and Yeonjung say otherwise, Yeoreum is not actually incompetent when it comes to social media. If anything she finds the insinuation offensive; her instagram is doing fine.

She just, doesn’t use it very often.

She’s not like Dayoung, who has a ridiculous amount of tiktok and instagram followers thanks to her… charming personality, or like Yeonjung, who has mastered the art of going viral for her singing and has a dedicated following thanks to her musicals.

yeolum_e exists for the sole purpose of posting bimonthly collections of photos she’s taken sporadically, for liking Dayoung and Yeonjung’s posts whenever they ask her to, and for apparently, internet stalking celebrities when she’s shitfaced drunk on the couch of her apartment.

Actually,

“Does it count as internet stalking if they’re k-pop idols?” She asks Dayoung and Yeonjung who are busy grumbling at each other over who gets to eat the last piece of fried chicken.

Yeonjung is the one to peer up at her from the floor, and Dayoung makes a noise of victory around the chicken that has not so elegantly been shoved into her mouth.

“Ah, please chew with your mouth closed.” Yeoreum groans.

“Sorry.” She’s not. “And no. Hasn’t everyone obsessed over an idol’s instagram at some point?”

“I haven’t?” Yeonjung says from where she’s opening another bottle of soju. They’re three, four? in already, the other empty bottles discarded somewhere unknown. Yeoreum just hopes they haven’t spilled under her couch.

“Don’t you have Nam Dawon’s notifications on?”

“I appreciate her from a musical perspective! She’s a good singer!” Yeonjung manages to sputter out. Yeoreum eyes the bottle she’s waving around with distrust.

Dayoung cackles. “You find her hot, don’t lie.”

“I can appreciate her from a visual perspective too.”

“You cried when she released her last song because she was so pretty–” Yeonjung attempts to lunge for Dayoung, only managing to whack the top of her knee on the coffee table instead.

“Dyeong-ah, the soju.”

Yeoreum makes grabby hands at it from the couch so Yeonjung remembers she’s holding it in her hands and doesn’t end up tipping it all over her lovely, recently vacuumed and cleaned, carpet.

She’s handed a shot, positively gags when she downs it. “Yeonjung, seriously, why did you have to open the pomegranate one?”

“I did?”

There’s a hiss from in front of her. “I did. Oh, fuck me. Why did you buy the red flavor?”

Yeoreum’s head spins from the overwhelmingly sweet shot. “It came in a pack!” She flops back down onto her back, throws an arm over her eyes as she pats around underneath her for her phone.

“Gross. That shit tastes like medicine.” Dayoung grunts, stumbling to her feet to hunt around Yeoreum’s kitchen. “Yeoreum, do you have beer? I want to make somaek.”

Yeonjung chortles when she whacks the side of her hip on an end table.

“Um,” Yeoreum scrunches her face. “Maybe? Check the fridge.” She says. And then, “Is that a good idea?”

“Yes? It’s not like we’re not already drunk.”

Yeonjung springs up as gracefully as someone inebriated can. “Somaek! I’ll help.”

“Don’t hit the table–” Yeoreum tries before there’s a groan from across the room and the sound of someone laughing hard enough to fall to the floor.

Yeoreum snorts at the ridiculousness of the scene unfolding in front of her; two grown women writhing around on her hardwood floor. When Yeonjung finally manages to trip her way into the kitchen, she returns to her previous entertainment: scrolling through eeunseo._.v.

“Ah, shit!” She exclaims, sitting up with a jolt before promptly flopping back down when her head starts spinning aggressively. “Oh my head.”

When she squints blearily at the direct message screen she managed to open on instagram, she relaxes when she realises all she had done was send a string of gibberish to Juyeon’s account.

“What happened?” Yeonjung yells from the kitchen. Yeoreum looks up to see them attempting to open a beer bottle with their bare hands.

She staggers to her own feet to help them out. “Nothing. I thought I had accidentally messaged someone on instagram but it just went to an idol.”

“Oh. At least they won’t see. What did you send?”

Yeoreum pulls the bottle opener off the fridge. Has to pause in the middle of the kitchen so her head stops spinning. “I keysmashed. I think my phone got caught under my hands.”

“It would be so funny if whoever Yeoreum messaged actually saw it,” Dayoung snickers from where she’s busy pouring beer after prying the bottle opener out of Yeoreum’s hand.

“Hey, you’re getting most of the beer on my counter.” Yeoreum huffs.

Dayoung shoves a finished glass of somaek into her hands. “I don’t care. Clean it up later. Let’s drink!”

-

Yeoreum is not a sentimental person. That might be a partial lie. Yeoreum tries her best not to spend her time on sentimentality.

What she means:

Yeoreum prefers taking logical approaches to her life. Learn a dance starting from the first verse, then the chorus, then the bridge. When designing a building, start from the foundations, draw the sketch and then the outline, glue the model together afterwards. Step-by-step.

Compartmentalise your emotions. Keep them to the side. Items can be rebought, if it comes to it.

That being said; Yeoreum keeps a photo with her. She keeps it in her wallet, kept it in her previous wallet, and the wallet before that one too.

Two girls no older than fourteen underneath the shade of the trees around them, barefooted in the sandy grass, arms hooked around each other. The smaller one has her cheeks puffed out with her brows furrowed. The taller one, yet to grow into the lankiness of her limbs, has a grin plastered on her face, eyes turned upwards into crescents.

The photo has been folded and creased so often the ink has rubbed away at the bends. The colour has dimmed over the years. One time Dayoung had asked her, who is that?

And Yeoreum had told her, a person who was important to me.

Eight years later, and there was no real reason for Juyeon to remember her. Yeoreum wondered sometimes what sort of memories Juyeon has about her, if she thinks about the start of summer in Jeju-do as often as she did, sometimes.

There’s no real reason for Yeoreum to hold onto her hazy summer memories with Son Juyeon, should leave it in her childhood and in the worn photograph in her wallet.

And yet–

Yeoreum wakes up holding onto a photograph. Her mouth is dry and her tongue feels like it takes up the entire back of her throat. Her head pounds. There’s a weight lying across her calves, and another sprawled across her stomach.

Moving takes effort. Opening her eyes and being greeted with Dayoung’s crusty blonde hair practically in her mouth takes effort. Floundering her hand on the bedside table to carefully put away the photo and grab her phone takes effort.

When she manages to angle her phone around Dayoung’s head in a way where she can actually see the screen, she’s greeted with more notifications then she expects given that most of the time her messages come from Dayoung and Yeonjung.

There are a handful of messages from her mom asking if she wants to come see Yeolmu tomorrow, one from her brother asking if she could buy him something, a few from some classmates asking about homework, and then some reminders from her calendar about due dates and classwork.

And then one from instagram. Or a few, technically.

[yeolum_e]: eeunseo._.v has sent you a message.

It takes decidedly less effort for Yeoreum to loudly squawk her way into a sitting position. There are long whines from Dayoung and Yeonjung as they lament the movement of their pillow.

She blinks at her screen a few times. Rubs at her eyes with her fists. The notifications don’t seem to go anywhere, so it’s safe to assume they’re not a strange hangover hallucination.

yeolum_e
ㅐㅇ로로ㅗㅓ휘ㅠㅎㅇㄴ소ㅗㄹ
ㅇ아ㅏㅚㅣㅎ
[voice message]

Yeoreum flounders again for her earpods, relistens to whatever voice message she managed to accidentally send last night.

“Yah, Yeoreum-ah, do you have any beer? Let’s make somaek.”

“Maybe? Check the top cabinets. Is this really a good idea?”

“Oh somaek! I’ll help!”

“Dyeong-ah, don’t hit the table-”

[a loud crash. raucous laughter in the distance. giggles close to the microphone.]

cute ㅋㅋ is what Juyeon sends, annoyingly casual.

this is my lee yeoreum right?
send a message when you wake up ^^
drink water and take painkillers first!!

Yeoreum has to wonder if The Black have social media managers; she finds it incredibly difficult to believe Juyeon would be allowed to respond back to a random account that may or may not be an old friend from childhood.

She probably isn’t. Apparently she has anyway.

-

She does what Juyeon tells her to do. Extracts herself carefully from the tangle of limbs that is Dayoung, Yeonjung, and herself, fills three glasses of water and takes some ibuprofen while scouring her kitchen to see if she has enough ingredients for haejangguk.

Dayoung wakes up twenty minutes afterwards. Yeonjung a minute or two later. Yeoreum has a hood over her head as she stirs the soup on the stove.

“There’s ibuprofen and water next to you,” she tells them when they slump over the counter, and receives two noncommittal grunts in response. She flicks them both on the top of their heads.

Somehow, she manages this and her hangover all while maintaining a string of messages with Juyeon.

yeah this is your lee yeoreum she sends, alongside a selfie with her face scrunched and the hood pulled tight around her face. its been a while ㅎ sorry for accidentally messaging you drunk

She sticks her tongue out in thought. i wouldn’t have expected you to respond ㅋㅋㅋ

ur still cute ㅎㅎ she receives not long later. And then, no but i would have responded
its you ^^

Yeoreum had stared at that message for a stupid amount of time and almost let the soup boil over. It doesn’t help that Juyeon distracts her again, asking for her kakaotalk under the excuse that instagram is difficult to message on.

“Yeoreum-ah,” Someone moans from behind her. “Stop looking at your phone and finish the haejangguk.”

Yeoreum sends a pointed look at Dayoung, that she can’t see with her head still buried in the crook of her elbow. “You’re not even helping.”

“I would fuck it up.”

Yeonjung makes a muffled noise of agreement next to her.

“I told you the somaek was a bad idea,” Yeoreum says, before reluctantly turning her phone off.

-

A question:

How do you reconnect with a childhood friend you haven’t seen in close to a decade and care almost too much for, who is now an idol with enough fans to sell out a whole concert hall and then some? What do you do when you want to say, i miss you, i think i’ve been missing you?

Did you miss me too? How have you been, all this time?

An answer:

Juyeon becomes a constant afterwards. Since Yeoreum’s accidental drunken incident, they start trading messages frequently, anything and everything at any given point in a day. It’s not enough to make up for lost time, never enough, but it’s a start in reshaping the Juyeon of the past into the Juyeon of today.

What she learns is Juyeon is still abundant in her affection, still golden-retriever like in her behaviour. She learns that Juyeon likes sending selfies, photos in suits and heavy makeup during music video filming and photos in sweatpants and hoodies during dance practice. That she’s enrolled in university and studying theatre. That she enjoys doting on Yeoreum as much as she enjoys nagging at her to eat more and stop looking at her phone during class.

She learns that Juyeon loves performing and dancing more than almost anything. Learns that above all, she loves people, loves the people around her, sending Yeoreum countless anecdotes of Exy’s mishaps in the waiting rooms and dorm, stories of Bona and her as trainees, her first meeting with Seola.

A time, perhaps a week or so after they first start talking again, Yeoreum gets one of Juyeon’s contextless messages she likes sending when she returns after hours away at a schedule. did u know i talked abt you on a radio once? is all she sends. Yeoreum doesn’t get a clear response regardless of how many unnie’s she sends.

look it up ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ is all Juyeon says before she tells Yeoreum she has to go again.

Later that night, with her knees brought to her chest as she picks at the dregs of the tteokbokki she had ordered, she does. Opens her seldom used twitter account and types eunseo jeju into the search bar.

[“Does anyone have any interesting stories from before their debut?”

“Me.”

“Eunseo-ssi?”

“I don’t think I’ve told this one before.”

“If it isn’t funny…”

“It’s not funny, but it is interesting– oh, unnie don’t give me that look.”

“Sorry, sorry. Tell us then.”

“You know how some kids would always travel during the two month summer break?”

“Were you one of them?”

“Yeah. My family would go to Jeju-do every break–”

“Jeju? Are you rich? You should buy me more stuff.”

“Sorry Bona-unnie, but, can I tell the story? Thank you. We started going when I was eight, and we would stay in a family friend’s house in this small local town close to this really pretty beach. During those summers, there was another family that would also come and stay nearby.”

“Oh, you’ve told us this. This story is sad more than it is interesting.”

“It’s not sad. There was… this family had a daughter who was a year younger than me. She was so cute, even when we were both small. We basically became instant friends. We would see each other every summer and we became really close. I think I would tell her everything.”

“Sorry Eunseo-ssi, you said this wasn’t sad? It’s starting to sound sad.”

“It’s not sad! Anyway, I would always look forward to summer so I could get to see her. I think we knew each other for… seven years? Eight? I’m not sure. Even if it was only two months a year she was practically one of my closest friends.”

“You make it sound like you’re not friends.”

“Well, when I got into Starship I couldn’t travel anymore. I was fifteen the last time I got to see her and neither of us had phones so we lost contact. But, she was the reason I became a trainee in the first place.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She was the first person I told about wanting to be an idol and she told me to do it. When you’re a kid, you’re kind of easily influenced by what your friends say, right?”

“Right. If I didn’t have Seola-unnie next to me cheering me on I probably would have given up.”

“Hey, this is my story?”

“Sorry.”

“This unnie… anyway, yeah. She gave me the confidence to audition and is one of the reasons I got to be The Black’s Eunseo.”

“I told you it was more sad than interesting.”

“Then, Eunseo-ssi, do you want to send a message to your friend here?”

“Mm… I don’t want to say her name… oh! To my Summer, if you hear this, it’s been a long time, right? Even still, I miss you! I hope wherever you are, you’re happy and well. Let’s meet again soon okay? I love you~”]

-

“Your Summer?” Yeoreum asks when Juyeon picks up her video call. She’s lying stomach down in her bed, chin perched on the backs of her hands with her phone propped up on the headboard.

Juyeon grins widely. Her hair is now dyed an ashy black, tied up behind her head. Yeoreum figures out she’s in her dorm given she can hear T.V. noise in the background despite Juyeon’s headphones.

“It was smart! And cute. Your name is literally summer, so I just said it in english.”

Yeoreum huffs, but out of fondness more than anything. “Your Summer?”

“Hey, aren’t you my summer?” Juyeon sticks her lips out slightly in a pout, bringing the phone close enough Yeoreum’s entire screen is just her face.

“I guess so. What if I was dating someone?”

“I wouldn’t have known if you were dating someone or not,” Juyeon says before cocking her head. “Wait, were you? Are you?”

“How long ago was the radio?”

“Um… a year ago? A year and a half? I can’t remember, but something like that.”

Yeoreum mulls over her answer. Moves one hand to prop her chin in it, tilting her head sideways a little. “Not right now. During that radio I was though.”

Juyeon pulls the phone back away from her face. Watches Yeoreum thoughtfully, for a second. “When did you break up?”

“Late last year,” Yeoreum can’t help the giggle that spills past her lips. “Unnie, your expression is so funny. It wasn’t a bad breakup, stop frowning.”

“Hey! You got all sombre on me. What was I meant to think?” Juyeon whines.

“Sorry, it was kinda funny.”

Juyeon grumbles something incoherent. “Not funny. I thought I was going to have to beat a guy up.” She fiddles with the loose strands of her hair. “Was … he good to you at least?”

“She was. We just didn’t work out.”

Yeoreum finds herself wishing she could read the spread of emotions that wash over Juyeon’s face afterwards.

“What the hell,” Juyeon breaths out as she moves from sitting to lying down. It almost sounds like a sigh of relief. “You know, you keep surprising me. I really wish we could have kept in touch.”

“Me too. But, unnie,” Yeoreum rolls over so that she’s echoing Juyeon’s position, holding her phone up above her head. “I only found out you were an idol two months ago because Dayoung made me go to your concert. You’re just as surprising.”

“You went to our concert?” Juyeon asks, loud enough that Yeoreum scrunches her face up from the attack on her ears.

“Who went to our concert?” A voice cuts in before Yeoreum can say anything. There’s suddenly a blurred shape on the screen and a loud groan as someone sprawls across Juyeon.

“Unnie go away-”

The camera feed shakes, and the audio quality changes as headphones get pulled out of the jack. Eventually a face pops into Yeoreum’s screen.

“Hey, Juyeon-ah, is this who you’re texting all the time?” Bona asks, clearly unperturbed by the pained whines from underneath her. “Hi,” she says, bringing the phone screen closer as if to inspect Yeoreum. “I’m Jiyeonie~”

Yeoreum giggles slightly and Bona positively coos at her.

“You’re so cute,” Bona pats the side of her, Juyeon’s stomach, still ignoring the fraught attempts to push her off. “I get why you always respond to her and not us now.”

“Ah, unnie get off me,” Juyeon grunts.

“But I want to see your friend?”

“You can see Yeoreumie another time!” There’s a struggle from underneath Bona, and Yeoreum can’t help her laughter, finding the whole scenario unfolding on her phone screen absurd.

“Please try not to kill Juyeon-unnie.” She says in tandem with a distant, strangled noise of agreement.

“Even her voice is cute– hey, Juyeon-ah, stop moving–” The feed shakes again before the screen tumbles somewhere, giving Yeoreum a view of the roof and the muffled sounds of a scuffle.

Eventually Juyeon’s disgruntled face reappears on the screen.

“Unnie…” Yeoreum says while stifling her laughter. “Your hair is a bit…”

Juyeon peers at the phone, readjusting her hair in the camera. She gives up after a second. “It’s okay, I’m still pretty right?”

“Your face is in magazines, I don’t think you need me to tell you.”

“Yeah, but I want you to tell me.” Juyeon pouts again, and Yeoreum thinks the puppy dog eyes combined with her birdnest hair is a ridiculous visual. She takes a screenshot.

“I should sleep,” she hums in lieu of an answer. “I have a morning class.”

“Okay,” Juyeon says, before somehow wrangling Yeoreum into another conversation. They don’t hang up until her eyes start drooping and her voice becomes more slurred than normal.
-

Half a month later The Black make their comeback.

Yeoreum’s in the studio working on a model when it gets released, and only remembers thanks to Dayoung’s freak out in their group chat.

And, perhaps the notifications she has on for their twitter account, but mostly Dayoung.

She takes a break from hunching over the table and tediously gluing a million parts together to pull out her laptop. Stretches her shoulders while the video loads, and presses play.

Kiss Your Lips is everything she expects from The Black, sultry and smooth with a powerful dance she itches to learn, though she hasn’t danced for a while. It’s good. Eunseo looks good.

She spends the music video wearing a multitude of suits, some with shirts and ties, some where it’s just a crop top showing off her unfair physique. Yeoreum thinks she looks unnecessarily attractive.

She replays the video and pauses on one of her solo shots, before taking a photo and composing a message to Juyeon. you look pretty is all she sends in the end.

She doesn’t expect a response instantly, she’s grown used to Juyeon disappearing for hours at a time before reappearing at ungodly times thanks to her job, so she’s slightly surprised when her phone lights up not long later.

yeoreum-ah ㅜㅜ thank you… it means a lot from you

It’s stupid how the warmth spreads through her chest then. How she smiles as if on instinct reading Juyeon’s message, having fully expected a humorous response instead of the warm one she receives.

Yeoreum decides she doesn’t really want to think about what any of that means.

-

“I’m screwed.”

“You’re not. Stop being so pessimistic.”

“I’m screwed.”

Dayoung sighs loudly. Yeoreum is currently bent over her dining table, head resting in the crook of her elbows as she mopes. Yeonjung is busy eating the chicken they’d ordered while Yeoreum complains.

She gets prodded in the side of the head, and is forced to look up at a surprisingly sympathetic Dayoung.

“Just tell her you like her, what’s the worst that can happen?”

Not so sympathetic.

Yeoreum leans back, letting her head roll on the top of her chair. “I can’t just tell her.”

As it turns out, Yeoreum had ended up thinking about it. She didn’t really mean to, or want to for that matter, but when she caught herself smiling just seeing a string of yellow notifications, felt her chest warm when Juyeon would update her on the mundane parts of her day, it become one of those annoying inexplicable realisations you have at three-am in the morning.

She’d tried pushing it to the side and burying it where hopefully time would let it pass, but as she’s come to learn over the past five years, nothing makes it past Im Dayoung.

It’s Yeonjung’s turn to sigh. She gets a plate of chicken pushed in front of her. “Why not?” she asks kindly, ever the more reasonable one between her and Dayoung. Sometimes.

Yeoreum lifts a finger. “Firstly, she could date anyone she wants. There’s no reason for her to like me back.”

“You literally look like Taeyeon, Yeoreum. Half of our high school had crushes on you even though I’m pretty sure you only said ten words total to anyone that wasn’t me or the teachers.”

She sends a look to Dayoung who holds her hands up in surrender. She lifts a second finger.
“Secondly, I don’t want to ruin our friendship.”

Dayoung snorts incredulously. She thinks that’s fair.

But when she’s only just gotten Juyeon back, it’s not something she can, or wants to, risk.

“That’s a good way to drive yourself crazy,” Yeonjung says.

“Then I’ll drive myself crazy.” She stabs her fork into one of the pieces of chicken, shoving it into her mouth.

-

Juyeon gets a couple days off a week after her promotions start. She tells Yeoreum she wasn’t meant to, but that there was a scheduling clash and then some cancellations, and so their management had just given up and opted to give them a small break.

what are you gonna do? Yeoreum had asked. Juyeon hadn’t had much time to rest since they’d regained contact, so she was genuinely curious as to what she got up to in her spare time.

lets do something together~ is what she gets as a response, however.

The thing is, with most of their conversations being contained within the 70 x 150 mm dimensions of her phone, she has no idea what to expect seeing a twenty-two year old Juyeon up close in the flesh.

The things she knows:

Juyeon is unreasonably pretty. Juyeon works out. Juyeon has really nice collarbones Yeoreum may or may not find herself looking at when she gets sent selfies in her stage outfits. Juyeon has apparently grown much taller.

What she doesn’t know:

“You’re so short?” Is what she’s greeted with when she opens the door to her apartment. Juyeon’s wearing a loose t-shirt tucked into a pair of jeans and an undone button up pulled up to her elbows, and Yeoreum learns very quickly her collarbones are prettier in person. As is her face, now matured from adulthood.

And that she’s much taller than she was eight years ago. They’ve always had a height discrepancy, even when they were barely older than ten, but Juyeon clearly had a growth spurt Yeoreum didn’t.

“Unnie,” She whines, grabbing a cap from the entranceway. “That’s the first thing you say to me?”

Juyeon just laughs, slinging an arm around Yeoreum’s shoulder as she leaves the apartment. “Sorry. I knew you were small, but your pictures made me think you’d have grown a little taller.”

Yeoreum pouts. Pushes Juyeon away, who makes a noise of complaint. “It’s not my fault you’re a giant and Dayoung’s good at taking pictures.”

“Okay, okay,” like a magnet Juyeon’s back at her side as they walk down the stairs. “What should I have said?”

“I don’t know,” She sniffs. “Not that I’m short.”

“Then,” Juyeon says brightly. Skips in front of Yeoreum and leans down so that they’re eye level, forcing them to pause next to the entrance of her building.

“Ah, what the hell are you doing unnie?”

Juyeon just smiles widely. Yeoreum looks at her with suspicion. “You’re cuter than you are in your pictures,” she starts, poking Yeoreum’s cheek, who just attempts to bite the offensive finger. “You’re shorter–”

“You said that already.”

“And,” She pauses for a second, lets her eyes flicker over Yeoreum’s face, and Yeoreum has to wonder if being– suave, for lack of a better term, is a part of becoming an idol. “Your face is much prettier in person.”

Yeoreum hopes the stare of abject horror is enough to counteract the blush spreading fast across her cheeks.

Juyeon returns to her full height with a proud grin. Yeoreum thinks she might be the death of her.

“Never mind,” she huffs, linking their arms together and forcing them out of the building. “Your first one was better.”

-

She learns very quickly that being with Juyeon comes with a lot of these probably bad-for-her-health confusing interactions.

Juyeon takes them to an art exhibition. It’s in a medium sized gallery a surprisingly comfortable walk away from where Yeoreum lives, surrounded by small cafes and bakeries interesting enough for Yeoreum to take note of.

“I’ve been wanting to go to this for a while,” Juyeon tells her when they arrive. “And also, design is part of your degree and I know you’re not an art major, but you seem to do a lot of drawing so…” she wrings her hands together, the unwavering confidence she’d had from the beginning faltering for the first time.

It’s endearing. Even under the black mask and cap hung low on her head, Juyeon’s nerves are palpable. Yeoreum can’t help the small smile that tugs at her lips. “Unnie,” she says in amusement. “It’s good. I like it.”

She holds out a hand for Juyeon to take so the girl doesn’t literally crumple from relief.

The actual exhibition only comprises a small part of the gallery so they take their time looking around everything. Well, Yeoreum does. Given the minimal amount of people around them, Juyeon’s taken off her mask to take photos in some of the dedicated photo spaces, and then some of the displays as they browse.

“Are you actually looking at anything?” Yeoreum asks her when she stops to read one of the placards. Juyeon’s standing as far behind her as their linked hands allow, absentmindedly rubbing at where her wrist meets her hand gently.

There’s a sound of an iphone camera going off. Yeoreum turns to look at her pointedly.

“Yeah? It’s pretty.” She says through a laugh, taking another photo before rejoining Yeoreum.

“How many of those am I in?”

“A few,” Juyeon tilts her head innocently. “You look pretty in them too.”

“Thanks.” Yeoreum replies dryly. She tugs on their hands so she can go look at another display – she saw a section earlier in the gallery displaying a collection of abstract building models that seemed interesting – when Juyeon keeps her firmly rooted in place.

“I mean it,” She says, giving Yeoreum pause. Her head is still tilted, but her eyes aren’t looking at her with the edge of faux puppy-dog innocence like before, something else Yeoreum can’t quite pick up on swimming in their depths.

She says it like there’s a deeper meaning Yeoreum’s not privy to. The sincerity is overwhelming.

And then she’s grinning and poking at her nose, eliciting a whine out of a speechless Yeoreum before she’s being dragged along like nothing happened.

So, it's a little bit confusing.

-

“You’re telling me you went on a date.” Dayoung says to her bluntly. Yeonjung blinks up from her phone at this, clearly hearing something she’s decided is worth her time.

“It wasn’t a date.”

Yeonjung’s still looking at them owlishly. “What happened?”

“The girl Yeoreum has a crush on, took her to an art exhibition because apparently she wanted to go but also because Yeoreum studies design, and then wouldn’t let her pay for anything, and then bought her a gift afterwards!” Dayoung says before Yeoreum can open her mouth. She stabs a finger at her accusingly. “That’s literally a date. You went on a date.”

“It wasn’t a date,” she tries weakly. “It was just a friend thing.”

“I don’t do those things for you guys.” Yeonjung says with a raised eyebrow.

“That’s because you don’t do anything unless it interests you,” Yeoreum responds. “I do those things for you two.”

They both ignore her.

“I’m on Dayoung’s side. I would consider that a date.” Dayoung makes a noise of victory, and gives Yeonjung a high five. “If it wasn’t, she definitely likes you back.”

“It wasn’t a date, and she doesn’t like me back.” Yeoreum says resolutely. She doesn’t have time to over-analyze all of Juyeon’s actions and bury herself in a fruitless sense of hope. She doesn’t have time to lose Juyeon to her uncontrollable, stupid feelings.

Juyeon might be able to have anyone she wants, but for Yeoreum, there’s only one Son Juyeon, only one summer best friend.

-

Yeoreum scratches at her head as she looks over the plans in front of her. A multitude of paper is scattered around her, rulers and pens lying on top. She sticks her tongue out in concentration. Cicadas chirp loudly outside as the afternoon closes into the evening.

A head drops onto her shoulder, breaking her out of her staring match with the offensive drawings. “What are you working on?”

“Lighting layouts,” she tells Juyeon. The smell of her own shampoo and body wash in someone else's skin drifts past her nose. “Do you really want to spend the rest of your last day off sitting in my apartment?”

“Are you kicking me out?” Juyeon responds through a grin.

Yeoreum leans back to give her a look, stretching out her shoulders and cracking her neck as she does. She wonders if Juyeon knows a good chiropractor.

“No just, you already spent most of your break with me.”

“We used to spend all of summer together,” Juyeon says as she flops down onto Yeoreum’s bed. “Two days is nothing.”

Yeoreum turns around fully in her chair, pulling her knees up to rest her head on. “We were kids, not adults.” Yeoreum wags a finger at Juyeon. “And not idols with three weeks off in a year.”

“But it’s nice spending time with you,” Juyeon says, voice bordering on petulant. She pauses her tantrum– Yeoreum has to wonder if there’s something about her bed that makes people sulky– to sit up straight, crossing her legs. “Do you have work to do?”

“No, I was just going over stuff while you showered.” Yeoreum rubs her palms together. “Are you hungry?”

“Does that mean I can stay?”

Yeoreum stands up, her back protesting as she does. God bless architecture. “Yeah. I’m going to cook.”

Juyeon scrambles off her bed to pull Yeoreum into a hug. “I could marry you,” she says through a laugh, her eyes turned up into small crescents. Yeoreum splutters something incomprehensible out of surprise.

“Unnie, you’re stupid.” She grumbles, detangling herself. “It’s just food.”

Juyeon ignores her, skipping out of her room and into the kitchen. Yeoreum finds it all objectively ridiculous.

She smiles anyway, padding into the kitchen behind her.

One of Juyeon’s mellow playlists plays through her speaker. There’s a comfortable silence as they work, occasionally broken up by Juyeon humming whatever’s playing or when Yeoreum asks her to taste something.

Yeoreum lets her help with chopping the vegetables when she makes a dramatic show of worry about how the knife is bigger than Yeoreum’s entire forearm. It’s not, but Juyeon knows her way around a kitchen well enough, so she doesn’t mind the help.

“Do you remember the last time we tried cooking something together?” Juyeon asks her, leaning against the stove counter as Yeoreum cooks the meat.

“When I was twelve?”

“Yeah,” Juyeon chuckles softly. “We almost burned your house down.”

“My great-grandma’s house technically,” Yeoreum says pointedly, though the sides of her mouth are tugged up. “My mom sent me to a cooking school when we got back to Seoul afterwards.”

“Because we almost burnt your holiday house down?”

Yeoreum makes a noncommittal noise, focused on opening the top cabinets to hunt for a certain definitely not msg at all seasoning. She has to tip-toe slightly when she finds it. Juyeon laughs at her, reaching over the top of her to help.

“Don’t laugh.” Juyeon just continues to softly. “The holiday house was only part of it,” she tells her, redirecting the conversation away from the sensitive topic of her height. “I wanted to audition for a dance academy, but my mom didn’t want me to. She made me go to cooking school for a month before I could.”

“You didn’t tell me you went to a dance academy?”

Yeoreum picks up one of the beef pieces and motions for Juyeon to open her mouth.

“I stopped during high school. Is it good?”

“Yes,” she says around the beef. “I can’t believe you haven’t shown any videos of you dancing.”

“I think my mom has them,” Yeoreum says breezily, lying. Juyeon makes a sound of disappointment, and Yeoreum turns to stare at her in shock. Or horror. “Unnie, did you just hing?”

Juyeon makes another noise through a pout. Yeoreum thinks it’s a lot like dealing with a sad puppy.

“Cheer up, unnie,” she says, turning off the stove.

They eat on the couch in front of her T.V. Mostly because there are parts of her cardboard model strewn across her dining table, and she would lose her mind if anything happened to it, and partly because she likes sitting close to Juyeon.

“How long can you stay?” She asks with slight trepidation when they’re done. She doesn’t bother moving the empty bowls away, leaving them on her coffee table. She’ll do the dishes later.

Juyeon leans into her shoulder, humming in thought. “Our manager wants us back at the dorm before two.”

“Two am is your curfew?”

“No,” Juyeon snorts. “We’re adults. We have to be at the salon at four.”

Yeoreum makes an o-shape with her mouth before checking the time. It’s only seven. “So we have… five hours?”

“Give or take,” Juyeon sits up. Looks at her curiously. “Why? Weren’t you trying to get rid of me earlier?”

“I wasn’t!” She says with a whine, crossing her arms. “I was being nice.”

Juyeon laughs loudly, in that way she does when she finds something unbelievably cute, and it makes Yeoreum slump into the couch deeper.

“I’m sorry.” Juyeon knocks Yeoreum’s shoulder with her own. “Why are you asking?”

Yeoreum pulls at the skin of her hands slightly. “Do you wanna watch something?”

“What do you have in mind?”

An uncharacteristically evil idea seeds itself into her mind, but Yeoreum thinks it’s karma for Juyeon being a pain in her ass earlier. She hops off her couch in a flurry. “Wait here.”

“Why,” Juyeon asks warily. “I don’t like that look on your face.”

Yeoreum ignores her in favour of grabbing her laptop from her room. Opens it next to the T.V, only projecting her screen when the first episode loads.

“Yeoreum-ah,” Juyeon looks at her with suspicion. Yeoreum just grins. Presses play before settling back down onto the couch.

There’s a momentary pause.

“We’re not watching Jinx.” Juyeon starts when she realises, attempting to scramble off the couch to stop the episode. Yeoreum pulls her back down.

“Unnie, please?”

Juyeon slouches with a huff. “Why would you want to watch Jinx!”

Yeoreum bites the tip of her tongue slightly, looking between the T.V. and Juyeon. “Do you actually not want to watch it?” She asks, standing up.

Juyeon looks at her thoughtfully for a second. Yeoreum starts moving to pause the episode, when it’s her turn to get pulled back down, landing less gracefully than Juyeon.

“It’s okay,” she says, more amused than anything now. “Let’s watch it.”

“Are you sure?”

Juyeon’s eyes just crinkle with a smile. “Yes, you’re missing everything right now.”

-

Juyeon’s drama is spectacularly frustrating.

Yeoreum spends most of the first episode making sure Juyeon isn’t uncomfortable, before she finds herself invested in the plot. As much as she possibly could be.

“No, what the hell?” She groans by the fourth episode. For the nth time. “He’s so stupid!”

By this point she’s drifted absentmindedly towards Juyeon, curled into her side. There’s an arm around her shaking in mirth.

“Unnie.” Yeoreum points at the screen as if it’s personally offended her. “Your character is insane too. Why did you kiss him!”

“Hey,” Juyeon laughs into the side of her head. “It’s not me. That’s Sekyung.”

Yeoreum waves her hand vaguely. “Wait, you study engineering?”

“Sekyung does! I think.”

Yeoreum hums. “Sekyung’s attractive.” She says, before the next stupid thing catches her attention. She whacks Juyeon on the shoulder. “Your boyfriend is stupid unnie. Seriously.”

“Ow, hey,” Juyeon complains, using her free hand to rub at her shoulder. “Why is Sekyung attractive and not me? I play her!”

“I never said you weren’t attractive,” Yeoreum replies with as much nonchalance as possible. She’d only realised what she’d said a second afterwards, and was not trying her best not to say something stupid, caught up in her emotions thanks to the drama. “Sekyung’s just less… puppy-dog like.”

“You’re saying Sekyung’s cooler than me.”

“Something like that,” Yeoreum replies, distracted again by the screen. “Wait, why does he have his ability again?”

Juyeon laughs again from above her. “Were you not paying attention?”

“No,” she grunts. “I was too busy thinking about how much of an idiot he is.”

Juyeon just leans into her, her head resting on the side of Yeoreum’s own, letting the quiet fall on them again as they go back to watching. Yeoreum only breaks it to grumble about the plot.

“I don’t think I've ever seen anyone fight like that,” Yeoreum says to the air halfway into the sixth episode. To the air, because Juyeon has gone oddly quiet next to her. “Unnie?”

Juyeon blinks down at her, as if she was in thought. Looks at her with a strange expression.

“Do you really want to watch this?”

Yeoreum blinks back. “We’ve already watched six episodes… Do you want to stop?”

“No, just,” she turns back towards the screen. “Just wondering.”

It’s strange, and Yeoreum watches her carefully before looking back towards the screen herself. She doesn’t say anything else. Yeoreum finds herself gnawing at her bottom lip as she watches an on-screen Juyeon dance around her love interest.

An abnormal tension settles in the air after their brief conversation, Juyeon’s arm around her going slightly stiffer as the episode continues. She can see her thumb rubbing at the centre of her palm in the corner of her view.

When Yeoreum finally stops worrying about Juyeon enough to focus on the drama again, well, she supposes she can guess why Juyeon’s suddenly nervous. They’re at the end of the episode, Sekyung seated across from her love interest– Gyuhyeon? Gyuhan?– and trailing her fingers up his arm. Yeoreum can guess what’s about to happen from a mile away.

“Unnie,” she tries, aiming for airiness. Her stomach has twisted a little inside, and she can’t help but think watching a drama where her childhood friend and the person she has feelings for makes out with another actor for over a minute, might be a bad idea. “Have you never kissed anyone before?”

It’s a joke, an attempt to break the undercurrent of tension, but Juyeon just looks down at her quietly.

“Sekyung’s not meant to be good,” is her response.

“You’re the one acting.”

“I’m not Sekyung.” Juyeon says. She’s startlingly serious, and Yeoreum chews on her lip under the look she’s given. Juyeon’s eyes follow the movement.

Yeoreum only realises then how close they are, how she can see so clearly into the depths of Juyeon’s eyes, can feel her breath on her cheek. She stiffens slightly, alarm bells ringing.

“I know–”

“Do you want to know how I'd do it?”

Yeoreum doesn’t say anything. Just watches her, her brain still struggling to catch up. Before it can, Juyeon’s leaning in. There’s a gentle kiss on the edge of her lips, soft and overwhelming, and Yeoreum belatedly realises that she’s copying Sekyung in the drama.

Yeoreum’s heart pounds in her ears. Juyeon pulls back, eyes dancing over her face. The hand around her shoulders has come forward to close around the back of her neck, Juyeon’s other hand reaching up to cup her cheek. Yeoreum wets her lips. Juyeon doesn’t make any movement, just lets her eyes flicker down to her lips again.

And then she’s closing the gap between them properly.

-

The end of the semester comes and goes in a haze. Yeoreum becomes swamped with a million things during the final weeks of term, exams for her theory classes, unfinished models and designs she has to spend countless sleepless days working on, an out-of-date portfolio that takes up an equal amount of her time.

Sleep becomes a distant memory at some point, and during her rare meetings with Dayoung and Yeonjung she spends most of them complaining about how distressing it is that caffeine makes her sleepier.

Through it all, her and Juyeon’s messages almost come to a complete standstill.

It’s almost entirely her fault. Juyeon, who is overwhelmingly kind, had tried her best for a while, but seemingly picked up on Yeoreum’s stilted responses enough to have given up in the end.

She should have said no, back then, her apartment in the evening and Son Juyeon on her couch. Juyeon who had kissed her. Juyeon who had kissed her like it was the easiest thing in the world, and then continued with life like it was nothing.

A smart person would have talked about it. Yeoreum had opted to avoid Juyeon entirely.

She was good at that, burying her emotions until they became too much, except now she’s in the alcohol aisle of a GS25 sighing long and deep as she stares at the beer options. She shifts her feet. Pokes her tongue out slightly, her eyelids moving slowly from a lack of sleep.

Her final submission was made earlier in the day, and with Yeonjung and Dayoung’s final exams being tomorrow, she was in charge of buying the alcohol for their inevitable end of spring semester drinking party.

Yeonjung had asked for wine; Yeoreum had to remind her that any wine from a convenience store would be terrible, and she’s not about to take three buses and the subway to buy some when she hasn’t slept in close to fifty hours. Give or take.

She shifts on her feet again. Juyeon still lingers in the back of her mind. She really wants to go to sleep.

Decides that she probably should given she can hear Juyeon’s voice distantly, and if the sanity of her classmates were to be trusted, auditory hallucinations were a very real side effect of sleep deprivation.

She grabs a selection of beer she knows her friends won’t complain about, a few bottles of nice tasting soju, and then turns down the aisle to grab snacks.

“Yeoreum?”

She pauses, staring silently at the Juyeon standing at the end of the aisle. She wonders if auditory hallucinations can work in tandem with visual ones.

Juyeon cocks her head. Yeoreum rubs at her eye with the heel of her free hand. When Juyeon walks closer, she has to squat, dumping her basket to the ground with a loud plastic thud before pressing her fingers on her suddenly aching temples.

“Did you not want to see me that badly?” Yeoreum looks up at the voice, squinting slightly.

“I can’t tell if you’re real.” She says, being slightly dramatic, but she gets like this when she’s tired.

Juyeon crouches in front of, grabbing her wrists gently. “I’m real. Are you okay?” She says, pulling Yeoreum’s hands away from her face.

“I’m just tired.”

Juyeon’s brow furrows. “When was the last time you slept?”

“Um,” Yeoreum does the maths as quickly as her brain can. “Two and a half days ago?”

“And you thought it’d be a good idea to drink.” Juyeon says dryly.

“It’s not for today,” Yeoreum mumbles. The hands wrapped around her wrists have started small ministrations on her skin, and the exhaustion of everything has begun to set in, on the floor of a GS25 five bus stops away from her apartment.

She stares up into the fluorescent lights.

ludayoung

colder when the suns out, 3.4k, the we-knew-eachother-in-high-school one sided dislike fake dating au

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said:
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time


If Luda had a dollar for every time someone told her that, ‘mathematics is beautiful’, she might not be able to drop out of university and turn into a 24/7 homebody, but at the very least she’d probably be able to afford that cardigan she has favourited online. It’s not a sentiment she shares nor really understands. Maths is, at its core, the very bane of her existence.

She was twelve the first time she ever failed a test. She was twelve, the top of her class, feeling on top of the world—and then mathematics and their stupid rules around constants and the correct order of operations and whatever the hell SOHCAHTOA is came along, and suddenly Luda was looking at an A4 sheet of paper with an insulting 31% circled in red. The first problem was that she failed a test. The second problem was that she failed a test. Luda was twelve and smart and had never failed a test— let alone a test on elementary school trigonometry.

Luda didn’t cry but she did henceforth decide that maths was the worst subject to exist, ever.

This was not a belief unique to her—by the time middle school rolled around, maths was predictably almost everyones least favourite subject. Turns out Luda was not the only person with a personal vendetta against trigonometry.

A part of her thinks that if she were a magician she might go back in time and tell her younger self to copy Nam Dawon and go into music; focus on fine arts or study more humanities, or, at the very least, stop spending all her time at hagwon asking the teacher to run her through how to do basic algebra.

But she isn’t a magician, and she didn’t copy her best friend and focus on music—as much as she kind of wanted to—and instead, horribly, came to the conclusion that she sort of likes maths.

Maths is the worst subject to exist ever. This much she thought then and still thinks now. Maths has too many rules and too few explanations for anything that actually make sense; stops, at some point, only having one or two answers and instead changes into having infinite solutions; eventually becomes less solve this and more prove why this is true.

But mathematics is also controllable.

If Luda can’t work out a problem: there’s always a solution, no matter how long the damn proofs are. Unless you’re a freak and studying the most abstract of mathematical concepts, there’s almost always very little space for bias. Luda likes that. Likes that at some point, she will be able to get the answer right.

In middle school that culminated in hours working through several worksheets, pages long, before every test. In high school that became redoing the maths portion of every past exam and CSAT she had available until she understood how every question worked, got nothing wrong.

In university—well.

“I’m going to jump off a bridge,” Luda declares, slumping over the table.

In university, her strange penchant for most things STEM related resulted in a bachelors degree in physics after a year of flip flopping between either that or chemistry. It’s not a degree in maths, but probably the closest she’ll get to it without her parents scolding her for choosing to study a subject with pitiful employment opportunities.

And then after four years of endlessly tearing her hair out, for reasons unbeknown to her, she had made the wondrous decision to also study a master’s degree.

It’s that decision currently kicking her ass.

Yeoreum—her junior, current study partner, and who Luda proclaims to be her ‘favourite dongsaeng’—to her credit, barely acknowledges Luda’s outburst beyond looking mildly startled for a second.

“I should’ve chosen to study chemistry,” Luda continues solemnly. She picks her head up to stare forlornly at Yeoreum’s open notebook, filled with messy scrawls of different organic molecules alongside neat lecture notes, because Yeoreum is the type to hand write the slides instead of taking advantage of, like, Evernote. “You were so smart for majoring in chemistry, Yeoreum-ah. So smart.”

“Well,” Yeoreum starts, sitting up from where she’s hunched over to stretch her shoulders. “You can always do this work for me. I won’t stop you.”

“I haven’t done chem since first year,” Luda replies through a grimace. “The most I remember is probably the periodic table and—I don’t know—glucose? Maybe?”

Yeoreum looks at her expectantly. “What’s glucose’s molecular formula?”

“C… six? H— oh I don’t remember.”

“You got the carbons right at least.”

Luda drops her head back onto the cold wood. Unfortunately, the devastating reality is that she is not studying chemistry, and in fact should probably finish reading through the lecture slides her statistical mechanics professor posted. The only panacea to her post-grad troubles is that at least she doesn’t need to take as many exams.

Which is offset by her looming research project, but she’s pretending that doesn’t exist yet.

“Fighting, unnie,” she hears Yeoreum tell her lightly.

Only at some nondescript point later, it could have fifteen minutes or an entire millennia, Luda’s not exactly sure but she is leaning towards the latter, does she finally manage to peel her face off from where it’s glued to the desk to finish going through the egregiously long, fourty-seven page powerpoint.

In university, her determination to get everything right manifested mostly in all-nighters fuelled purely by dirt cheap americanos and energy drinks from the CU two blocks away from her apartment, while hoping if she simply stared at her computer hard enough for long enough the information would absorb itself into her mind.

She’s lucky in that Yeoreum was smart enough to book a study room in their university’s library this time around, meaning no one’s there to judge her when she has to physically keep her eyelids open with her fingers.

No one, that is, except for Son Juyeon choosing that exact moment to stride into the room.

“You look stupid, unnie,” she says blithely, entirely unbothered by the scowl sent her way. Luda tries incinerating the bottom strands of Juyeon’s hair with her eyes to disappointing failure. “Girlfriend,” she says, pressing a kiss to the top of Yeoreum’s head before slumping in the seat next to her. She shoots Luda finger guns. “Ex-girlfriend.”

Luda throws a paper ball at her. “Don’t say that,” she intones at the same time as Yeoreum.

“Sorry,” Juyeon responds, leaning on Yeoreum’s shoulder despite her protests of unnie, please, I’m studying, while sounding incredibly not-sorry. “Why does Luda-unnie look like she’s in a one of those Saw movie traps?”

“Statistical mechanics.”

“Hm. Gross.”

She tries her best for the next ten minutes or so to ignore Juyeon’s, for lack of a better term, loud presence, continuing to painstakingly slog through her homework. Typically Juyeon isn’t a bad study partner, she’s smart and dedicated and quieter than people expect, especially when focused, but considering Yeoreum’s been away visiting family for the past few days—well, Luda’s pretty sure Juyeon was a dog with separation anxiety in a past life.

Luda debates on whether or not to ask if Yeoreum brought headphones with her, before caving and opening League of Legends on her laptop. She figures she’s not going to get much work done with Juyeon across from her harassing Yeoreum into giving her attention.

“Oh right,” Juyeon exclaims suddenly, as Luda looks up from where she’s shit talking her team to see that Yeoreum too, has finally given in to Juyeon’s incessant nagging. Luda does not miss that part of their relationship. Not that she misses much at all, really. They always worked better as friends. “Luda-unnie. Are you busy next weekend?”

“Depends,” she hedges, eyeing Juyeon suspiciously.

Yeoreum yawns, nudging Juyeon up so she can prop her chin on her shoulder. “It’s not something bad,” she says lazily. “Sojung-unnie wants to have a drinking party since work has been successful, that’s all.”

This, in Luda’s opinion, actually did fall on the scale somewhere close to ‘something bad’. Regardless of whether it’s Sojung or not, she does not enjoy drinking parties in the slightest. She gets drunk too quickly off less than half a bottle of soju and then usually spends the rest of the night either trying not to throw up or angrily ranting about something until she passes out. A combination not fun for her or her reputation.

“Yeoreum’s not drinking,” Juyeon adds, as if she can sense Luda’s mental anguish. “If that helps. She has work on Sunday, so if you don’t want to drink you can just hang with her. It’s at Sojung-unnie’s apartment, so it’s not a big thing. Not that many people are coming. Just us and some of her close friends— and her cousin, I think,” she chews on her lips for a moment as Luda considers.

“Don’t guilt trip Luda-unnie,” Yeoreum interrupts as Juyeon goes to continue.

“I wasn’t going to!”

“Mm-hm,” Yeoreum hums, patting a pouting Juyeon’s thigh in consolation before turning to Luda. “Come if you want and if you’re not busy. It’ll be fun, and it’d be nice to have another sober person around, since Juyeon-unnie and Hyunjung-unnie both plan on drinking. I’m driving there as well so if you need a lift…”

“Hyunjung-unnie is going to drink,” is what Luda chooses to focus on, immediately finding that image hilarious. Luda is horrible at drinking. Kim Hyunjung is hysterically, even worse, and also incredibly entertaining to watch. “You should have lead with that. I knew I cleared out my phone storage for a reason.”

Yeoreum sends a blinding smile across the table, and Luda has the creeping suspicion she had that reaction planned. “Juyeon-unnie will katalk the details.”

“I will.” Juyeon claps her hands, seemingly very pleased with herself and what she’s achieved in the half-an-hour since she arrived. “Then, if you two are done, we should go get food. I want to try that hotpot place near the bakery.”

“What do you even mean if we’re done,” Luda grunts. “You were the one that interrupted us.”

Which, at that thought—

“Ah fuck, my League game!” Luda bursts out, jolting upwards and frantically slamming her fingers on her keyboard to wake her laptop up. She shoots a glare towards Juyeon who has the decency to look somewhat sheepish. The message telling her she was kicked out for being AFK means her rank is definitely doomed. “You owe me a coffee for this,” she deadpans. “This and the party. Two coffees. From that place that I like. And you’re paying for the hotpot.”

“I forgot how serious you take video games,” Juyeon mumbles, but acquiesces anyway.


*


Despite Luda’s best efforts to rack her brain for an excuse not to go, she still ends up at Sojung’s party.

She had tried her sister first, asking if she’d maybe want to get food Saturday evening. It was a long shot for sure, since her sister was an actually busy person with a life and a job and they only really ever met up when Luda decided she wanted to annoy Banggu for her mental health. But she didn’t think there was any harm in trying.

Unfortunately, her sister’s response was:

“No way. I have a date, I’m not ditching it to eat bad food with my younger sister.”

“You’re an ass,” Luda grunted, before hanging up and promptly ordering the cheapest tteokbokki she could find off the delivery app, which she’s reluctant to admit was, actually, really bad.

In her defense, she works at her part-time job maybe twice per week and spends the other five days playing League, PUBG with Dawon, and studying. Money for good tteokbokki does not grow on trees.

Her parents were next, and while her dad told her he had plans with his work colleagues, she was somewhat successful with her mom who, to Luda’s relief, pleasantly agreed.

This was immediately nullified by Juyeon texting her that she’d already told Sojung Luda was coming and to stop trying to wriggle out of it.

“How did you even know,” Luda huffs when she climbs into the backseat of Yeoreum’s car that Saturday evening. “I almost got my mom to take me to this restaurant in Itaewon before you texted me,” she pouts sadly at that, to which Juyeon rolls her eyes. “You don’t get it, she told me it’d be her treat for ‘all the hard work I was doing’ and the restaurant looked so nice.”

“You are aware that you’re terrible, right?” Juyeon deadpans as Yeoreum laughs from the driver’s seat. “Anyway, I only knew because the last three times I tried getting you to come with me to a party, you magically spawned three dates with god-knows who, since we’re your only friends.”

Luda purses her lips. “One of those times I really did have a meeting with my professor,” She responds, choosing to ignore the latter half of Juyeon’s sentence. She has friends. She has plenty of friends. They just… happen to always be busy.“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“You had a meeting for the entire evening?”

She shrugs. “Sometimes they run long.”

In reality that particular meeting lasted about twenty minutes, not that she thinks Juyeon needs to know. Luda has every intention of continuing to shirk all of her friend’s parties, and only drink alcohol after either all her exams are over, or it becomes the preferred coping method for university shy of literally just dying.

At least Yeoreum kept true to her promise of being Juyeon’s designated driver. Luda’s delighted to have another sober person to make fun of all the drunk people with.

“By the way,” Luda says a few minutes into the drive, leaning forward to poke her head in-between the two front seats. “What exactly is Sojung-unnie celebrating? No one ever told me.”

“One of her demos for a girl group got accepted,” Yeoreum explains. “For the company she works with the most. Starship, I think?”

“Normally Sojung-unnie just writes lyrics for their boy groups, so she’s excited about this one,” Juyeon tacks on while Luda nods her head slowly.

Sojung was someone she met by virtue of being Dawon’s friend. Which is honestly how a lot of her friendships are formed, since it’s easier to just have other people introduce her rather than go out of her own way to make friends. The consequence of that, however, is that Luda doesn’t really know much about Sojung outside of that she’s a producer, and usually available for Luda to bug into getting food with when her usual companions aren’t free.

“Sojung-unnie doesn’t mind that I’m coming, right?” Luda asks, suddenly a little self-conscious.

Juyeon just looks at her quizzically. “No? She told us to ask you if you were going to come. She said you left her on read twice, so.”

Luda flushes a little bit, slumping back into her seat. That’s—a little embarrassing. “Whoops,” she mutters, having opened her phone to see that she, did in fact, leave Sojung on read twice a few weeks ago.

She pointedly pays zero mind to Juyeon’s loud chortle.

It doesn’t take them much longer to reach Sojung’s apartment building, and by the time Juyeon’s shoved her whole face into the intercom camera—probably to Sojung’s chagrin and a lot to Luda’s amusement—and let inside, she’s coming to realise Juyeon wasn’t kidding when she said it wasn’t a big thing.

Sure, there’s soft music filtering through a speaker when they file inside with their greetings, and more people inside than Luda would probably manage to scrape up if it was her playing hostess, but it’s otherwise not even close to the painful chaos she’d expected.

Most of Sojung’s guests are either milling around in the kitchen, nursing beers that have been spread out on one of the counters, or chatting in front of the T.V. and couch. The balcony doors have been opened to let out some of the stuffy indoor heat, and Luda immediately clocks it as an escape point when it does eventually dissolve into a drunk mess.

“We’re waiting on a few stragglers to get here so we can buy food and things,” Sojung tells them when she meets them at the entranceway. “Which will be a pain in the ass to order, but oh well. Jiyeon said she’s covering. I guess just relax until then, drink something, harass Yoo Yeonjung to take the subway quicker.”

“Jiyeon-unnie really agreed to pay?” Juyeon asks, slightly sceptical. Luda, for one, is practically vibrating in anticipatory glee. She has every intention on ordering the most expensive menu she can think of to make up for all the terrible junk food she’s been ingesting, and also to annoy Jiyeon.

“She owes me,” is all Sojung cryptically says.

What Luda notices when Sojung leaves them and she’s left to people watch, Juyeon having immediately started to chat to someone close by and Yeoreum disappearing somewhere into the apartment, is that she actually recognises most of the people inside. It honestly shocks her a little bit. She sees Hyunjung talking to Park Soobin on the couch, spots Dawon next to the bookshelf nursing a glass of wine with the aforementioned Jiyeon.

In fact, it’s more than she realises, someone in the crowd of people in the kitchen catching her eyes until she’s startled stone-still.

Oh, she really should have tried harder to avoid coming. Sojung’s song be damned.

It’s the blonde hair she notices first. Wild and bright amongst the muted blacks and browns of her friends, golden yellow searing into Luda’s vision as if she’d just stupidly stared straight at the sun. It’s not the hair that throws her off, precisely. People dye their hair. Yeoreum and Juyeon have both had a colourful array of different styles over the past few years.

But it’s the loud voice she hears accompanying it, more familiar to Luda than it really should be, cleaving through the chatter to pierce straight into her ears. Like a terrible demon back from the dead six years later to reap it’s revenge, or—something. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. Hearing Im Dayoung’s voice was as familiar as doing math again after a break and still knowing that one plus one equals two, except, with ten levels of added annoyance simmering in ways under her skin she’d forgotten it could.

Luda is suddenly regretting every decision in her life that lead to this moment.

“Juyeon-ah,” she grits out, smacking the other girl in the arm several times to get her attention.

“Ow— what?” Juyeon turns with a jolt, rubbing sadly at her bicep. “Unnie, what is it?”

“Why is Im Dayoung here?”

Juyeon blinks at her. “Dayoung-ah? She’s one of Sojung-unnie’s cousins. The one I mentioned would be coming,” She opens and shuts her eyes a couple more times, as if in disbelief. “You know Dayoung?”

“Dayoung is Sojung-unnie’s cousin?” Luda hisses, ignoring Juyeon’s question.

“You didn’t know?”

Which, well. Maybe if Luda remembered to respond to Sojung’s messages and went to her parties without being forced to and actually talked to the older girl like friends do, she would have already known that Dayoung’s her cousin.

She doesn’t want to admit to that though, so instead she just bitterly bites out,“What, am I supposed to have Sojung-unnie’s entire family tree memorised?”

Yeoreum chooses that moment to return, looking more than mildly startled at Luda as she passes a beer to Juyeon. “What’s wrong with her?” She asks slowly.

“Um. I told her Dayoung is Sojung-unnie’s cousin and she freaked,” Juyeon murmurs back. Luda doesn’t really appreciate them talking like she’s not there, so she sends them both a withering glare in the hopes they’ll go back to being her kind and lovely dongsaengs again. “Unnie,” Juyeon continues, disappointingly unperturbed. “You didn’t answer my question. You know Dayoung?”



Truthfully, Luda has very little reason to hold any sort of animosity towards Dayoung.

finger breaks into blossom, 1.6k, married in vegas au except i never got to the vegas part so its just luda moping about being single for 2k

I look across the table and think
(fiery with love)
Ask me, go on, ask me
to do something impossible,
something freakishly useless,
something unimaginable and inimitable.


- Norman MacCraig, Incident




The day Lee Luda’s life changes for the worst is the day Son Juyeon calls her and says, “come ring shopping with me.”

“What?”

“Ring shopping,” she repeats, as if it makes it any more clearer than the first time. Luda, who is normal and does not randomly call people at eight am in the morning to go ring shopping, is acceptably still confused, in her opinion. “I have the day off. I want to go look at rings, but I need someone else to give me an opinion, so. Come ring shopping with me.”

“Why are you—” Luda pauses. Rubs the heel of her palm into her eye, because it’s eight am, and like a normal person she’s still in bed. “What?”

“…Unnie,” Juyeon starts slowly, voice drawn out like she’s talking to a toddler. “Yeoreumie and I have been together for seven years. We share bank accounts. She eats brunch with my mom more than I do. We have two dogs. Etc. Why do you think I want to go ring shopping?”

It is eight am. Luda was at the lab until three am the night before doing what all thirty-something year olds do, which is running the same experiment twenty times over until her brain felt like dissolving. Her room is currently pitch black and the light from her phone is making her feel like someone is busy sucking all the moisture out of her eyes.

Naturally, her only response is, “What?”

“Ah, unnie seriously!” Juyeon explodes. “I want to propose! To Yeoreum! Honestly, I thought you were supposed to be smart. What time did you go to sleep last night?”

“Late?” Luda hedges. She hears Juyeon sigh through the line, and has the unfortunately vivid mental image of Juyeon pinching the bridge of her nose. She rolls over guiltily to flick her bedside lamp on. “Sorry, sorry. I’m awake. I’m happy for you. It was about time.”

“I haven’t even proposed yet?”

“I’m happy you want to propose,” Luda huffs, sitting up. “Like I said, about time.”

“Right!” Juyeon chirps. “So get up, you’re coming ring shopping with me. I’ll buy you coffee and food.”








Okay, so. Luda’s being slightly dramatic. Her life doesn’t take a steep nosedive into miserable territories that day specifically, it just happens to act as a precursor to the day where everything and anything that could go wrong, goes wrong.

Really, that day was very lovely, in fact. Luda got to eat food she didn’t need to pay for, and had a joyous time following a hilariously antsy Juyeon around through jewellery shops, where her opinion amounted to basically nothing, because she’s Lee Luda and has never been in a relationship long enough for marriage to even be a speck on the proverbial table.

“Don’t know why you’re being so self-deprecating,” Juyeon had said, once Luda had cajoled her into a bakery to eat more food she didn’t have to pay for. “You’re smart, pretty, cute and funny. You literally have a PhD. You’re basically the full package, lots of people would want to date you.”

“I went to bed at three-thirty because I—what is it that Sojung-unnie says?—was too busy making love to my lab equipment,” Luda shoots back.

Her ex-girlfriend also said she had an attitude problem, her ex before that said she was emotionally constipated, and her ex before that said Luda made her feel like she was doing all the work, here.

Basically, Luda’s track record isn’t the greatest. But at least she knows how to say, ooh, that’s pretty, at all the right times, so who’s really winning here.

No, that’s not the day Luda’s life changes for the worst. Nor is it the day when all their friends take the train down to Busan for a weekend, summer whispering in the air like a foghorn, by which she means so sweltering it feels like she’s perpetually inside a sauna.

Nonetheless they go because they’re adults with jobs and lives and not college kids anymore. They only have so many days in the year to catch up as a group, weather be damned. Besides, hot weather makes for good beach weather, even if the beaches are in Busan, South Korea, and not the tropical islands.

Temperature aside, it’s not on either days in Busan where her life changes. It’s not on the Saturday, where she sits next to a jittery Juyeon on the train, ring tucked neatly away in one of her pockets.

It’s not that evening either, where they go down to the beach together and sprawl across a part of the sand. Sojung loses every game of beach volleyball despite Dawon’s best efforts to save them and Luda spends half the time heckling Hyunjung during her attempts to go anywhere close to the water. Juyeon and Yeoreum, who are nice, do not, and somehow manage to get her waist deep in the water before letting her collapse next to Soobin underneath the beach umbrella.

“You did very well, unnie,” Luda says, clapping. “I’m very proud of you. So proud I took multiple videos of you screaming.”

“Do you want to die?” Hyunjung, rightfully, replies.

It’s not when the fireworks start either. When Dawon pulls them out of their hotel rooms one at a time, finger on her lips and a glimmer in her eyes as she leads them to a secluded area down one end of the beach. Sojung’s a creep and is already set up with a camera which Luda snickers about under her breath before she’s whacked in the arm hard enough to bruise.

But regardless, they watch like a particularly endeared group of stalkers as Juyeon hands Yeoreum a small present, and between Yeoreum unwrapping an empty box and the inevitable question that would follow, gets down on one knee, and asks.

“We are so creepy,” Luda sniffles to the sound of Sojung’s camera and the loud crackle and pop of explosives. “Why are there even fireworks right now?”

“We’re being supportive friends,” Dawon corrects at the same time Sojung says, “just admit you’re jealous.”

She’s not, and she vehemently denies as much as they quite literally stumble out of the bushes to interrupt the very sweet moment happening in front of them, but—well.

There might be a part of her that writhes green whenever she sees Juyeon looking at Yeoreum like there’s no one else that matters in the world. A part of her that coils with bitterness whenever she’s forced to third wheel the steadiness of Hyunjung and Soobin, when she watches the gentle kisses Dawon places to the side of Sojung’s head every time they lose pathetically at volleyball.

She’s Lee Luda, though, and while she may be emotionally constipated according to her ex, she refuses to ruin the weekend so instead of moping she brushes the twigs off her shorts and says, “I can’t believe my grossest friends are getting married,” before wrapping Juyeon and Yeoreum in the biggest hugs she can conjure with her 5’2 body.

It’s not the Sunday after, even when she wakes up the latest and pauses at the doorway of the breakfast buffet room, stilled by the the sight of all her closest friends crowded around one table. The morning feels like sticky honey gold, summer air exhaling light through the windows, and Yeoreum’s got a bad case of puppy love seven years in written on her face. Sojung’s half-asleep and at the verge of drooling on Dawon’s shoulder, Soobin’s bickering like an old lady with Hyunjung, and Luda’s—Luda.

Luda’s Lee Luda with a PhD in chemical engineering and nothing else to her name.

“Am I unlovable?” She asks two weeks later, commandeering Dawon’s bed and staring up at her ceiling. “Don’t answer that. I know I’m lovable. But also, I’m thirty-one and the only one out of all of us not in a committed long term relationship.”

Dawon, who has known her since they were fifteen and knows when she’s just ranting, only says, “Mm.”

“No,” Luda continues. “The real question is if you think I’m too emotionally constipated. I don’t think I’m that bad with my emotions. I’m very in touch. Like right now I’m literally talking about my emotions, and my emotions say that I kind of wish I was in a relationship.”

“I think you should stop being hung up on what your ex-girlfriend from four years ago said.”

“No one ever recovers from being called emotionally constipated, Dawon-ah,” Luda says sagely.

“You’re doing fine, Luda. You know what people say; there’s no time limit on love.” Dawon rolls her shoulders a few times before turning around in her desk chair. “Emotionally constipated is a… strong phrase, anyway. You’re not. A bit of a workaholic, maybe, but you were in the middle of your PhD at the time. It’s justifiable.”

“My PhD has left me single for two years.”

Dawon gives Luda a long, considering look. “I think,” she says carefully, “you’re asking the wrong questions. You’ve never been emotionally constipated, just, a little unavailable. Sometimes it felt like you didn’t really like any of the girls you dated beyond being friends.”

Luda rolls over to lean her chin on the back of her hands. “So what should I be asking?”

“Maybe you should start by asking yourself if you’re as over Jiyeon-unnie as you say you are.”

exy/yeonjung

idol jung, 1k, silly composer/idol au

The problem, like most things, starts with Dayoung. Specifically, it starts with no less than twenty kakaotalk messages at seven in the evening while Sojung is busy staring blankly at the composition program open on the monitors in front of her.

She has half a mind to ignore the onslaught of yellow notifications. Quite, literally, nothing good could possibly come from Im Dayoung spamming her phone at any time of the day. Sojung would know. Sojung would know, much to her own chagrin, given remembering the last time this happened involves a lot of hospitals and crying Dayoungs.

So, half a mind to ignore Dayoung and return to finishing the song she’s painfully aware has a deadline she’s already pushed to hell and back. Maybe spite will magically materialise a finished version for her.

Unfortunately, the other half of her mind that is filled with annoying concern for the younger girl wins, and she begrudgingly turns her phone over to read through the long thread of yellow notifications.

It’s mostly every single variation of unnie under the sun, some garbled key smashes Sojung has no intention of ever trying to decipher, and—

“Dayoung-ah.” She says sternly into the phone when the call goes through. There’s a quiet sniffle from the other end. “What do you mean you adopted a stray cat?”

“Unnie,” Dayoung starts, and when Sojung hears the raspy voice come through the speakers she has to quell the rising worry in favour of prioritising her annoyance. “Listen. Juyeon-unnie and Yeoreum found Arong—”

“You named him?”

“—outside of their apartment—yes, I named him— and since Yeoreum has Yeolmu it’s not like they could take care of him, so I offered.” Dayoung ends with a wheezed puff.

Sojung pinches the bridge of her nose. “How long has he been with you?”

“A week?”

“A week. Dayoung you have allergies.”

There’s another pathetic sniffle. “I know, but, I couldn’t just leave him.” Dayoung whines softly, and Sojung sighs while turning her laptop off. “I thought taking antihistamines would be enough but it ended up getting worse after a few days.”

“So now you want me to look after him.” She replies dryly while pulling her jacket off the back of her chair. It’s not like much work was getting done anyway.

“Not for long! Just, until I can find somewhere he can go.”

“Fine. Where is he, your apartment?”

“Oh, wait a second,” She can hear muffled commotion on the other end of the line, a loud squawk and someone’s name being called out. “Sorry, Arong was— never mind. Don’t worry about it.”

Sojung has to resist the urge to smack her forehead against the door to the studio. “I’m worrying about it.”

“Don’t. Anyway, just go back to your place. I’m getting a friend to bring him over to you.”

“Okay, that’s fine.” Sojung says while rubbing at the crease in her brow. “Don’t forget to clean your apartment afterwards, you’ll be all sniffly until you do.”

“Oh, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou,” Dayoung crows in one relieved breath. “I love you. Seriously, unnie, have I ever told you how much I love you?” She sounds exceptionally sincere, except her voice is still raspy and she manages to sneeze halfway through, so Sojung spends more time trying not to laugh than feeling touched.

She huffs in amusement instead. “I get it, Dayoung-ah. I’m going home now.”

“Say it back. Unnie. Say it back—”

Sojung hangs up.

-

The first thing Sojung does when she gets home is open a beer. It’s refreshing and bitter and a nice respite to the impending sense of doom falling upon her as she stares out at her apartment.

Her living room—which she can cross in about two well placed steps—comprises of a small coffee table, a worn couch across from a T.V with a crack in the corner, and a couple ikea shelves lined with various mementos and books she’s collected over the years. Her place isn’t the pigsty everyone seems to think it is, but it is admittedly, not very cat safe either.

So the second thing Sojung does is start cat proofing everything. After preemptively opening another bottle of Terra. She eyes the cables in her kitchen with heavy suspicion. Perhaps she should’ve been a little less impulsive about taking in Dayoung’s stray cat, but she’s also never been well renowned for having stellar decision making.

She’s halfway between sculling her third beer and deciding whether or not Dayoung can live with her middle school art project being shoved into a box for the foreseeable future, when her doorbell rings loudly.

She smacks the side of the door into her face when she opens it.

“Ow,” She groans, cradling her nose in her palms. There’s panicked shuffling in front of her as she lets out a string of curses, before she feels soft hands holding her shoulders in concern.

“Are you okay?” An alarmed voice asks. Sojung can only nod, given the voice belongs to the exact reason she’s busy trying not to cry pathetically from the throbbing in her face.

Sojung thinks that Dayoung should stop neglecting very important information in her texts; maybe then she wouldn’t be smacking her nose against doors.

Very important information, such as the friend bringing her new cat being Yoo Yeonjung. Chart topping, nation’s songbird, refreshing cider vocals soloist Yoo Yeonjung, who’s looking at Sojung with watery eyes and a sniffly nose and no shortage of worry.

Wait,

“Are you allergic to cats too?” Is what Sojung asks when she straightens up. Yeonjung sniffles.

“Um. No?” She blinks at Sojung, wide eyed, before bending down to pick up the carrier placed next to the entranceway. “I brought Arong. Who I’m not allergic to.”

Sojung can hear quiet mewling from behind the plastic grate. “He’s very sweet, just a bit scared of everything, you know.”

And well, no. She doesn’t know, given she: only found out about Arong around an hour ago, and honestly kinda forgot about the cat all together for a second. Still, she bends back down slightly, peering through the grate to catch a glimpse of

2jung

sakamichi no apollon, 1k, high school jazz au

The drive to Busan is all grey.

Mostly, anyway. The Gyeongbu expressway tries its best to make the view exciting for any passenger; large walls of sprawling green vines, some pink flowers for approximately two minutes, what feels like endless, sickly phosphorescent yellow from the tunnels, and—once you make it past the urban sprawl from the fingertips of Seoul—the view of some entirely uninteresting dying farmland, ashen beige like a fire had raged through it just to leave a whisper behind, and sprawling, distant hills covered in also-dying trees.

Granted, that is, you have the fortune of driving in one of the two outer lanes. Which Hyunjung’s family is not.

So, the drive to Busan is all grey. Grey, grey, grey; grey cars, grey roads, grey highway walls, grey asphalt underneath the car tires smooth enough that Hyunjung can lean her forehead against the window without too many headache inducing repercussions. The view for her is just a blur of cars and the hint of green, occasionally.

There’s a soft song trickling through her headphones that she falls into; a gentle, slow striking of keys that ring like empty wind chimes. It’s one she downloaded before her dad had knocked on the door to her bedroom, brow lines pulled tight around his eyes while his knuckles turned white, gripping the door handle like a lifeline as he told her they’d be moving to Busan at the end of the month. Something about a new job.

Hyunjung presses her forehead against the cool glass a little more, lets herself feel about as present as the blurs she watches. Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence floating through her ears. Her fingers twitch atop her thigh, almost absentmindedly as the notes dance into her hands, a melody with warm nostalgia wrapped around its voice.

She never did get to play this song on the piano before they left.

That was, admittedly, one of the harder parts about leaving Seoul. There won’t be enough space for a piano, her mom had told her, eyes and mouth pulled low in a sad smile, Hyunjung suddenly aware of how the wrinkles creased around her eyes seem to get deeper everyday. We’re sorry, Hyunjung-ah. We did try—

It’s okay, she’d cut in, smile equally as sad. She might be seventeen and rife with tumultuous emotions—as much as they can get for Kim Hyunjung—but she wouldn’t be at odds with her parents over something they’d had about as much choice in as she did. It’s okay.

Her fingers stop drumming against the imaginary piano when the notes fade out into a different, mellow tune. She’d never blame her parents, but that doesn’t stop the grey of the highway from washing over her like one of her bad dreams; the ones where she’s drifting away from shore on top of a shitty little wooden raft, ocean blue dark and expansive and ominous around her.


//


The first thing Hyunjung does when she escapes from homeroom isn’t find the music room.

She’d like to—her parents even implored her to, saying she was too talented to give up on music just because they no longer owned a piano—but after a stilted introduction and a whirlwind of unfamiliar satoori and watchful eyes that made goosebumps prickle and the hair behind her nape stand on edge, she’d rather just look for an escape.

She never was very good with people.

So instead of the music room, she climbs the winding staircase leading to the rooftop.

Her new school in Busan is practically identical to almost every other high school in Korea, with three floors for each year level, wooden desks that are easily carved into with enough pressure, sliding doors that whip open like a crack of thunder when the sports kids laugh their way into the room.

And a rooftop, hopefully, blessedly free from the unabashedly curious looks wondering why there’s a transfer from Seoul a third of the way into the school year. Everything is making Hyunjung’s stomach roil.

Except, when she finally makes it to the top of the staircase—thighs aching slightly as if it’d been a million years since the last time she’d climbed a flight of stairs—she can’t help but utterly freeze. Deer caught in headlights type of freeze. Cat touching water. Kim Hyunjung facing a girl in front of the entranceway to the rooftop.

There’s a small area of floor space in front of the double doors, ceramic tiles dirtied over the years, cobwebs lining the top corners where the roof angles down slightly. A small area big enough to house three chairs lined up in a row, and a girl fast asleep on top of said chairs. There’s a rectangle of sunlight from the small panes of glass in the doors cutting directly across her face—the only light in the outcrop—an arm slung on top of her eyes to block it out. Untied brown hair spilling down and almost sweeping the floor.

It’s what strikes Hyunjung first, the brown hair. Both untied and dyed, but kept natural enough the school wouldn’t have something to ring her up on, though she thinks that part is probably moot considering the girl’s uniform is completely, utterly worn wrong. A tieless shirt, grey adidas hoodie slipping off her shoulder with the bare minimum of a name tag hanging precariously off it, half-pinned.

Hyunjung doesn’t know why she’s still standing there, frozen in front of Chu Sojung and her jerry rigged nap spot. She should turn back around, force her thighs back down the four flights to the second year floor, perhaps down the next four to the bottom floor that leads to the club rooms and the piano. She really should. This Sojung doesn’t seem to be waking up anytime soon, and Hyunjung really doesn’t want to be caught standing like a dazed zombie in front of the rooftop doors.

She makes it one step backwards before Sojung decides it’s the perfect moment to jolt upwards with a flourish, and then fall off the chairs.

“Fuckin’ hell,” she groans, and Hyunjung winces; both from the fall and the rough accent she doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to. It’s one thing to hear the strong, blunt lilt of Busan through television speakers, and another to have it swimming around her constantly.