f(x); show me your teeth. {sulli/krystal.}
Title: show me your teeth.
Author: augmenti
Fandom(s)/Pairing(s): f(x), sulli/krystal
Prompt: werewolves
Rating: pg-13
Warnings: hints of graphic violence.
Summary: First rule of anti-society: Do not talk about the anti-society.
Also on AO3 | dreamwidth
When it happens it doesn’t seem like a dream. They always do that in movies, make it a sort of quick thing, a montage of quick flashes and trees and blood and screaming. Really, Jinri doesn’t remember a whole lot of screaming happening. She definitely doesn’t remember the trees, or the flashes. There isn’t really any growling, either. In fact, everything was really peaceful.
Morning sun filtered through the trees, a slow wind brushed her hair off her shoulders as she ran. The only thing she really remembered before she was how the air under her sneakers felt when she was ripped off the path and into the woods. She distinctly remembered stopping to brush at the coarse, fine hair of her knees down from the way they’d risen up right before everything in the universe that she knew just completely flipped upside down.
A snap in front of her nose jerks her right out of her reverie, as Krystal sits down on the other side of her table, slapping a notebook on the cafeteria table.
“Yo Jinri, what’s up?” She asks like she doesn’t care, turning to her bag and pulling out an apple. Jinri knows it’s an apple before she pulls it out because it’s a Monday, and Krystal always has apples on Monday’s. Even more than that though, she knows it’s an apple because it’s been festering in her bag all day, and she’s smelled it in every class so far. That’s the fact that she ignores. The same way she ignores that she knows just how tasteless it’s going to be, just how soft it is compared to how it should be.
Jinri ignores this the same way she’s been ignoring the little pain in the middle of her chest when she grins and says, “Just the sky.” She hides every little thing wrong with her somewhere next to the wolf biting it’s way out of the depths of her stomach. As much as she hates to say it, the same way she hates how Krystal snaps her fingers, snaps her heels, snaps her notebook open, snaps at the apple in one hand, is the way she feels when her heart snaps beneath her ribcage at every idol glance.
“So, have I missed anything good?” Krystal asks. Snap, goes her apple, as she takes another bite.
Jinri shrugs, leaning forward and putting her chin in her hand. Fingers flash towards one table. “Amber’s wearing her jersey again.”
“Ugh, does she have no other clothes?”
“Sunyoung’s got the fat jeans on again.”
“Monster thighs again,” Krystal sighs. “How will we survive PE?” She finishes her apple and swipes it into the bin, because she has freakishly long limbs and painted nails and really amazing aim. Krystal isn’t a PE star, she isn’t a Dancing Queen. She’s just someone who hates everyone just like Jinri, so they fit. Her dyed hair, painted nails, black on black on ripped jeans compared to Jinri’s ruffle skirts, teddy bear shirts, natural hair. They shouldn’t be outcasts, but they are. It’s a free will sort of thing.
The only one’s who can ridicule society accurately are the one’s that quit that thing like no one’s business, so quoted Krystal at their very first lunch meeting, freshman year.
“I think Victoria’s date is pregnant,” Krystal says absently, and Jinri nearly chokes on a pear.
“I think he’s just had too much beer.”
“Ah, they start so young these days,” Krystal flips back her hair with a lamentable sigh, raising her make up plastered eyes skyward. Once, Jinri thought they should feel bad about this, the calling out of weirdo’s, the judgement, the ridicule. However, it’s their civic duty to evaluate society. Krystal also might have said that, and Jinri might be shamelessly in love with her.
So it feels all the worse that she has to keep so many secrets from her.
Yet, she doesn’t want it any other way.
Fall starts when Jinri wakes up in the middle of the night, feverish and aching. She can’t move, she can’t run, her legs feel like lead and burning all at once, her head is on fire, and she screams out but no one ever seems to hear. She’s locked herself in the cellar room, deep in the basement where it smells like moldy wood chips and can’t be opened if you wedge it closed just right. It’s all but soundproof, all but perfect. Except she shreds her clothing, slams her wolf head on the roof, bruises herself spectacularly, and only just manages to make it back into her bed in the morning before her mother wakes up for work. She has to take off of school for three days with a fever.
The movies tell you about this part, but it’s so easy to pretend it doesn’t happen, so easy to pretend they can just hop right back into life when they’re feeling like they just ate their previous skin.
She still feels horrible when she finally manages to crawl out of bed again and catch the bus to school. She manages, somehow, to cake on make up to look normal. She manages to put on her favorite skirt. She manages to style her hair. Somehow, she even puts on heels. Somehow, she gets through the day.
The only hiccup is when she gets to lunch, takes one look at the goulash for lunch and all but hurls.
She never thought of how much goulash looks like human insides until she ate her own for a midnight snack.
“Seriously,” Krystal’s voice snaps in her mind, snapping like a dragon, like a wasp, like the jaw of her wolfy self when it attacked her human carcass. “So many people were gone! Victoria, Amber, Luna: All gone! I had no one to tease and no one to talk to about it. All of my entertainment abandoned me.” She puffs out her cheeks, puts on her most annoyed look.
It would look a lot better if she weren’t wearing so much mascara, Jinri thinks, and then feels awful about it for some reason.
“I even had to write about my sister in the book! Look, see?” She whirls her notebook in Jinri’s direction, and she tips her head obediently to read her messy handwriting.
Today, Jessica stared blankly at the wall, ignoring this plane of existence. “I mean really, she didn’t even notice that Hyoyeon kept bumping shoulders with her, trying to get her attention. What is this, How I Met Your Sister?”
Jinri snorts, because it doesn’t make sense. Because no TV has anything on what’s been going on, not even Teen Wolf, and she has to hate that show on principle of hating everything. Especially sensationalized, confusing, reality unreality. “I don’t think your sister lives on this plane of existence.”
At this, Krystal rolls her eyes. She’s really good at that. “She got abducted by aliens when she was eight and hasn’t come back to earth since. The person we know is just an alien in her skin, temporarily living her life until they’ve finished probing her and getting her pregnant to investigate interracial intercourse.”
The theory is so well thought out and so ridiculous that Jinri laughs all the way into Government, and even draws it in the margins of her textbook when the teacher isn’t looking.
After class, she’s so focused in getting to English to show Krystal her drawing that she doesn’t realize that Amber’s there until she shoves her into the girl’s bathroom, pushes her into a stall, and locks the door behind them. Amber is the kind of person who’s ridiculously focused even when they’re grinning. She’s a star soccer player, and one time she even kicked the ball from midfield to the net. It was the best thing anyone in this town had ever seen. It rocketed her from lowbrow skater girl status to instant popularity.
She rolls that popularity off her shoulders, laughs it off with a twinkle in her eye and always says that she just likes to play the game. It’s the truth and everyone laughs about it because it’s supposed to be good to be humble but all Jinri’s ever wanted to see Amber do is say, ‘Damn right, I did that, and I could do it again but I don’t because your team is a joke, stop using me as an excuse to not do anything.’ She doesn’t, though, because she’s always been too nice. Because Amber doesn’t have any balls, no matter how short she wears her hair.
Now, though, she’s taking all the force and intensity she’s ever wanted to see and pushing it into the fucking nails at her shoulders. This close she can smell the burger she ate for lunch, smell the protein bar she had at breakfast, smell the fresh grass in her shoes and fresh air in her hair. There’s also something more there, something familiar, but Jinri doesn’t want to think about it.
Until Amber, with her intense gaze, pushes her shoulders until she falls against the stall wall and then pins her there and shoves until the wall creaks, lowers her voice to an inhuman level and asks, eyes flashing, “Where do you transform?”
“Transform, what?” Jinri asks, her heart speeding up in her chest.
“Where?” Amber asks, and just like that, Jinri knows why her scent is so familiar the same way she dreams about waking up next to crushed beer bottles with a chunk of her throat healing over and a monster in a head that just won’t go away.
“In my basement.” She says and shoves Amber back, pushing her into the toilet paper roll and not even saying sorry when she does it. She doesn’t like it, she doesn’t like the proximity, and she hates how she can hear Amber’s palpitating heartbeat. The only person she ever wants to be that close to again is Krystal, and that is a disturbing thought. “Why are we in here, you want to take another bite out of me?”
She says it to hurt, and it does. Amber’s eyes go wide and her face goes slack. Her body goes stiff, though, and she pushes her again with ah and meant to keep her there. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Jinri level’s a glare that hurts to give, the hate feels so intense. She’s never been as angry as she is right now and it makes her feel euphoric. “No! I’m not okay! You left me in the middle of the woods - and it was you I know - because we’ve just passed that bridge and okay, fine! You bit me, you left me there, I’ve been through three really, really horrible transformations - I mean wow, Teen Wolf never prepared me for that - And now, NOW, you come?”
Amber’s shaking now, badly enough that it looks like she’s going to fall into the toilet. Her knees even bump the porcelain. “It isn’t like that, though. It wasn’t supposed to be a thing, okay? No one was supposed to be there and I wasn’t supposed to get out. They didn’t tie my chain securely. It’s a thing, I look more buff than I am.”
She realizes then that Amber’s just a baby too. Just a little baby wolf with no idea what she’s doing at all. “Who didn’t?”
Amber runs a hand through her hair, multiple times, biting her lips like she’s trying really hard not to say what Jinri desperately needs to know.
“I mean, you’re talking about this like there’s some sort of structure, like there’s some kind of system in place to help people or something. Like there’s more of us. Like we’re some Werewolf Federation of North America, and doesn’t that sound great?”
Amber laughs, shakily, runs a hand across her chin, glances up into her eyes, and then down. Jinri makes sure to inflect extra intensity into her gaze. She even takes a page out of Krystal’s book and snaps her foot down really hard on the pee smelling floor.
“Yeah, there is. Well, sort of. It’s like a pack, right? Werewolves come in packs.”
“Federation,” Jinri snaps.
“Yeah, whatever. But no, that’s not right. It’s a family.” Amber tilts her head. “I’m a beta. Sunyoung’s a Beta. Victoria’s the Alpha, but she doesn’t have a mate. She tests people, right? But she’s the Alpha.”
Jinri’s lips curls before she even realizes it. Because these are all people who’ve been in certain circles of society all her life. These are people who have been ridiculously in the limelight of events. They’re really talented, really charismatic, and more. “This conversation just got a lot more stupid, okay.”
Amber opens her mouth to reply, manages a “You were a mistake--” Before the door to the bathroom bangs open and a flock of chattering, perfume infested girls rush into the room. Taking the chance for what it is, Jinri unlatches the stall and out of the bathroom, down the hall and to class before the final bell can ring.
For all the horrible horribleness of all of these sudden bathroom-revelations, it’s the last part that really hurts.
“You were a mistake,” Rushed out with shifting eyes the same way her mom said it once when she was way too drunk and Jinri had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. You were a mistake, just like her father said before he ran off. A mistake, just like everything she’d ever been told by any society, ever.
It stewed in her head all through the end of the school day, all through the night, all through the next day.
Until Krystal yanked the thought away with a snap of her gum.
“What’s with you?” Krystal’s voice grates on her ears. “It’s almost like you don’t want to do this today.”
Jinri could tell she’d been trying to make her feel better. So far, she’s made fun of everything on Sunyoung, from her shoes to the way her voice carried over the tables, “Like she thinks she’s in a musical now, or something. Ugh, look at that sweater. She definitely wants to be in Rent or something.”
It’s the accusation that makes her snap. Just one too many snaps, breaking her concentration, creeping into her life, getting into her mind.
“Ugh, so what if she does!” Jinri slams her hands down on the table so loud that her tray rattles.
“So what if she wears stupid shirts, so what if Victoria’s ass looks bad in those jeans, they’re her jeans, let her wear them! So what if Amber’s face looks like it got run over by a truck, if she’s slumping like a slug in the sun, if she’s got wobbly knees or if her hair looks really dumb in that cut! It’s not going to change anything, they’re still going to be idiots tomorrow, trying really hard to get into society even if we’re all going to be in society anyway, no matter how we reject it like some dumb punk rock people! It’s just! Useless!”
She throws her hands up in disgust, yanks on her hair until she can feel the strands snapping, and then drops her face onto her book.
“Wow,” Krystal says, and it’s quiet for once. If Jinri had looked up, she’d be able to see just why her heart leapt the way it did. “I never said anything like that about Amber. That was all you.” She says, instead of anything else, and then snaps her gum resolutely. It was so beside the entire point that Jinri caves immediately, frustration tacking onto the thread of conversation.
“I can’t help it, Amber ruined my life.” She groans, buries her head in her arms, tries to block out the sunlight. She can feel the tension in Krystal’s arms when she says it.
“You...mean. You like Amber?”
“What, no!” Jinri looks up, fixes Krystal with the best glare she has. “Never! Come on.”
“Oh, good.” Krystal has a weird lilt to her voice, an odd blush to her cheeks. Jinri opens her mouth to ask her about it but Krystal finishes peeling the new stick of gum from her bag and pops it into her open mouth. When her fingers brush so softly against them and they both freeze a little, Jinri breathes out and tries not to think too much about it when Krystal pulls her hand away and hides her face behind a curtain of long hair.
“Because you’re not allowed to like anyone, it’s against the rules, remember. ‘No relations with society,’ remember.” Krystal tapped her notebook. “Number three. Right after-”
“Right after ‘Take no prisoners’ and ‘No empathizing with the enemy.’” The enemy being society, society being everyone else. “Wow, I’ve been really bad at this.”
“Yes, you have.” Krystal says, the silent ‘duh’ hanging between them silently, heavily, because they had both agreed that saying duh was just too valley girl and the closer they got to valley girl the more they valued the opinions of jock’s and they couldn’t have that. It was rule number five.
Even though Krystal had cancelled out Jinri’s frustration, that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it, because she was still a little girl playing at a war that no one could win. Although they went to class and Jinri’s head felt clearer because of the spearmint gum and the shadow of Krystal’s nail on her lip, her heart felt divided, as annoyingly cliche as it was.
The more time passed and the closer they got to the next full moon, the more Jinri would find herself getting drawn to the rest of the ‘pack.’ Every time Amber met her eyes in Chemistry, every time she smacked Sunyoung with the ball in Dodgeball, every time Victoria passed her in the hallway, she felt an odd beckoning. Like the pull of imaginary tide, pulling her, drowning, out to sea.
She’s keeping all of this inside, a huge secret that goes against everything she and Krystal had started, but she can’t help it. It’s not like they sell werewolf how-to-guide’s, or like there’s a big gathering of them on the internet. There are no Werewolf Anonymous meetings to go to and she wouldn’t participate anyway. She’s the pastel wearing type, not the fake leather, stinky, waxy skin types.
It starts, really starts, when Amber slides in next to her at Chemistry, eyes gleaming with charisma. “Hey.”
“Hi?” Jinri pretends to ignore her, and the way her face immediately heats up. The way her heart suddenly evens out from it’s odd beating pattern when Amber’s not around. Like there are two hearts in there, and they’re only in unison when she’s around. It’s a dumb theory, but it holds up.
“How you doin’?”
Jinri finally closes her notebook in favor of giving her the biggest eyeroll of the century. “Did you really just throw that quote at me?”
“Uh, not on purpose?” Amber says with a staggering laugh, rubbing at the back of her neck. It’s awkward. Amber’s wearing a team jersey. With a logo. Jinri’s wearing pastel clothes, a flowery skirt, and she looks good. Amber just looks like a boy.
“Okay, bro.” She draws out the bro with a sneer. “What can I say? Chemistry is about to start, my lab partner is suddenly my papa wolf, and I feel all weird and twisted inside.” She feels horrified that she even revealed that much, but once she gets going she can’t stop. “By the way, you are intruding on all my rules. Every single one of them. You guys need to go away and let me handle this on my own because really, werewolf packs?”
Amber leans forward, looking pale and terrified. All that fake humor and charm suddenly gone. “You could keep it down, you know. There are people who poach people like us.”
“‘People like us,’” Jinri repeats, her voice rising as her anxiety does. “There are no ‘People Like Us’ because we don’t qualify as people.” She lowers her tone as classmates are starting to turn and stare. “Why can’t you leave me alone, I’m trying to learn.”
Amber snorts. “Why, I thought you were all anti-society.”
“Know thy enemy,” Jinri quips, turning towards the front as the bell rang. “School is about research. So I know what not to do.”
Amber touches her arm, and Jinri instantly turns to look at her, like there’s some sort of internal force making her obey. Like she wanted to. Amber’s hand is warm, and when they match eyes, there was a spark of humor there. The kind that didn’t come with condescension.
“So why don’t you do that with us, too. Come see what we’re like, after school, and then if you feel comfortable, you can transform with us. You don’t have to stay, but it’d be nice if you’d try it. I hate seeing you with so many bruises all the time.”
Jinri wants more than anything to brush it off, return kindness with cruelty, to not get involved. This breaks nearly every rule in the book already, pushes right through them all so easily. If she accepted, it was going to be the biggest breach of club rules she’s ever made.
“Okay, sure.”
“Cool, I’ll meet you outside after school.” Amber taps her mechanical pencil against the desk top until it clicks, just as the teacher walks back inside to start class. “I’ll take you to the clubhouse.”
Jinri would be lying if she hadn’t sneered internally about the term ‘clubhouse’ the whole way there. Especially since it wasn’t a clubhouse at all, but Victoria’s house.
Apparently, Victoria lived alone. Which was really convenient for a werewolf Alpha to not take advantage of, and she had henceforth converted her house into a little werewolf haven or something, because Amber and Sunyoung both stomped around it like they owned it. When they arrived, Sunyoung’s little beat up yellow slug-bug was outside in the driveway, and she was banging around in the kitchen when they walked in.
Well, she thought it was just Sunyoung, but Victoria was there too, at the stove, the counters filled with all sorts of food in the making.
As soon as Jinri steps through the door they both turn from their conversation with twin bright smiles. Sunyoung’s sitting on the counter with her legs swinging back and forth, putting filling into dumplings and handing them to Victoria, who’s setting them in a bamboo steamer on top of bamboo leaves. Both of them could cause blindness with smiles, honestly. No one in the world had smiles as bright as these three. She nearly backs right out of the kitchen right then, but Amber puts a hand on the small of her back and pushes her forward.
“Hi!” Victoria is all smiles and teeth, and Jinri’s not sure if she’s sincere or not when she does because she’s always been a hard one to crack. She’s a few years older, a senior like Jessica, and she’s only ever looked at her from a distance. It’s way more fun to make up stuff about people when you don’t really know them.
But Victoria really seems to mean it when she pushes the plate of cookies on the table towards her and all but orders her to eat. “Thanks for coming! Amber says you’re giving us a trial run, or something like that, so I’m going to do my best to convince you to stay.”
“I bet you’ll stay when you taste her food, though.” Sunyoung says, singsong, and Jinri nearly throws a cookie at her.
“That’s the plan,” Victoria chimed with a wink, trying for the same tune as Sunyoung and failing miserably, because Victoria might make amazing cookies, but she isn’t a singer.
Of all of them, Sunyoung’s the one she has the most trouble liking. She’s all sugar, all bounce. She’s so sincere about everything that it could make a nutter weep, and she really, really has bad taste in all things style, even worse in music. Which is just bad for someone who’s played the lead in every musical since freshman year. She’s not sure how she managed to force her way to the popular circle when she’s all energy and no brain, but they seem to like that in that circle anyway. Jinri would never forget the time she lost the talent show to Jieun and bawled in front of the entire assembly, but maybe that was just a personal issue.
Victoria’s house is mostly a cottage, filled to the brim with old-person stuff, and none of it makes sense until she finds out it used to be her Grandparents house, and that her Grandma left her name on the will, and that her parents are always away on business anyway so it’s nice to have a place to call home. When she talks about her family she talks matter of fact, like there is no gripe between her and them, no feeling. They support her and send her money and that’s what her parents are.
“My real family is you guys,” Victoria says, and her eyes sparkle oddly from the sunlight shining in through the window. She always knew that Victoria’s family was rich, but she didn’t know she lived alone, and she definitely didn’t know that she could cook.
Really, wow. Could she ever cook. She made dumplings for dinner. Homemade, Chinese pork dumplings, and Jinri’s pretty sure it’s the first time she ever had anything so mouth watering tasty. She’s not sure who told them that the most surefire way to get into her heart is to feed her really good food, but someone must have, because she can’t resist after that.
Against her will, against her rules, she starts to get closer to them. Before she realizes it, she’s there on a Friday with her overnight bag packed with extra bandages, and the full moon is all but about to pop over the horizon.
“Okay, it’s nearly time, pack.” Victoria says, and for the first time ever Jinri feels okay with being grouped with them. Because it’s the full moon, and she’s afraid, and Victoria is there and the Alpha and she’s taken care of all of them like some sort of saintly mother.
She follows the others to the basement, and instead of a cellar of horror with chains and brick walls and iron bars, she finds a soft, squishy room with padded walls and a torn up couch. It might not win any awards for decor with the scratches and the loose stuffing everywhere, but it’s a lot better than her tiny dungeon back home.
“W-what?” She says, because it doesn’t make any sense.
The grin Amber flashes at her is almost heavenly. “Yeah, different, huh?”
“Um, I kind of expected more...bars.” She tests the cushion on the floor with one bare foot before she steps. It’s like a padded cell, not a dungeon master’s cave.
“The benefits of being in a pack, is that the wolf is a lot more docile when it has one.” Victoria says, with a hint of authority, a hint of script. She’s done this before. “No more bruises for you, Jinri.” She grins at her, holds up a victory sign. “I’m going to take care of you tonight, okay?”
Jinri can feel the change taking hold of her even while she nods. “Okay, I guess.”
She wakes up naked, curled up between Amber and Sunyoung, feeling warm and cozy, and Victoria is threading her fingers through her hair. She looks up, dizzy, disoriented, and her own guts aren’t swirling inside of her for once. Her own remains. Her stomach growls, even, and Victoria laughs and leans down to kiss her hair.
Jinri can smell herself on her breath, and Amber, and Sunyoung too.
“Welcome to the pack,” Victoria whispers, so gently that she can’t help but laugh even though she’s naked, surrounded by girls and so comfortable with it. She feels, for the first time, maybe ever, that she’s home. She can’t help it, she laughs, and it’s dazzling.
For once, school doesn’t seem daunting. For once when Jinri smiles, she means it. For once, she feels just like the carefully bright pastel colors she wears every day. When she sees Krystal, she can’t help but feel so overwhelmed by emotion that she wants to hug her, hold her, kiss her, even.
“Hey!” She says, beaming. Krystal squints at her, eyeliner thick and hair carefully catastrophic.
“Oh my god, why are you smiling like the sun?” She gripes, puts a hand up like she’s shielding her eyes from her. “You’re beaming, stop it, it hurts.”
She laughs. She hasn’t been able to stop laughing since she woke up this morning. “I know, I know! I just can’t help it. I just had a really good night, okay!” She can practically taste her own exclamation points, but she can’t seem to dial it down.
“Oh no, who are you dating. You’re dating, aren’t you. That’s against the rules, you know.”
“No, no!” Jinri shakes her head empathetically. “I’m not, I swear.”
Krystal snaps her gum, putting a hand on her hip. Other kids start to file in, pushing around them to get to classes, grouping around in their social circles. “Oh, yeah? Then what’s up?”
“I’m not sure. It was just weird. I do have to tell you something, though, and it’s important.”
“Oh good, finally, you’re going to say something. You’ve been so lame, you know. As a fellow General in our anti-society campaign, I’m really upset about how little effort you’ve been putting into this. Like Maximum lack of effort.”
“I really like you!” Jinri burst out. It was so fast, so enthusiastic, that she blinks at herself. “I really like you,” she repeats, more calmly. Then everything catches up with her in the widening of Krystal’s eyes, in the widening of her own eyes, in the way she woke up this morning feeling absolutely coddled and safe and happy.
“I really like you, and I know that dating is a society thing, and I know that friends are sort of a cliche, and I also know that all of it is against our rules. Although, isn’t following rules sort of like a social thing anyway? Can’t we just be happy together, making fun of society and going against it and still doing stuff? Because I really want to do stuff. With you. All the time.”
“You like me?” Krystal opens and closes her mouth a few times like a fish, gasping for breath. “Wow, I didn’t know you had a heart.” Jinri punches her lightly in the arm.
“Okay, okay.” Krystal looks down, then at the lockers, then at students milling and pushing and forcing their way through the hallways. Then up at the ceiling, where a blush lines her cheeks and turns her ears a bit pink. “Um, so you’re saying, you want to go on a date?”
Jinri nods, then says, “Yes.” She reaches for Krystal’s hand, and when she doesn’t pull away she squeezes it. “I would like that so much.”
Krystal finally looks back at her, tilts her head a little, and then says. “I was wondering if you’d ever ask.”
“Cliche!” Jinri bumps their hips together, and Krystal laughs, and it doesn’t sound chagrinned or bitter or horrible. It sounds real.
Jinri’s hand feels so warm, even though she has a big secret, even though everything feels like a dream. She’ll take it, this time. This movie, gas-lighting thing that her heart’s doing whenever Krystal flips her hair, or laughs, or touches her hand. Gas-lighting might be the bane of media, but she can’t seem to turn it off until Krystal snaps her fingers, or her gum, or her notebook. Or her heel. Because if anyone can kill gas-lighting, it’s Krystal, but when the happiness doesn’t disappear, she realizes that they’ve always been like this, that the bickering and the comments only add to it, and that Krystal is just awesome, no matter what.
K & J’s Anti-Society Rules
Author: augmenti
Fandom(s)/Pairing(s): f(x), sulli/krystal
Prompt: werewolves
Rating: pg-13
Warnings: hints of graphic violence.
Summary: First rule of anti-society: Do not talk about the anti-society.
Also on AO3 | dreamwidth
When it happens it doesn’t seem like a dream. They always do that in movies, make it a sort of quick thing, a montage of quick flashes and trees and blood and screaming. Really, Jinri doesn’t remember a whole lot of screaming happening. She definitely doesn’t remember the trees, or the flashes. There isn’t really any growling, either. In fact, everything was really peaceful.
Morning sun filtered through the trees, a slow wind brushed her hair off her shoulders as she ran. The only thing she really remembered before she was how the air under her sneakers felt when she was ripped off the path and into the woods. She distinctly remembered stopping to brush at the coarse, fine hair of her knees down from the way they’d risen up right before everything in the universe that she knew just completely flipped upside down.
A snap in front of her nose jerks her right out of her reverie, as Krystal sits down on the other side of her table, slapping a notebook on the cafeteria table.
“Yo Jinri, what’s up?” She asks like she doesn’t care, turning to her bag and pulling out an apple. Jinri knows it’s an apple before she pulls it out because it’s a Monday, and Krystal always has apples on Monday’s. Even more than that though, she knows it’s an apple because it’s been festering in her bag all day, and she’s smelled it in every class so far. That’s the fact that she ignores. The same way she ignores that she knows just how tasteless it’s going to be, just how soft it is compared to how it should be.
Jinri ignores this the same way she’s been ignoring the little pain in the middle of her chest when she grins and says, “Just the sky.” She hides every little thing wrong with her somewhere next to the wolf biting it’s way out of the depths of her stomach. As much as she hates to say it, the same way she hates how Krystal snaps her fingers, snaps her heels, snaps her notebook open, snaps at the apple in one hand, is the way she feels when her heart snaps beneath her ribcage at every idol glance.
“So, have I missed anything good?” Krystal asks. Snap, goes her apple, as she takes another bite.
Jinri shrugs, leaning forward and putting her chin in her hand. Fingers flash towards one table. “Amber’s wearing her jersey again.”
“Ugh, does she have no other clothes?”
“Sunyoung’s got the fat jeans on again.”
“Monster thighs again,” Krystal sighs. “How will we survive PE?” She finishes her apple and swipes it into the bin, because she has freakishly long limbs and painted nails and really amazing aim. Krystal isn’t a PE star, she isn’t a Dancing Queen. She’s just someone who hates everyone just like Jinri, so they fit. Her dyed hair, painted nails, black on black on ripped jeans compared to Jinri’s ruffle skirts, teddy bear shirts, natural hair. They shouldn’t be outcasts, but they are. It’s a free will sort of thing.
The only one’s who can ridicule society accurately are the one’s that quit that thing like no one’s business, so quoted Krystal at their very first lunch meeting, freshman year.
“I think Victoria’s date is pregnant,” Krystal says absently, and Jinri nearly chokes on a pear.
“I think he’s just had too much beer.”
“Ah, they start so young these days,” Krystal flips back her hair with a lamentable sigh, raising her make up plastered eyes skyward. Once, Jinri thought they should feel bad about this, the calling out of weirdo’s, the judgement, the ridicule. However, it’s their civic duty to evaluate society. Krystal also might have said that, and Jinri might be shamelessly in love with her.
So it feels all the worse that she has to keep so many secrets from her.
Yet, she doesn’t want it any other way.
Fall starts when Jinri wakes up in the middle of the night, feverish and aching. She can’t move, she can’t run, her legs feel like lead and burning all at once, her head is on fire, and she screams out but no one ever seems to hear. She’s locked herself in the cellar room, deep in the basement where it smells like moldy wood chips and can’t be opened if you wedge it closed just right. It’s all but soundproof, all but perfect. Except she shreds her clothing, slams her wolf head on the roof, bruises herself spectacularly, and only just manages to make it back into her bed in the morning before her mother wakes up for work. She has to take off of school for three days with a fever.
The movies tell you about this part, but it’s so easy to pretend it doesn’t happen, so easy to pretend they can just hop right back into life when they’re feeling like they just ate their previous skin.
She still feels horrible when she finally manages to crawl out of bed again and catch the bus to school. She manages, somehow, to cake on make up to look normal. She manages to put on her favorite skirt. She manages to style her hair. Somehow, she even puts on heels. Somehow, she gets through the day.
The only hiccup is when she gets to lunch, takes one look at the goulash for lunch and all but hurls.
She never thought of how much goulash looks like human insides until she ate her own for a midnight snack.
“Seriously,” Krystal’s voice snaps in her mind, snapping like a dragon, like a wasp, like the jaw of her wolfy self when it attacked her human carcass. “So many people were gone! Victoria, Amber, Luna: All gone! I had no one to tease and no one to talk to about it. All of my entertainment abandoned me.” She puffs out her cheeks, puts on her most annoyed look.
It would look a lot better if she weren’t wearing so much mascara, Jinri thinks, and then feels awful about it for some reason.
“I even had to write about my sister in the book! Look, see?” She whirls her notebook in Jinri’s direction, and she tips her head obediently to read her messy handwriting.
Today, Jessica stared blankly at the wall, ignoring this plane of existence. “I mean really, she didn’t even notice that Hyoyeon kept bumping shoulders with her, trying to get her attention. What is this, How I Met Your Sister?”
Jinri snorts, because it doesn’t make sense. Because no TV has anything on what’s been going on, not even Teen Wolf, and she has to hate that show on principle of hating everything. Especially sensationalized, confusing, reality unreality. “I don’t think your sister lives on this plane of existence.”
At this, Krystal rolls her eyes. She’s really good at that. “She got abducted by aliens when she was eight and hasn’t come back to earth since. The person we know is just an alien in her skin, temporarily living her life until they’ve finished probing her and getting her pregnant to investigate interracial intercourse.”
The theory is so well thought out and so ridiculous that Jinri laughs all the way into Government, and even draws it in the margins of her textbook when the teacher isn’t looking.
After class, she’s so focused in getting to English to show Krystal her drawing that she doesn’t realize that Amber’s there until she shoves her into the girl’s bathroom, pushes her into a stall, and locks the door behind them. Amber is the kind of person who’s ridiculously focused even when they’re grinning. She’s a star soccer player, and one time she even kicked the ball from midfield to the net. It was the best thing anyone in this town had ever seen. It rocketed her from lowbrow skater girl status to instant popularity.
She rolls that popularity off her shoulders, laughs it off with a twinkle in her eye and always says that she just likes to play the game. It’s the truth and everyone laughs about it because it’s supposed to be good to be humble but all Jinri’s ever wanted to see Amber do is say, ‘Damn right, I did that, and I could do it again but I don’t because your team is a joke, stop using me as an excuse to not do anything.’ She doesn’t, though, because she’s always been too nice. Because Amber doesn’t have any balls, no matter how short she wears her hair.
Now, though, she’s taking all the force and intensity she’s ever wanted to see and pushing it into the fucking nails at her shoulders. This close she can smell the burger she ate for lunch, smell the protein bar she had at breakfast, smell the fresh grass in her shoes and fresh air in her hair. There’s also something more there, something familiar, but Jinri doesn’t want to think about it.
Until Amber, with her intense gaze, pushes her shoulders until she falls against the stall wall and then pins her there and shoves until the wall creaks, lowers her voice to an inhuman level and asks, eyes flashing, “Where do you transform?”
“Transform, what?” Jinri asks, her heart speeding up in her chest.
“Where?” Amber asks, and just like that, Jinri knows why her scent is so familiar the same way she dreams about waking up next to crushed beer bottles with a chunk of her throat healing over and a monster in a head that just won’t go away.
“In my basement.” She says and shoves Amber back, pushing her into the toilet paper roll and not even saying sorry when she does it. She doesn’t like it, she doesn’t like the proximity, and she hates how she can hear Amber’s palpitating heartbeat. The only person she ever wants to be that close to again is Krystal, and that is a disturbing thought. “Why are we in here, you want to take another bite out of me?”
She says it to hurt, and it does. Amber’s eyes go wide and her face goes slack. Her body goes stiff, though, and she pushes her again with ah and meant to keep her there. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Jinri level’s a glare that hurts to give, the hate feels so intense. She’s never been as angry as she is right now and it makes her feel euphoric. “No! I’m not okay! You left me in the middle of the woods - and it was you I know - because we’ve just passed that bridge and okay, fine! You bit me, you left me there, I’ve been through three really, really horrible transformations - I mean wow, Teen Wolf never prepared me for that - And now, NOW, you come?”
Amber’s shaking now, badly enough that it looks like she’s going to fall into the toilet. Her knees even bump the porcelain. “It isn’t like that, though. It wasn’t supposed to be a thing, okay? No one was supposed to be there and I wasn’t supposed to get out. They didn’t tie my chain securely. It’s a thing, I look more buff than I am.”
She realizes then that Amber’s just a baby too. Just a little baby wolf with no idea what she’s doing at all. “Who didn’t?”
Amber runs a hand through her hair, multiple times, biting her lips like she’s trying really hard not to say what Jinri desperately needs to know.
“I mean, you’re talking about this like there’s some sort of structure, like there’s some kind of system in place to help people or something. Like there’s more of us. Like we’re some Werewolf Federation of North America, and doesn’t that sound great?”
Amber laughs, shakily, runs a hand across her chin, glances up into her eyes, and then down. Jinri makes sure to inflect extra intensity into her gaze. She even takes a page out of Krystal’s book and snaps her foot down really hard on the pee smelling floor.
“Yeah, there is. Well, sort of. It’s like a pack, right? Werewolves come in packs.”
“Federation,” Jinri snaps.
“Yeah, whatever. But no, that’s not right. It’s a family.” Amber tilts her head. “I’m a beta. Sunyoung’s a Beta. Victoria’s the Alpha, but she doesn’t have a mate. She tests people, right? But she’s the Alpha.”
Jinri’s lips curls before she even realizes it. Because these are all people who’ve been in certain circles of society all her life. These are people who have been ridiculously in the limelight of events. They’re really talented, really charismatic, and more. “This conversation just got a lot more stupid, okay.”
Amber opens her mouth to reply, manages a “You were a mistake--” Before the door to the bathroom bangs open and a flock of chattering, perfume infested girls rush into the room. Taking the chance for what it is, Jinri unlatches the stall and out of the bathroom, down the hall and to class before the final bell can ring.
For all the horrible horribleness of all of these sudden bathroom-revelations, it’s the last part that really hurts.
“You were a mistake,” Rushed out with shifting eyes the same way her mom said it once when she was way too drunk and Jinri had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. You were a mistake, just like her father said before he ran off. A mistake, just like everything she’d ever been told by any society, ever.
It stewed in her head all through the end of the school day, all through the night, all through the next day.
Until Krystal yanked the thought away with a snap of her gum.
“What’s with you?” Krystal’s voice grates on her ears. “It’s almost like you don’t want to do this today.”
Jinri could tell she’d been trying to make her feel better. So far, she’s made fun of everything on Sunyoung, from her shoes to the way her voice carried over the tables, “Like she thinks she’s in a musical now, or something. Ugh, look at that sweater. She definitely wants to be in Rent or something.”
It’s the accusation that makes her snap. Just one too many snaps, breaking her concentration, creeping into her life, getting into her mind.
“Ugh, so what if she does!” Jinri slams her hands down on the table so loud that her tray rattles.
“So what if she wears stupid shirts, so what if Victoria’s ass looks bad in those jeans, they’re her jeans, let her wear them! So what if Amber’s face looks like it got run over by a truck, if she’s slumping like a slug in the sun, if she’s got wobbly knees or if her hair looks really dumb in that cut! It’s not going to change anything, they’re still going to be idiots tomorrow, trying really hard to get into society even if we’re all going to be in society anyway, no matter how we reject it like some dumb punk rock people! It’s just! Useless!”
She throws her hands up in disgust, yanks on her hair until she can feel the strands snapping, and then drops her face onto her book.
“Wow,” Krystal says, and it’s quiet for once. If Jinri had looked up, she’d be able to see just why her heart leapt the way it did. “I never said anything like that about Amber. That was all you.” She says, instead of anything else, and then snaps her gum resolutely. It was so beside the entire point that Jinri caves immediately, frustration tacking onto the thread of conversation.
“I can’t help it, Amber ruined my life.” She groans, buries her head in her arms, tries to block out the sunlight. She can feel the tension in Krystal’s arms when she says it.
“You...mean. You like Amber?”
“What, no!” Jinri looks up, fixes Krystal with the best glare she has. “Never! Come on.”
“Oh, good.” Krystal has a weird lilt to her voice, an odd blush to her cheeks. Jinri opens her mouth to ask her about it but Krystal finishes peeling the new stick of gum from her bag and pops it into her open mouth. When her fingers brush so softly against them and they both freeze a little, Jinri breathes out and tries not to think too much about it when Krystal pulls her hand away and hides her face behind a curtain of long hair.
“Because you’re not allowed to like anyone, it’s against the rules, remember. ‘No relations with society,’ remember.” Krystal tapped her notebook. “Number three. Right after-”
“Right after ‘Take no prisoners’ and ‘No empathizing with the enemy.’” The enemy being society, society being everyone else. “Wow, I’ve been really bad at this.”
“Yes, you have.” Krystal says, the silent ‘duh’ hanging between them silently, heavily, because they had both agreed that saying duh was just too valley girl and the closer they got to valley girl the more they valued the opinions of jock’s and they couldn’t have that. It was rule number five.
Even though Krystal had cancelled out Jinri’s frustration, that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it, because she was still a little girl playing at a war that no one could win. Although they went to class and Jinri’s head felt clearer because of the spearmint gum and the shadow of Krystal’s nail on her lip, her heart felt divided, as annoyingly cliche as it was.
The more time passed and the closer they got to the next full moon, the more Jinri would find herself getting drawn to the rest of the ‘pack.’ Every time Amber met her eyes in Chemistry, every time she smacked Sunyoung with the ball in Dodgeball, every time Victoria passed her in the hallway, she felt an odd beckoning. Like the pull of imaginary tide, pulling her, drowning, out to sea.
She’s keeping all of this inside, a huge secret that goes against everything she and Krystal had started, but she can’t help it. It’s not like they sell werewolf how-to-guide’s, or like there’s a big gathering of them on the internet. There are no Werewolf Anonymous meetings to go to and she wouldn’t participate anyway. She’s the pastel wearing type, not the fake leather, stinky, waxy skin types.
It starts, really starts, when Amber slides in next to her at Chemistry, eyes gleaming with charisma. “Hey.”
“Hi?” Jinri pretends to ignore her, and the way her face immediately heats up. The way her heart suddenly evens out from it’s odd beating pattern when Amber’s not around. Like there are two hearts in there, and they’re only in unison when she’s around. It’s a dumb theory, but it holds up.
“How you doin’?”
Jinri finally closes her notebook in favor of giving her the biggest eyeroll of the century. “Did you really just throw that quote at me?”
“Uh, not on purpose?” Amber says with a staggering laugh, rubbing at the back of her neck. It’s awkward. Amber’s wearing a team jersey. With a logo. Jinri’s wearing pastel clothes, a flowery skirt, and she looks good. Amber just looks like a boy.
“Okay, bro.” She draws out the bro with a sneer. “What can I say? Chemistry is about to start, my lab partner is suddenly my papa wolf, and I feel all weird and twisted inside.” She feels horrified that she even revealed that much, but once she gets going she can’t stop. “By the way, you are intruding on all my rules. Every single one of them. You guys need to go away and let me handle this on my own because really, werewolf packs?”
Amber leans forward, looking pale and terrified. All that fake humor and charm suddenly gone. “You could keep it down, you know. There are people who poach people like us.”
“‘People like us,’” Jinri repeats, her voice rising as her anxiety does. “There are no ‘People Like Us’ because we don’t qualify as people.” She lowers her tone as classmates are starting to turn and stare. “Why can’t you leave me alone, I’m trying to learn.”
Amber snorts. “Why, I thought you were all anti-society.”
“Know thy enemy,” Jinri quips, turning towards the front as the bell rang. “School is about research. So I know what not to do.”
Amber touches her arm, and Jinri instantly turns to look at her, like there’s some sort of internal force making her obey. Like she wanted to. Amber’s hand is warm, and when they match eyes, there was a spark of humor there. The kind that didn’t come with condescension.
“So why don’t you do that with us, too. Come see what we’re like, after school, and then if you feel comfortable, you can transform with us. You don’t have to stay, but it’d be nice if you’d try it. I hate seeing you with so many bruises all the time.”
Jinri wants more than anything to brush it off, return kindness with cruelty, to not get involved. This breaks nearly every rule in the book already, pushes right through them all so easily. If she accepted, it was going to be the biggest breach of club rules she’s ever made.
“Okay, sure.”
“Cool, I’ll meet you outside after school.” Amber taps her mechanical pencil against the desk top until it clicks, just as the teacher walks back inside to start class. “I’ll take you to the clubhouse.”
Jinri would be lying if she hadn’t sneered internally about the term ‘clubhouse’ the whole way there. Especially since it wasn’t a clubhouse at all, but Victoria’s house.
Apparently, Victoria lived alone. Which was really convenient for a werewolf Alpha to not take advantage of, and she had henceforth converted her house into a little werewolf haven or something, because Amber and Sunyoung both stomped around it like they owned it. When they arrived, Sunyoung’s little beat up yellow slug-bug was outside in the driveway, and she was banging around in the kitchen when they walked in.
Well, she thought it was just Sunyoung, but Victoria was there too, at the stove, the counters filled with all sorts of food in the making.
As soon as Jinri steps through the door they both turn from their conversation with twin bright smiles. Sunyoung’s sitting on the counter with her legs swinging back and forth, putting filling into dumplings and handing them to Victoria, who’s setting them in a bamboo steamer on top of bamboo leaves. Both of them could cause blindness with smiles, honestly. No one in the world had smiles as bright as these three. She nearly backs right out of the kitchen right then, but Amber puts a hand on the small of her back and pushes her forward.
“Hi!” Victoria is all smiles and teeth, and Jinri’s not sure if she’s sincere or not when she does because she’s always been a hard one to crack. She’s a few years older, a senior like Jessica, and she’s only ever looked at her from a distance. It’s way more fun to make up stuff about people when you don’t really know them.
But Victoria really seems to mean it when she pushes the plate of cookies on the table towards her and all but orders her to eat. “Thanks for coming! Amber says you’re giving us a trial run, or something like that, so I’m going to do my best to convince you to stay.”
“I bet you’ll stay when you taste her food, though.” Sunyoung says, singsong, and Jinri nearly throws a cookie at her.
“That’s the plan,” Victoria chimed with a wink, trying for the same tune as Sunyoung and failing miserably, because Victoria might make amazing cookies, but she isn’t a singer.
Of all of them, Sunyoung’s the one she has the most trouble liking. She’s all sugar, all bounce. She’s so sincere about everything that it could make a nutter weep, and she really, really has bad taste in all things style, even worse in music. Which is just bad for someone who’s played the lead in every musical since freshman year. She’s not sure how she managed to force her way to the popular circle when she’s all energy and no brain, but they seem to like that in that circle anyway. Jinri would never forget the time she lost the talent show to Jieun and bawled in front of the entire assembly, but maybe that was just a personal issue.
Victoria’s house is mostly a cottage, filled to the brim with old-person stuff, and none of it makes sense until she finds out it used to be her Grandparents house, and that her Grandma left her name on the will, and that her parents are always away on business anyway so it’s nice to have a place to call home. When she talks about her family she talks matter of fact, like there is no gripe between her and them, no feeling. They support her and send her money and that’s what her parents are.
“My real family is you guys,” Victoria says, and her eyes sparkle oddly from the sunlight shining in through the window. She always knew that Victoria’s family was rich, but she didn’t know she lived alone, and she definitely didn’t know that she could cook.
Really, wow. Could she ever cook. She made dumplings for dinner. Homemade, Chinese pork dumplings, and Jinri’s pretty sure it’s the first time she ever had anything so mouth watering tasty. She’s not sure who told them that the most surefire way to get into her heart is to feed her really good food, but someone must have, because she can’t resist after that.
Against her will, against her rules, she starts to get closer to them. Before she realizes it, she’s there on a Friday with her overnight bag packed with extra bandages, and the full moon is all but about to pop over the horizon.
“Okay, it’s nearly time, pack.” Victoria says, and for the first time ever Jinri feels okay with being grouped with them. Because it’s the full moon, and she’s afraid, and Victoria is there and the Alpha and she’s taken care of all of them like some sort of saintly mother.
She follows the others to the basement, and instead of a cellar of horror with chains and brick walls and iron bars, she finds a soft, squishy room with padded walls and a torn up couch. It might not win any awards for decor with the scratches and the loose stuffing everywhere, but it’s a lot better than her tiny dungeon back home.
“W-what?” She says, because it doesn’t make any sense.
The grin Amber flashes at her is almost heavenly. “Yeah, different, huh?”
“Um, I kind of expected more...bars.” She tests the cushion on the floor with one bare foot before she steps. It’s like a padded cell, not a dungeon master’s cave.
“The benefits of being in a pack, is that the wolf is a lot more docile when it has one.” Victoria says, with a hint of authority, a hint of script. She’s done this before. “No more bruises for you, Jinri.” She grins at her, holds up a victory sign. “I’m going to take care of you tonight, okay?”
Jinri can feel the change taking hold of her even while she nods. “Okay, I guess.”
She wakes up naked, curled up between Amber and Sunyoung, feeling warm and cozy, and Victoria is threading her fingers through her hair. She looks up, dizzy, disoriented, and her own guts aren’t swirling inside of her for once. Her own remains. Her stomach growls, even, and Victoria laughs and leans down to kiss her hair.
Jinri can smell herself on her breath, and Amber, and Sunyoung too.
“Welcome to the pack,” Victoria whispers, so gently that she can’t help but laugh even though she’s naked, surrounded by girls and so comfortable with it. She feels, for the first time, maybe ever, that she’s home. She can’t help it, she laughs, and it’s dazzling.
For once, school doesn’t seem daunting. For once when Jinri smiles, she means it. For once, she feels just like the carefully bright pastel colors she wears every day. When she sees Krystal, she can’t help but feel so overwhelmed by emotion that she wants to hug her, hold her, kiss her, even.
“Hey!” She says, beaming. Krystal squints at her, eyeliner thick and hair carefully catastrophic.
“Oh my god, why are you smiling like the sun?” She gripes, puts a hand up like she’s shielding her eyes from her. “You’re beaming, stop it, it hurts.”
She laughs. She hasn’t been able to stop laughing since she woke up this morning. “I know, I know! I just can’t help it. I just had a really good night, okay!” She can practically taste her own exclamation points, but she can’t seem to dial it down.
“Oh no, who are you dating. You’re dating, aren’t you. That’s against the rules, you know.”
“No, no!” Jinri shakes her head empathetically. “I’m not, I swear.”
Krystal snaps her gum, putting a hand on her hip. Other kids start to file in, pushing around them to get to classes, grouping around in their social circles. “Oh, yeah? Then what’s up?”
“I’m not sure. It was just weird. I do have to tell you something, though, and it’s important.”
“Oh good, finally, you’re going to say something. You’ve been so lame, you know. As a fellow General in our anti-society campaign, I’m really upset about how little effort you’ve been putting into this. Like Maximum lack of effort.”
“I really like you!” Jinri burst out. It was so fast, so enthusiastic, that she blinks at herself. “I really like you,” she repeats, more calmly. Then everything catches up with her in the widening of Krystal’s eyes, in the widening of her own eyes, in the way she woke up this morning feeling absolutely coddled and safe and happy.
“I really like you, and I know that dating is a society thing, and I know that friends are sort of a cliche, and I also know that all of it is against our rules. Although, isn’t following rules sort of like a social thing anyway? Can’t we just be happy together, making fun of society and going against it and still doing stuff? Because I really want to do stuff. With you. All the time.”
“You like me?” Krystal opens and closes her mouth a few times like a fish, gasping for breath. “Wow, I didn’t know you had a heart.” Jinri punches her lightly in the arm.
“Okay, okay.” Krystal looks down, then at the lockers, then at students milling and pushing and forcing their way through the hallways. Then up at the ceiling, where a blush lines her cheeks and turns her ears a bit pink. “Um, so you’re saying, you want to go on a date?”
Jinri nods, then says, “Yes.” She reaches for Krystal’s hand, and when she doesn’t pull away she squeezes it. “I would like that so much.”
Krystal finally looks back at her, tilts her head a little, and then says. “I was wondering if you’d ever ask.”
“Cliche!” Jinri bumps their hips together, and Krystal laughs, and it doesn’t sound chagrinned or bitter or horrible. It sounds real.
Jinri’s hand feels so warm, even though she has a big secret, even though everything feels like a dream. She’ll take it, this time. This movie, gas-lighting thing that her heart’s doing whenever Krystal flips her hair, or laughs, or touches her hand. Gas-lighting might be the bane of media, but she can’t seem to turn it off until Krystal snaps her fingers, or her gum, or her notebook. Or her heel. Because if anyone can kill gas-lighting, it’s Krystal, but when the happiness doesn’t disappear, she realizes that they’ve always been like this, that the bickering and the comments only add to it, and that Krystal is just awesome, no matter what.
K & J’s Anti-Society Rules
- 1. Do not talk about the anti-society club.
2. No Empathizing with the enemy.
3. No Relations with Society.
4. No Logos! Unless those logos are Punk Rock Bands.
5. No Colloquial slang. Or old slang. Or cliche things at all ever.
6. NO BETRAYALS!
7. No secrets and no lies to each other.
8. Do no participate in stupid.
9. Remember that rule 8 is relevant to everything.
10. We are AWESOME always.