EIGHT COUNT
Jul. 27th, 2025 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
onetenthsok so. hello.
no one except two people are reading this but just preemptively anyway, there is a lot of this that isn't very good. i think it's very corny. and that's ok. im not sure why i wrote it like that and there's a reason i scrapped it. please read with ur hearts and minds open... ❤️
in the same vein, though, i did put a lot of work into this fic and im sad that i felt the need to scrap it in the end for various reasons. i think this is the first piece where i fully got to flesh out a lot of the ideas i have surrounding megan and dani as characters, and so subsequently there's parts that i've ripped out from this and transplanted into other drafts and fics because i really liked it. if u recognise a sentence in here from something else. no u don't
anyway this is eight count please enjoy or dont idk im not ur keeper
(if the formatting is weird pls ignore its 9k words im not going in and individually fixing everything i dont have that sort of patience ❤️)
daniela has loved and been loved before and never once had it slip past her like this.
The truth is, Daniela’s not actually sure why she’d said it.
It’d turned into a joke almost instantly, the consequence of being in a group so predominately queer it was as if the fans had sniffed them out like bloodhounds—that Daniela had come out as straight. Which wasn’t wrong, she supposes. Lara had asked if there were any rumours they’d wanted to dispel and Daniela, in all her two-hours-of-sleep glory, took the bait. “Came out” as straight.
For the most part it’d turned out fine. Lara sent her screenshots of Twitter posts about her that’d blown up, and her own TikTok feed enjoyed surprising her when she scrolled with the same thirty-second clip accompanied by an almost disgusting amount of likes. The staff didn’t really care and the fans found it funny, so Daniela knows, at least on a logical level, that she didn’t do anything wrong.
How the sausage got made, or tasted, or whatever, doesn’t really matter in the end. Daniela’s still not sure why she’d said it.
Or—more importantly.
That night in the car to their next schedule Daniela bullies her way past her members to claim one half of the backseat, pressing her forehead into the cool glass the moment the engine starts running. In front of her Manon’s got her headphones cupped over her ears. Next to her, Lara’s leaning between the gap in the seats at the front to show their manager something on her phone, and Megan, curled up on the other side of the backseat, stretches her legs out aimlessly until one of them flops itself into Daniela’s lap.
Unthinkingly, she curls a hand around Megan’s ankle. Runs a thumb over the bone jutting out under her sock. Thinkingly, Daniela chews on her bottom lip, and lets herself wonder back to the live. Runs her mind over the grooves of all the things she’d said and done, and wonders why her chest feels so tight.
In the morning she forgets about it, mostly. It’s a generous term to describe the time they’re awake at, morning: technically true but when the sun hasn’t yet poked out from the horizon and the clock on her phone is busy hovering around half-past four while she’s trying to keep her eyes open during one final, shoehorned in practice before their flight back to L.A., she’s inclined to disagree.
“What else would you call it?” Yoonchae asks, less about playing devil’s advocate and more out of genuine curiosity.
“The middle of the night,” Daniela deadpans. Megan makes an agreeing hum, eyes drooping shut from where she’s stretched herself into a split in front of the mirror.
“It’s closer to dawn,” Sophia points out, unhelpfully, really, and Daniela decides to just give in to the strain of her eyelids and nod off while she still has five minutes to do so.
Korea is always hard like this. It’s only their second time doing the music show rounds and it’s not as if they have to promote for weeks on end like the K-Pop groups actually based here, but there’s still something undeniably exhausting about the schedule, the gruelling three-am wake up calls where they spend the rest of the day running on measly hours of sleep, the wear of the relentless, absurdly bright stage lights.
It’s easier this time, though. That’s saying something.
“They were pretty good, right?” Megan asks later that day, coming up from behind Daniela in the waiting area for boarding just to drape all five-foot-seven of herself over her shoulders. Daniela staggers a bit under the surprise weight before righting herself, leaning backwards into Megan and squeezing one of the hands now dangling underneath her chin. “Our performances. The EYEKONS liked it.”
“Yeah,” Daniela hums. “We did good. You did good.”
Last time they were here Megan had spent most of it horizontal unless otherwise required, fighting a losing battle against one of the discs in her lower back. Daniela remembers how hard it’d been to watch Megan grit her teeth before each pre-recording, how Sophia and Lara and eventually the staff had tried in a futile effort to get her to rest for just one performance, until the cards stacked against her finally fell and the doctors stepped in.
That day Daniela had gone to Megan and Lara’s hotel room to check in; found Megan curled helplessly in her bed. Remembers how the choking rasp of Megan’s muffled sobs had struck her dead still in the doorway, and she realised, for the first time, what people really meant by their blood running cold.
Against her hair now she can feel Megan’s grin, all wide and sweet, and in her mind Daniela can picture the dimples squishing whisker-like into to existence underneath Megan’s eyes. For a moment they stay tangled together, content, before Daniela starts swaying them both back and forth just to be annoying and then they’re wrestling in front of every other passenger taking the same flight home.
After they return from Korea, Daniela finds herself thinking about the live again. It’s not something that’s bothering her in a persistent, debilitating way; she’s not losing sleep over this. But sometimes it feels like something’s gone off-kilter inside herself and given half a second to examine the tilt, it becomes easy enough to track the roots back to where it all began.
Manon seems to notice, though; giving her strange side eyes from the passenger seat when Daniela worries her lip at a red light, peering at her at night when she opens her book just to sit and stare at the pages.
“Okay,” Manon eventually says, going on the fourth night straight of this happening. “Have you even, like, read a page of that since we got back?”
Daniela blinks up at her. “What?”
“Your book,” Manon repeats. “I’ve scrolled through, I don’t know, twenty TikToks since you started reading and you haven’t turned a single page.”
“You know watching those at night is bad for you, right?” Daniela deflects, and for her efforts is rewarded with a pillow being tossed in her direction. It bounces lamely off the corner post where she hangs the curtains she uses to pretend at having her own room. “Wow, you suck at that.”
Manon jabs a finger at her. “Don’t change the topic.”
Daniela just sighs and snaps her book shut. Flops back against her pillows and rubs at her forehead, even though it’s a habit she’s been trying to break since figuring out that in a days time she’ll probably end up breaking out in the exact same spot, and in their line of work it’s always a bitch to deal with the whole human side of just having a face.
“Dani,” Manon says.
“Yes, yes, I heard you,” Daniela grumbles, dropping her hand to stare up at the roof.
Manon means well, she knows. This is not the first nor the last time she’ll be gently cornered into having to excavate whatever emotional knot she’d buried in favour of keeping up appearances. But it’s hard trying to put words to a problem when she’s not sure there really is one. Where would she even begin? That the other day she’d scrolled too far down her own TikTok feed and stumbled upon that one clip of her and Megan and Lara at David’s Twitch stream, and spent maybe a minute or ten too long reading everyone’s theories on who was futch and who wasn’t and had to forcibly shut her own phone off when all the comments pointing out that, well, we know it’s not dani now lol, made her skin run too hot, left her temples to throb? Or that when Lara had accosted her mirror while getting ready for—something, a party, or whatever—she’d spent the entire time ranting to Daniela about the most recent girl that’d broken her heart, and Daniela had just, shut down, for whatever reason, mind involuntarily snapping back to that live in Korea?
Or that recently Megan’s become something of a mainstay in her thoughts, occupying crevices she didn’t even know existed. Keeping a closer eye on her during practice than she normally would, watching the curve of her spine, the flex of her back, her arms, the stretch of her legs across hardwood floors—
Well, so she lied, a little. She might be losing some sleep over this.
“I just wonder,” she eventually settles on saying, “if I shouldn’t have said that. The—you know. When we were in Korea and I told everyone I was straight.”
“What?” Manon says. “Why? Is it the fans? Because really, who gives a fuck what they think.”
“Okay I have to remind you that we’re like, contractually obligated to do that. But no, it’s not them. They’re fine. It’s just—I don’t know.”
“We’re contractually obligated to do lots of things we don’t do.” Manon rolls her eyes. “But seriously, if it’s not them, then what’s the problem? It’s not like you’re not—” she pauses, then, straightening up from where she’s sitting cross-legged atop her sheets. Daniela suddenly feels small on her side of the room, the weight of Manon’s scrutinising look enough to make her shrink further into her bed. For a beat Manon just stares at her, contemplating something Daniela’s not privy to, before going, “ah.”
“Ah?” Daniela echoes. “Ah? What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means that I think you should think some more about it.”
Daniela just throws her hands in the air. “That’s exactly what I have been doing!”
“No, I mean,” Manon starts, and there’s something about the gravity in her voice that has Daniela quieting. “Really think about it, Dani. I’m serious.”
“You,” Daniela points a finger, “are ridiculous. And no help.” And while Manon is shrugging she draws the curtains to her bed shut, before turning over and going the fuck to sleep.
The thing is that she’s not stupid. She knows what Manon’s getting at, the same way she knows exactly why saying what she’d said had grated at her. Why it’d soured in her stomach the moment the words fell out her mouth.
The thing is— the thing is that Daniela was sure until she wasn’t; until very suddenly the boxes stopped ticking and the facts no longer checked out and the feeling grew too big, too encompassing for the words to ring true.
And then she’d gone and said them anyway.
Here’s another truth.
Dancing, she used to think, was a competition. For a long time that’s all it really was. Of course she recognised the artistry of it, but growing up with dance filtered through the lens of preparing for the next set of judges, the next big stage, the next ribbon and medal, left that logic to be pushed to the wayside. Before she’d officially packed up her bags and joined Dream Academy they’d sent her no less than five different emails about housing and schedules and rules, and at the top right of each one sat her name, bold and black followed simply by DANCE.
Daniela Avanzini. Dance. There’s the first truth; this is all she’s ever known.
The gravity of what she was doing never exactly hit her until the day she’d Ubered to the studio for the first time, less than a week after she’d thrown as much of her life as possible into two suitcases and flown from one side of the country to the other. What she remembers most is how her hands shook, much against her will, around the straps of the bag digging into her shoulder, how much smaller the studio was compared to what she’d expected. She’d been told there would be cameras—the perpetual shadowing of the Netflix crew that in a years time would become little more than white noise—but it’d been jarring the first time, when she’d stepped inside and immediately had two separate faceless lens zero in on her.
But in the end these all ran secondary. What Daniela really remembers most has always been Megan.
“You were so different,” Daniela says now, underneath a breathless laugh as she watches Megan groan loudly. Daniela’s sprawled out on one of their couches in the living room, Manon on one end, her on the other. Megan’s on the floor with her back against the armchair occupied by Sophia, face red and now more or less melted into the carpet.
“I was—ugh. You know!” Megan splutters.
From above her, Sophia leans down to pat the top of her head. Gently, sure, but mostly condescendingly. “You were a baby. Can you believe she was fifteen when this all started?”
“She was so awkward.” Daniela grins. Megan sends her nothing short of a withering look, but its effect is dulled by the strands of hair sticking every which way, her pink bangs crossed messily across her forehead. “What! You were, don’t even try to deny it. You literally hugged me before you even said a word to me.”
Manon barks out a laugh while Megan tries to press herself further into the floor. “Oh my god. That is such a Megan thing to do.”
“I was sixteen! I don’t know why we keep bringing this back up, it’s not that funny.”
“It is a little funny,” Daniela says, catching Megan’s eye from across the room. For a brief moment they just squint at each other, content to let the weight of a late night wash over them, rare as it is to have more than three of them around the house at any given time. Without all her makeup Megan looks more like the Megan Daniela knows best. Heels B, T&D’s first and second. Nothing between them.
Daniela lets the moment break, happy to watch Megan finally slump all the way to the ground, lying starfish flat with her hands dragging down her face and a strangled noise floating out from between them.
Of course what Daniela always leaves out from this story is what it was like to see Megan for the first time. That when Megan had first awkwardly, but with no less heart, greeted her, she’d very nearly brushed off this lanky, earnest sixteen-year old as being any sort of adversary. Daniela had been on the operating table of competitions like this before. Had her blood spilt and chest cracked open on stages very much like the ones in Dream Academy, learned long ago how to field criticisms with the right edge. Malleable, but not enough to no longer recognise herself. She will do this her way or not at all.
Daniela had looked at Megan and thought, this kid won’t know what hit her.
She didn’t know yet about any of Megan’s history. That the Megan at the beginning of Dream Academy was a Megan already drowned, desperate and ravenous to resurface away from a history of dead in the water careers.
Still. That day Daniela was allowed to hover around the back of the practice room, a grace day to ease into what would become her life for the next two years and beyond. Leaning against the wall she’d gnawed aimlessly at her bottom lip, finding herself inexplicably unable to drag her eyes away from the same teenager she’d disregarded just moments before.
And then she blinked, and it was like watching Megan shed her skin. Any pretense of bumbling timidity falling away at the first note of music. What Daniela learned quickly was that on stage, Megan transformed— as if a fire lit beneath her, leaving nothing but confidence, and devastating proficiency.
When she’d ranked first during the last evaluation of T&D it had come as a surprise to no one. How could it, when she’d walked into the practice rooms at fifteen and only known how to take and take and take, to rearrange her body after every critique hungry and demanding, an endless, unceasing paragon of what it means to want. Greed that left her nigh untouchable.
And—well. All Daniela could do was watch, the same way she’d done that very first day. The second to Megan’s first, the fifth to her fourth. It’s not as if being a step behind on paper has ever bothered Daniela; this was something she was born for. She knew this beyond any measure of doubt. Even when they very nearly kicked her from the program entirely, all she’d done was sink her teeth down harder and refused to let go. Remained just as hungry as everyone else.
But Megan was something else completely. Everything she did the antithesis to Daniela’s sharpened edges, the way they approached dance in itself running parallel to each other. Years later and it’s still hard to pry her eyes away from the tangible shift Megan undergoes every time the stage lights dim in preparation.
That’s always been the crux of the issue, really. Daniela’s never not been able to pay attention to Megan.
There’s a how but not the why, is the other thing. An answer without the reason.
So maybe Daniela isn’t as straight as she thought she was going into all this, when she’d first turned up in Los Angeles with a boyfriend she was half-heartedly attempting long distance with and a preconceived notion that at some point in her life she’d settle down with a husband and a dog and have like, two kids or something. Which is fine, really. It is. There are bigger problems in her life to worry about in lieu of cutting herself on the thorns of her burgeoning sexual awakening.
She still likes men anyway, something that hasn’t changed despite the now growing hours spent staring at her ceiling at night trying to work out where the lines get drawn, how far they stretch. She likes when they’re taller than her, bigger than her; likes the rough curl of their palms around her waist and the flex of their arms. The physicality of it all. It’s easy to trace lines she’s already intimately familiar with.
As for the rest of it, well. It’s harder to gauge a standard when all the other lines just map out into the shape of one of her coworkers.
“Wingstop,” Sophia starts during rehearsal, “or something else, for dinner. Shake Shack?”
“Neither,” Daniela grumbles. “Too greasy.”
“I want Shake Shack,” Yoonchae contributes, voice mildly garbled from where she’s practically shoved her face into a fan.
Summer seems to have set in early, as it always does in L.A., given the nature of its almost desert-ness. Semi-arid, technically. Mediterranean. Daniela googled it once after Megan and Lara had spent fifteen minutes bickering over whether or not it really was a desert. Regardless— it’s warm. A dry heat buzzing over the pavement, permeating sticky into Daniela’s car, the practice studio.
They’re in the middle of their first break for the day and Daniela’s already stripped down to as few clothes as she possibly can, sports bra and rolled up sweatpants pressed against the hardwood floor as she sprawls out in a poor attempt to cool down.
“I’m with Dani,” Manon says. “I don’t know if I want anything that like, heavy. And I’m kinda sick of Wingstop.”
From the other side of the room Lara gasps, scandalised, and Daniela has to peer backwards to try and work out how she even heard from that far. “You can’t say that,” she yells, as if Manon had just slung slurs on live, or defamed Beyoncé, or something equally as controversial. “Who gets sick of Wingstop? It’s Wingstop!”
“Me, Lara! We’ve ordered it, like, three rehearsals in a row now,” Manon yells back, and Daniela can only sigh and bury her eyes into her forearm and pray this argument goes quicker than the last. Yoonchae’s already gone and blocked them all out; Daniela can hear her making quiet noises into the fan like a bored teenager over summer break.
For a minute Daniela continues to lie there, letting the sweat beading around the skin of her arm dry down tacky on her nose, her forehead. Her eyes are starting to get kind of warm now, but it’s a fare tradeoff for the cool nothingness of getting to shut her eyes and not have the bright glare of the studio lights bleed into her vision.
She’s halfway to dozing off completely when she feels a presence flop down next to her.
“What are they arguing about?” Megan asks.
“Wingstop,” Daniela says, peeling her arm away and lolling her head to the side so she can glance up at Megan. Her hair’s been tugged up into one of those loose ponytails she likes, bangs sitting messy and less hair probably in the hair tie than out of it, and it’s easy enough for Daniela to trail her eyes down the line of Megan’s neck, the pale skin of her collarbone, her shoulder, before flicking her gaze back up to Megan’s face. “Where’d you go?”
“Oh right,” Megan says brightly. Turns around to pull out a couple of damp hand towels she waves eagerly in Daniela’s direction. “I got hot. So I—hold on. Can you like, sit up?”
Daniela raises a curious eyebrow but does as she’s told anyway, clasping her hands behind her and stretching them outwards in the process. She’s busy enjoying the mild burn of her tendons when Megan gets bored of waiting and Daniela can feel the gentle brush of Megan’s fingers moving her hair out of the way, and the cool, wet press of one of the towels wrapping around the back of her neck.
“Jesus, Megan,” Daniela yelps. “Why the fuck is it so—cold?”
Megan just beams a proud smile at her. “It’s good, right? My mom—uh, I was complaining to her the other day about how it gets, like so hot in here, so she bought me one of those little coolers and told me to keep it in my car, and then I put the towels inside it. I mean, it goes in the fridge at home first of course, but the cooler keeps it cold, yeah?”
Daniela blinks at her, before huffing a soft laugh. Megan’s hand is still curled around her neck, something of a gentle, anchoring pressure, but her thumb’s gravitated upwards to graze lightly at the base of Daniela’s scalp, and despite how the towel really is fucking cold, it’s not enough to stop the lick of heat shocking down her spine.
At the touch, Daniela shivers.
“Well you can say thanks to your mom for me,” she eventually says, grinning at Megan’s pout.
“The towels were my idea!”
Daniela just makes a disbelieving noise. Shrugs lightly. “Was it? Seems like something your mom would tell you to do. Either way, she bought the cooler, so.”
Megan whines, a little loud and very petulant, her brows furrowing and lips pursing in that way they do when she’s chasing acknowledgement and being denied of it. Daniela holds out for a second longer before relenting.
“Alright fine. I’m just kidding.” She nudges at Megan’s arm lightly. “It was nice. You should keep bringing them.”
Megan practically preens at the praise, goes to say something until Grant pushes himself up from the couch and tells them all break’s over and she’s forced to fall back to a defeated ugh sound.
“There there,” Daniela says, placating. Megan sticks her tongue out at her.
When they both finally go to stand Megan uncurls her hand from its spot around Daniela’s neck, towel now more or less plastered against her skin, and—
Daniela’s not expecting it, is the thing. Her and Megan and all the girls have known each other for years now, have touched and been touched in countless, fleeting, unthinking ways. The other day Manon had wrapped around her on the floor, buried her face into Daniela’s neck while complaining about something or other and she’d barely batted an eye at it.
But Daniela thinks about the lines and where they get drawn and watches, in real time, as it unfurls out into the shape of Megan’s fingers absentmindedly trailing down Daniela’s spine, dragging over each knot, before it becomes the feel of Megan’s palm soft around the crook of her lower back.
Megan’s not even paying attention to her anymore, which is fine, really. Daniela can live with that even if her hand’s still lingering there, the cold splay of her palm flattened against her waist; even if Daniela feels like she’s being rewired on the spot, all the atoms in her body splitting and reorienting and narrowing down into where the pads of Megan’s fingers meet her skin.
Daniela shivers again. From the cold, maybe, or the lone bead of water sliding down her bones, or from the want of something else entirely.
In the end, Daniela feels unmoored. It’d been fine when it’d just been hypotheticals and then a maybe, an unverifiable something, but there’s a difference between a concept and simple reality. Suddenly she’d tipped over the edge of it all and realised there was no going back without losing herself in the thick of it, that all the ideals she’d imagined and re-imagined over the past twenty years of her life have unspooled right back to the beginning, just to start again.
So now what?
May slips into June which arrives in the whirlwind fashion all months do when they’re in the midst of preparing for their next full comeback. Gnarly, Gameboy, Gabriela; they spend eight hours a day either in the new dance studio or shuffled between photo shoots and YouTube videos and interviews where they try not to accidentally say the same things they said at the last one.
There’s a real privilege to their position, though. They’re a girl group, sure, in the middle—or beginning, even—of their coveted rise to popstar fame, and there’s a truth behind being careful. The internet is not nearly as generous as it used to be, their staff remind them. But they’re also six young women with all of Los Angeles at their fingertips— you can forgive them for taking advantage of it.
“We’re going to a party,” Lara announces, striding into Manon and Daniela’s room.
“Manon’s already with Sophie,” Daniela says without taking her eyes off her phone. She’s lying on her bed, tucked against the wall and enjoying, quite frankly, her free time. They’ve been going to a lot of events lately and she could stand to have one free evening to herself. “Whose party?”
Lara just makes some sort of disgruntled sound at the back of her throat. “I don’t know, a friend of Megan’s—just tell Manon to bring Sophie. Or all her friends! The more the merrier. I like them.”
“She’s not gonna come.” Daniela glances up at Lara, though. Interest piqued. “Megan going?”
“What do you—duh. She’ll meet us there.”
Daniela lowers her phone, staring at Lara like she’s considering. “I guess. But I’m not driving.”
Lara makes a hissing yes noise before pumping her first and marching straight back out the room.
The house their Uber drops them at is already alive by the time Daniela’s rolled herself out of bed and pulled on something that vaguely says party, quiet enough from the street but still leaking a quiet thrum of bass, the din of crowded laughter and chatter audible over the occasional breeze. Lara gets them inside with little fanfare, and when they make it past the threshold it’s as if they’d stepped straight into a wall of noise.
Daniela almost relaxes at it. The throng of bodies navigating between rooms and the pulse of music flooding her from the soles of her feet up— this is what she’s used to.
“Where is Megan,” Daniela asks Lara, has to repeat it twice into the shell of her ear after they’d jostled their way into the kitchen and found the improvised bar. The drinks all taste like shit, which is whatever. Daniela downs one anyway.
“No idea girl,” Lara calls back. “I’m sure we’ll run into her. Come on, I wanna dance.”
It’s easy enough to find the makeshift dance floor given all they have to do is follow the crowd, the flicker of hastily strung up strobe lights. Daniela hasn’t been to a house party this big in months now, and there’s something about the pulse of people, the brush of bodies in the dark to some vague beat, that has her flicker to life.
The several drinks she’d speedran in the kitchen start to hit her, a sweet spot of haziness buzzing through her veins. Lara tugs on her hand and lets them get swallowed by the music.
It doesn’t take Daniela long to notice, even with the numb flush of alcohol enveloping her and the knock of bodies against her, the feeling of a hand around her upper back, the light press of someone against her. She’s smart enough to recognise the invitation for what it is, has been here before. But it doesn’t change the beat she has to take when she spins on her heel and is met with the lazy smile of another girl.
Daniela blinks, kisses her teeth in thought, before returning it with a smile of her own. The girl laughs as Daniela slips her way into her orbit, finds one bubbling out of herself when she twirls a little to the beat and hears cheers from who are clearly the girl’s friends. This is the easy part, she thinks absently, the music shifting around her, the beat transitioning. Behind her she can feel a hand curl around her waist, and this time she grinds backwards into the pressure, lifting one of her own hands and wrapping it around the girl’s shoulder.
In her ear she can feel more than hear the quiet huff of laughter, the look of a silent question. Something like a reckoning. A choice.
Girls kiss different, is the first thought to swim up from the still functioning part of her brain, through the muddled haze of everything else. Softer lips, softer skin against her chin, smaller jaw under the spread of her palm against the girl’s face. Daniela doesn’t know her name, doesn’t really care for it—it’s not like she’s ever known the name of any of the guys she does this with.
It feels like a revelation, name or no name. In a dark corner of the steadily growing dance floor Daniela presses in further, angles her head and licks at the bottom lip of her partner. There are hands all over her, crossed over her shoulders, wrapping around her neck, and then the shock of heady want at the feel of fingers teasing at the bottom of her top.
Daniela pulls back to breathe. Tilts her head and flutters her eyes shut at the press of lips against her jaw, down the column of her neck, and she can feel it, now. The coil of heat licking through her body, the want marked in intervals against her skin, the tug back into a messy open-mouthed kissed. More than anything, the addictive rush of knowing.
So now what. So now—
A pause. Daniela exhales one shuddering breath, and leans back in.
So, alright. Daniela thinks: maps, lines, hands. Men and women. The girl from the party. Megan.
Maybe she should’ve listened to Manon more and thought about it harder, genuinely, instead of presuming herself better of it and finding herself hovering in this strange state of emotional paralysis. Daniela has loved and been loved before and never once had it slip past her like this, as if every moment she spent unknowingly blindfolded, every unrealised touch, their perpetual song and dance, had metamorphosed behind her back into something suddenly so tangible all it had to do was lean over, rip the blindfold off and leave her to ask how she’d got here at all.
It’s a question that for all her recent attempts at self-actualisation, she has no answer for. No real point of inception. Moments, maybe, quick-flash glimpses in time where Daniela had toed the line of realisation before retreating back into the self-serving compartmentalising she’d spent a lifetime mastering. There was the live show a distant memory ago, Megan’s arms out-stretched and easy after the call of Daniela’s name, the press of her tear-stained cheek against Daniela’s hair and their hands linked as they’d bowed to the crowd, the culmination of two years work neatly bow-tied into six. The green room of the stages after that, KCON, El Rey, Daniela pressing her face into the crook of Megan’s neck flushed and fresh off the buzz of getting to stand on stage and perform. The month Megan had been gone and Daniela found herself seeking her out during each gig she wasn’t there, the new blocking one person too little, her body instinctively trying to move to a choreography made impossible.
Or now, Daniela stumbling away from this girl, blood pumping like the comedown from a bad high, after her brain drifted too far to reel back in and she’d been struck by the vision of someone else, telling, inevitable.
“I think I like girls,” Daniela blurts out after finding Lara and dragging her into the first empty bathroom she could find. Her entire head—spins, under the bright, sterile lights, and she has to stumble and drop herself to the floor against the bathtub to ease the swell of nausea.
Lara only stares at her, mouth slightly agape, and Daniela knows she’s shot whatever complaint Lara had straight in the foot. “What?” She eventually says, dropping down to crouch next to Daniela. “Wait, are you serious?”
“Yeah,” Daniela says miserably.
“Oh, girl,” Lara sighs, reaching around to rub gently at Daniela’s back. “How long—when did you realise?”
That’s a question, isn’t it? Daniela thinks the normal answer to this is probably something along the lines of, always, I’ve just never admitted it, or at least the right answer, anyway. She hadn’t really thought this part through. Just that it had all become too much and the rush of tipping past an abstract hunch into something real, her own spit stamping the letter and immortalising it shut in someone’s mouth at a party, had left her on edge and champing at the bit.
“I don’t really know.” She shrugs. Settles on saying, “Korea, I think. Or after Korea.”
“Wow,” Lara drawls. “So after you told the whole world you were straight. What is the state of that, by the way? Do you know?”
Daniela coughs out a rough laugh, pressing her forehead into the hard bones of her knees. “Yes. After that. And, I don’t, really know. Like you, I guess—I haven’t really thought that far. I still like guys.”
“Alright,” Lara murmurs. Her hand squeezes Daniela’s shoulder muscle, briefly, comforting, before resuming its slow circles. “That’s okay. You have all the time in the world to work that part out.”
Wouldn’t that be great, Daniela thinks numbly. To be able to postpone her mental torment until she’s ready for it. The labels aren’t the problem, here, not really, and she’s sure she’ll be able to fit that round of distress into her schedule somewhere.
“It’s not that,” Daniela grumbles.
“Then—okay. What’s up?”
Daniela sighs. Shuts her eyes and splits her knees so she can bury her head between them, ears pressed hard against her skin. “I think I might like Megan,” she spits out, into the dark, muffled by her body.
“Ah,” Lara says, stilling.
Yeah. Ah.
Okay.
So now what?
Daniela does eventually get to find Megan, although it’s more like Megan finding her, sitting down next to Daniela outside on the one part of the deck not yet taken by smokers.
“Hi,” she says simply, pulling her knees up to her chest so she can wrap her arms around them. “What are you doing out here?”
Daniela blinks. Hums. Says, “decompressing.”
Time had fallen away from her long ago, after she’d spilled her guts out both to Lara and into the clean ceramic of the toilet bowel, as if the act of would purge her of her truths. Not that it could. Not that it mattered. The words were out there now, the burden of her being shared with one of the few people who would never let her be anything except all the harsh lines of herself, anyway. So she’d thrown up once and then pulled Lara into the kitchen to wash the acrid taste of her stomach contents down with more awful drinks.
That was—Daniela doesn’t really know. A few hours ago? She’d stumbled outside after she’d waved Lara away with some guy she knew around and her head had begun feeling too heavy for her neck, the onset of a low-grade headache starting behind her ears.
Megan laughs softly, tilting her cheek onto her knees. “I can see that. You look waa—sted. No offence.”
“Okay, no need for that.” Daniela scrunches her face. The entire deck is lined with fairy lights, wrapped around the columns and dangling from the wall, and underneath them Megan’s eyes twinkle, repetitive, in time with the lights. Other than the slight muss of her hair and the pink tinge to her cheeks, she seems leagues more coherent than either Daniela or Lara. “You look—sober. You didn’t drink?”
“Huh? Oh, no. Lara texted me earlier and said you both weren’t driving, so I just took my car. I was getting ready at Emily’s anyway so it was easier.”
“Uh-ohh,” Daniela sings, tongue a little heavy in her mouth. “I don’t know how I feel about you being DD—hey!”
“I’m a good driver, I thought this debate was over already,” Megan says, huffing, pulling her hand back from where she’d slapped Daniela’s arm lightly. “See if I ever give you a lift again.”
“Mmm, but you’ll still give me one tonight, right?”
Megan scoffs, rolling her eyes even though the effect is dampened by the way her cheek’s squished, puffing outwards beneath her eye. “Don’t test your luck,” she deadpans, before her voice slips into something softer, quieter. Nudges Daniela’s shoulder and asks, “how was your night, anyway?”
It’s such a harmless question, is the annoying part; no reason for it to inspire the sudden spike of hot-blooded anxiety through her body. Daniela hadn’t seen Megan so she’d assumed, naturally, that there’d be no way for her to see her, the corner tucked far away from anywhere worth being, the girl unassuming, ambiguous. Hell, Megan’s face alone is telling her she has no idea. And yet.
Daniela opens her mouth to say something and feels the words choke against the back of her teeth.
“Woah.” Megan sits up a little straighter, concern undercurrent in her words. “You okay? Did something happen?”
“No,” Daniela groans. “No. I had fun. I think I just drank too much.”
She can feel Megan’s hesitation, watches her open her mouth before closing it, twisting her lips and furrowing her brow in quiet thought. For a beat she just flickers her eyes over Daniela’s face and—that’s one of the things about Megan. She’s always been good at catching Daniela off guard. It’s not as if she ever means to, but Megan’s always looked at people like she’s scrutinising them, as if she could piece together the entire puzzle of their being just from their habits alone.
Under her gaze Daniela feels raw and on display. Like a cadaver, or something, ready to be bifurcated and probed at, no organ left unturned.
Mostly, just like she drank too much.
“Okay,” Megan relents, and Daniela relaxes. Quietly, though, she raises one of her arms, waving Daniela over so she can collapse against the side of her body and bury her forehead into the soft muscle of Megan’s chest. “Is there anything I can do?” She murmurs after. “Do you want like, water?”
“I’m okay,” Daniela says, and means it, really. Tomorrow she’ll probably wake up in desperate need of water and two advils and a trip to the bathroom to empty her stomach again; will probably spend the whole day with her hoodie tugged over her head and a pair of sunglasses perched in the middle of her nose, irritable and hangover-sore. After a few days she’ll either cave under the weight of her own brain or be locked in her room by Manon with the express purpose of interrogating her, again, and she’ll find herself telling the whole story, top to bottom, the words finally peeled away from where they’d coated the top of her mouth like a gross membrane.
And she’ll cry, probably. But that’s later. This is now.
“It’s fine,” Daniela mumbles, curling further into the side of Megan. When she closes her eyes all she’s met with is darkness and the occasional flicker of gold from the fairy lights. “Let’s just, stay like this, for a little longer.”
“Okay,” Megan hums. And then, “don’t throw up on me, or something.”
Daniela just whacks her on the stomach.
In the car ride home Daniela rests her elbow on the passenger seat door, leaning her face against her curled fist despite how the occasional jostle of the car knocks her knuckles into her cheekbone. Lara’s in the back, asleep, mostly, leaving the front seat at mercy to the quiet flow of Megan’s R&B playlist.
It’s not early enough for the sun to be anywhere near rising. In the dark, with her eyes focused on the road, Daniela traces the way streetlights colour the contours of Megan’s face; yellow lining the curve of her forehead, red cutting across the plane of her nose. Megan drives with one hand firm around the top of the wheel and the other loose around the bottom.
The traffic light flickers green, haloes her lips, her jaw, in sharp light, and Daniela allows herself to think of how devastating she really is.
“So what’s the plan, exactly?” Manon asks later.
“Don’t know,” Daniela says.
“Okay, you know we need a plan, right?”
“Nope,” Daniela says again. It’s not like she’s been doing all this with one.
“Right.” Manon sighs, before asking, “are you going to tell her at all?”
Daniela reaches over Manon for the closest pillow she can find, before winding up, and smacking Manon straight on the back.
So no, is the evident answer to that, despite Manon’s incessant effort over the next few days for Daniela to say otherwise. For as well as Manon knows her they’re always bound to disagree over both the little and big things; they’re best friends, not clones of each other. Or actual twins for that matter.
Either way. What Daniela thinks is that telling Megan anything is a stupid idea, that even if it doesn’t turn into disaster, even the chance of something going wrong is a chance Daniela won’t take. Not when the consequences fracture out further than just their own interpersonal relationship, into the group and the cameras and the fans—out. Their very own careers.
And what about you? Had been Manon’s answer. Her logic settling on the idea that Megan and Daniela were both mature enough to weather any fallout, if there was one. Manon has always been a believer in just going for it. Everything’s easier when it’s all in the air.
But again. Daniela is not Manon, and Manon is not Daniela.
A plan is not the worst idea, though, Daniela can admit that one. Even if it has nothing to do with Megan.
“Dani,” Sophia says one evening, bursting through Daniela’s bedroom door after approximately one knock and less than five seconds for Daniela to prepare herself.
“You,” she says, voice flat, “are lucky I was only unpacking. What happened to knocking properly?”
Sophia makes a sheepish face, glancing around at all the boxes still piled up against Daniela’s walls, nudging a half-open one sitting haphazardly near the door out of the way with her foot. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll do better. I just wanted to talk, you know!”
Daniela narrows her eyes. “Did someone say something to you?”
That seems to give Sophia pause. “What?” She asks, picking a spot on the floor and settling down, dragging over one of the boxes labelled DANIELA CLOTHES AND SHIT (3??) and slicing it open with a nail. “No, no one told me anything. I just wanted to ask you what’s been up lately. You’ve been kind of, I don’t know, quiet? I thought I would do a check in.”
“Oh,” Daniela says, remembering this is Sophia she’s talking to. Their stalwart leader. Sometimes Daniela forgets that despite all of Sophia’s energy, her perpetual business, her constant jokes and occasional, deliberate bouts of immaturity, she’s always keeping an eye on the five of them. Almost like Megan, in a way. But where Megan’s perceptiveness is almost accidental, Sophia’s is deliberate. A conscious want to know them all as well as the back of her hand.
Sophia tilts her head in question. In her hands she’s folding one of the tops that’d made into Daniela’s closet box, all careful, precise movements with her fingers.
“I think that’s one of Lara’s,” Daniela says first, just to say something, before resuming her own tedious unboxing. Hers just says DANIELA VANITY (FRAGILE) (!!!). She picks out a broken old eye shadow palette she’d shoved into the back of a drawer and adds it to the dispose pile. Says, “I’m fine. There’s just some things I’ve been dealing with.”
“Okay,” Sophia replies slowly. “That’s fine. But you can always tell me anything, if you want. Or just, if there’s something I can do to make it easier for you?”
What goes unspoken is the before our next comeback. Or not even before, but during, now. The preparation stage. An opening to ease any burdens before it infects something that can’t be changed in post.
Daniela rubs at one of her eyebrows. There’s a plan, she remembers. Slow steps.
“It’s—kind of hard to say,” she settles on.
Sophia hums. Daniela watches as she pulls out a pair of jeans, flicking it straight in the air before folding it over twice with her forearm. “That’s okay. Take your time.”
“Um,” Daniela hedges. She remembers talking to Lara the other day, asking out of the blue at the end of a shoot as they’d walked back to their cars, if it ever got easier.
What, she’d responded, telling people? It depends. Sometimes it’s still hard, but It’s all down to you, baby girl. Some people find it easy, some hate the fact they have to every moment of their lives. You’ll figure it out.
“Do you remember,” Daniela starts, “when we were in Korea. And Manon and Lara and I did that live, and I, like, told everyone I was straight?”
“Uh, yeah?” Sophia pauses in her folding. “Why?”
“Um, well. So. Imight’veliedalittle?”
Sophia stares, mouth parting slightly as she processes. Says, “You’re going to have to say that slower,” but it’s soft and understanding she’s standing, now, walking over to Daniela’s perch on her bed. She hadn’t anticipated how this would go, Lara’s voice in the back of her head reminding her that she never will. The first time she’d thrown up. The second time she’d cried.
“I—like, might like girls, or whatever,” she amends, scrunching her nose at how unfamiliar the words feel rolling off her tongue. This time she’s met with Sophia’s fast-stretching grin, splitting her cheeks, her squeal as she climbs onto Daniela’s bed and tugs her into a tight hug.
“Oh my god,” Daniela splutters. But there’s no deterring Sophia, who just laughs and plants a gentle kiss against Daniela’s hairline.
“I’m proud of you,” Sophia murmurs into her curls, but there’s the strange feel of relief slipping away from her shoulders, and Daniela thinks of Manon and her dumb plan and how she’d been a little right, in the end.
What Daniela will always find amusing—or not amusing, just interesting, really—is how it could be possible to traverse life in two fundamentally different ways and still end up in the same place. Sometime after KATSEYE had been formed there’d been a moment off the back of a shoot where Daniela spent the whole time gnashing her jaw together, uncomfortable at all the answers she’d scraped out from the back of her throat, that she’d stormed into Megan and Lara’s room and collapsed onto Megan’s bed, just to ask how she did it.
Did what? Megan had answered, tapping absentmindedly on her phone. And it was kind of embarrassing, Daniela had realised in the middle of her self-flagellating seething, to demand answers from her younger bandmate on the age-old question of how to be yourself, or whatever. Daniela had spent all of Dream Academy trying to unlearn her habits from high school, picking apart at the stitches of a personality determined by its instinctual conformity: she’d moved so many times as a kid, been on the screen and under the spotlight, that around her peers there’d been no other option except to be what they asked of her.
There was the blonde, the straightening out of her curls, the way her spanish was a party trick.
The thing is that Daniela and Megan are not the polar opposites some people make them out to be. The difference has always been that Megan is better at exactly that, being Megan, unfettered and unapologetic; Daniela has always admired this about her. During Dream Academy she’d watched Megan shed all the angsty defences built up over a teenagehood spent hanging around vicious D-List L.A. wannabe-somethings, quicker on the uptake than Daniela, as if she’d simply grown tired of moulding herself into someone she wasn’t for the express purpose of keeping herself in the right circles.
While Daniela was still grappling with the idea of dying her hair anything other than blonde, Megan was busy dipping her toe into the act of endless candidness.
Daniela knows that Megan drinks all her coffee with whole milk despite a short detour into milk alternatives, that it didn’t work out because she has a thing about textures, and tastes, and that she sets three different alarms in the morning so she wakes up with enough time to stop by whatever her favourite coffee joint of the week is and still make it to work with fifteen minutes to spare. That for all her easygoingness she still has a neurotic streak a mile long, a therapist she zoom calls once a week from her car, and that when she gets an idea to do something, anything, she wants, it came with a primal urge to do it in whole, a need to sink her teeth in and chew until she’d had her full.
Most of all, that Megan loves Hawai’i, loves her home and her family and her culture. When she’d first told them all she was bisexual it’d been two thirds of the way through the survival show, back in Los Angeles a week or so before the live finale, at a random chinese restaurant Megan’s mom chose for them. Daniela doesn’t even remember what they were talking about anymore. Just that at some point Megan had gone, well, yeah, I like girls too, shrugged, and left it at that.
Later Daniela had pried her fortune cookie apart strangely anxious about it, as if the twenty-cent plastic wrapped treat really could foretell whether or not she’d make it, if the sweat and tears had been worth it. Between her fingertips she remembers it saying, like, SOON YOU WILL HAVE A CHANCE FOR A PROFITABLE INVESTMENT; REMEMBER TO TRUST THE MARKET. Whatever that meant.
After, she’d nudged Megan, flipped the fortune to the other side and asked, how do you say this?
Jiě … kě, Megan had responded, slowly, mouth stumbling over the tones. Then she’d shrugged again, popped one of the halves into her mouth. What’s it mean?
解渴, the fortune cookie said. To quench.
Daniela’s sitting at the dining table and poking at her heated up leftovers when she decides to ask, “How did you guys know?”
Lara, who is the one person actually using the kitchen, at the moment, just sort of turns her head to peer suspiciously at Daniela. Megan’s leaning back on her palms against one of the marble bench tops and is only there because she has every intention to filch half of Lara’s cooking.
“Know what?” She asks, letting her legs slide forward so she can do weird upright half-push ups. She’s in a good mood tonight, all kinetic energy like there’s a buzz under her skin she can’t quite scratch, and Daniela just raises one of her eyebrows when she slides forward an inch too far to lift herself back up and has to slip to the floor with a quiet oof.
“Dude,” Lara says.
“Sorry.”
Lara shakes her head as Megan grins sheepishly, pushing herself back up and padding over to the seat opposite Daniela. “Anyway,” she says, dragging out the syllables as she tugs the chair out and slumps into the leather, tucking one of her knees under her chin. “What’d you say, Dani?”
“Uh, no, nothing really.” Daniela shrugs. From the stove Lara twists her neck back over her shoulder, squinting, and Daniela would’ve been happy to leave her answer as that if it weren’t for the fact Lara’s giving her that look, the one where it’s obvious she knows exactly what Daniela’s referring to, and to just spit it out already. Damn. “Ugh, I don’t know. I guess I was just kinda curious how you both knew you were like, gay.”
In front of her Daniela watches in mute amusement as Megan’s eyebrows dip down and she tilts her head, trying to piece together what she just heard.
Lara only says, “Okay, are you asking for yourself, or because you genuinely want to know?”
“What? Oh, no I’m fine.” Daniela holds her hands out, waving them slightly as if to clear the air, because really she mostly was. It’s not—she’s not all the way there yet, she can admit that. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night a little paralysed at how quickly the very concept she had of herself had changed. It’s whatever, though. She’s tired of thinking about it. “A girl can’t ask a question anymore?”
“Uh,” Lara starts, waving a spatula at her. “Not in this context.”
“It wasn’t—I’m serious!” Daniela splutters. “I’m curious, because you’ve never, like, gone into detail!”
“You know damn well I have. Do we not remember every time I talked about high school?”
“Okay well—”
“Um,” Megan says, interjecting before they get a chance to properly start bickering, her eyes a little wide as she flicks them between the stove and the table. “Can I get some context here? I feel like I’m missing something. Or, no. I’m definitely missing something.”
Stories always have some sort of form, is the thing. Beginning, middle, end. Inception and climax, the satisfying resolution. Daniela doesn’t think she’s really been telling one, and if she was, it wasn’t in any sort of coherent way. She still can’t place her finger on where it all really began, and if her life has shown her anything it’s that you can never be completely sure of an ending. Unless you die, or something.
In any case, if she was telling a story; she supposes this would be where she’d bookmark the beginning of the end. New York, after her birthday, the six of them and their endlessly loyal staff, fresh off the back of a successful series of promotions for their new mini.
Daniela, drunk. As it always seems to happen.
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Date: 2025-07-28 01:40 am (UTC)there are so many moments that broke me in that exact quiet way: daniela tracing megan’s ankle in the car without even thinking about it. the towel on her neck. the bead of water down her spine. the way her entire body responds to a touch that megan doesn’t even realize she’s giving. daniela’s entire crisis builds so gradually and naturally that by the time she’s falling apart in a bathroom, or asking vague questions at the dinner table, you’re like, of course she can’t hold this anymore. i felt every ounce of what led her there.
i've read the 'daniela suddenly realizes she's gay for megan' trope once or twice so i appreciate that your writing never forces the epiphanies. daniela doesn’t wake up and say “i’m gay now”. she spirals. she compartmentalizes. she asks weird half-questions to her friends and then gets defensive when they see through her. and then she softens again. and that is what makes this daniela the most real i’ve ever seen her. you have her figured out: she’s a girl who’s been performing for most of her life: onstage, in new cities, in front of cameras, and now she’s staring at all the versions of herself she built for survival and realizing none of them fit anymore.
and megan, god. the way you wrote her, not just as a love interest, but as someone fully herself. her dorkiness balanced with her emotional steadiness, so nuanced just like irl megan. it’s not just that daniela is in love with megan. she's just lovable on her own.
and the meizini dynamic as a whole is just... perfect. megan as this steady gravitational force, not even fully aware of her own effect. daniela as the girl constantly trying to translate her feelings into something safe, only to realize that all the safe versions of her are slowly falling away. the car ride home with the streetlight glow ('The traffic light flickers green, haloes her lips, her jaw, in sharp light, and Daniela allows herself to think of how devastating she really is.). the way daniela thinks, “so now what?” and then doesn’t answer, because the answer is too big and too heavy and too close to her chest. that line has echoed through every section of the fic, always slightly redefined. always a little closer to truth.
and then that scene with sophia... you KNOW how i get about sophia laforteza. that was so soft and validating. and i love that you were on sophia's ass because yeah, you get her, you know her. of course her ass is balancing out being worried for her dani but Also for the group. i am going to snipe you ms. laforteza. anyways. the way you show that coming out isn’t always about trauma or tragedy, sometimes it’s just letting the people who love you love you more. sophia hugging her, kissing her head, saying “i’m proud of you”.
so yeah. this is the best meizini work i’ve read. because you didn’t just write the ship, even though i am convinced no one on the planet gets meizini like you do. you wrote daniela’s becoming (you are SO good with writing daniela and inserting her in this gayass scenario without having to change her personality, keeping her true self). you wrote what it means to want something so badly it terrifies you. you wrote about being witnessed. and you wrote it with so much care, insight, and craft. i need to hear everything you think about meizini forever. like, actually forever. and you know i am Not a meizini girl, but, well... i am a You girl i guess.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-29 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-06 05:18 am (UTC)