- For ladadadi!
Title: When Your Heart Carries Vice
Recipient: ladadadi
Group(s)/Pairing: SNSD, Jessica/Sunny (Sunny/Yuri, Jessica/Yuri, Taeyeon/Tiffany, Hyoyeon/Seohyun, unrequited Jessica/everyone)
Rating: R
Warning(s): (implications of) disordered eating
Summary: If you're a bird, I'm a bird.
Notes: I hope this is even a fourth as good as your fics, ladadadi!
Taeyeon bellows “Movie night!” into everyone’s rooms until Sooyeon taps her on the shoulder lightly and reminds her that it’s her turn to choose the film.
“Oh, that’s fine,” Taeyeon says. Her tone is deceptively gently, the same voice she uses when she’s trying to coax food from Joohyun’s plate or tugging on Tiffany’s sleeve and pleading to take her for a ride (“Gross,” Hyoyeon says, screwing her face up, “we don’t need to know that you’re going to go have sex,” and Sooyoung barks out a too loud laugh once the entendre registers with her) in her car, and Sooyeon turns on her heel to park her ass in front of the television but not before Taeyeon sniffs, “I’m sure you’ll choose something that we’ll all want to watch. It definitely won’t be like last time,” and Sooyeon turns back around and hits her in the arm.
It’s hard settling nine girls in front of one television - it reminds Sooyeon a little too intimately of the sleepovers that she’d had before moving to Korea; girls who were not impossibly thin or breathtakingly gorgeous but who Sooyeon slept in the same bed with, who Sooyeon giggled nervously in front of when it came time to slip into pajamas, who danced a little too close to her in front of the huge window in the rec room overlooking the water; and with a swallow, Sooyeon shifts in her seat - but after Yuri runs to the bathroom for the millionth time that evening and Hyoyeon stops tying Joohyun’s hair into stupid snarled knots, Sooyeon slips the disc inside of the player.
“The Notebook?” Taeyeon snorts.
Sooyeon presses ‘play’ and says, spritely and sunnily, “Fuck you.”
“If you’re a bird, I’m a bird,” Noah says onscreen.
“I need to go the bathroom,” Soonkyu says into Sooyeon’s ear.
Yuri is there to greet her with a terse grunt.
Soonkyu doesn’t waste words, doesn’t ask her if she’s gone to see the doctor about her supposed stomach bug yet, doesn’t run back into the room and snag some popcorn - no salt, fat free butter substitute - and bring it back for her to nibble on in between bouts of what she’s taken to calling motion sickness like some sort of slowly starving pigeon.
The muscles in her back twinge like plucked guitar strings. Pigeon. Eh.
“Do you want to go lay down?” Soonkyu asks her instead, locking the door and stripping her shirt off. She still has her chest binder on.
“Do you need help with that?” Yuri asks her instead.
“Are they holding a pissing contest in there?” Taeyeon asks.
Sooyeon leans across Joohyun’s lap to pinch Taeyeon. “Shut up,” she hisses, “you’re going to make me miss my favorite part.”
In the mirror, Yuri compares the small curves of Soonkyu’s wings to the concentric circles of her breasts, her aerolas, her pert nipples. The chest binder is warm to the touch from where it’s been hugging Soonkyu’s breasts and back for nearly twelve hours.
“Can I borrow this?” she asks Soonkyu. She doesn’t meet her eyes, but it’s barely out of shame and very much because she’s still staring at her body in the mirror. Her wings are matted little things, a little less dove and a little more - pigeon, maybe. They look like the angel wings that Yuri wore in her first grade school play and then shoved into the back of a closet until her mother unearthed them and threw them in the trash immediately because a family of spiders had clearly made their home in them.
“No,” Soonkyu says. “It’s not even your size.”
Sooyeon dabs her eyes with a tissue handily provided by Joohyun. She can hear Yoona and Sooyoung sniffling near her. No matter how many times she watches this movie, the deliciously indulgent pathos will never fail to trigger the waterworks.
Taeyeon taps Joohyun’s shoulder and gestures for a tissue, too. “This movie was so bad, it made me cry,” she whines while exaggeratedly blowing her nose and wiping her eyes, as if the sight gag needed clarification in the first place. Taeyeon has an awful sense of comedic timing, but God forbid Sooyeon try to lock her in a room with Hyoyeon again, and she doesn’t even think they offer classes on how to be funnier. She’s hopeless. Someone should take her out back and shoot her, put her and Sooyeon both out of their misery.
“You should have just hid in the bathroom,” Tiffany says.
The door handle jiggles impatiently. Soonkyu has maybe fifteen seconds to at least get her shirt back on. Forget the chest binder.
“Who is it?” she asks.
“Why is the door locked?” Sooyeon shoots back.
“Yuri was feeling kind of woozy when I found her, so I didn’t want to leave her alone,” Soonkyu answers, gesturing for Yuri to hide the chest binder somewhere quickly. She throws it into the bathtub and tugs the shower curtain shut.
“Were you in the shower?” Sooyeon asks, sounding appalled. “Wait, you didn’t even answer my question!”
Soonkyu unlocks the door.
From the other room, Taeyeon yells, “They better not have used up all the hot water!”
Sooyeon doesn’t sleep so well that night. More often than not, she falls asleep sooner than Sooyoung, but tonight, she can hear Sooyoung lightly snoring. It feels lonely, and she wants to climb out of bed, let the air hit her bare legs, sit on top of Sooyoung’s bed covers and run her mouth like they used to together before debut. She knows that Sooyoung’s been busy - they’ve all been busy - though, and decency wins out against lonesomeness like it usually does with her.
She slips out of bed, out the bedroom door, shutting it quietly behind her, and means to go to the kitchen for a glass of water but stops halfway there when she sees Soonkyu parked in front of the television. It’s muted; the light casts a bluish glow on her face; the whole scene is a little disjointed, muffled, and she almost wants to turn right back around and go back to bed.
Nope. Lonesomeness wins out this time.
“Soonkyu,” she whispers, “why are you still awake?”
Soonkyu’s eyes squint trying to find her in the darkness of the room. “Sooyeon?” she whispers back. “Why are you awake?”
“What’s with you and dodging my questions today?” Sooyeon laughs halfheartedly. “I just got up to get a glass of water.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Soonkyu answers. She tries not to wear the chest binder on the nights when she’s in the dorm, but the damage was already done when she decided to wear it in the first place, the persistent soreness in her chest and back making it hard to breathe evenly, to lie in bed anywhere but on her side. Possibly she should have consulted someone who had had experience with chest binders before. She briefly entertains the prospect of calling Song Qian, asking her what brand Amber wears on stage and how easy it is to help her put it on, if she could steady Yuri’s hands - or going straight to the source herself, asking Amber if it’s supposed to hurt this much, if it ever gets any easier.
Sooyeon sits on the couch. Soonkyu is warm, her skin goosebump riddled and clammy to the touch when Sooyeon curls up next to her. Soonkyu is good for many things - for sneaking snacks into her bag for long flights and stints in dressing rooms, for fixing your hair at the last minute when the cordi unnies are busy with someone else, for easy and unquestioned touch - but she shrinks away when Sooyeon touches her this time and it leaves Sooyeon genuinely shocked for one stretched out moment.
“Sorry,” she says, stumbling over the word. She’s used to apologizing, but not to Soonkyu. It feels unnatural, and the moment that she realizes that is the moment when Soonkyu gets up off of the couch and says, hastily, “I’m going back to sleep.”
Sooyeon makes a grab for her arm to pull her back onto the couch, but Soonkyu tears it away. It abruptly feels like they’re fighting, and Sooyeon feels nauseous. What the fuck’s wrong with her?
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” she parrots back aloud. “I just wanted to - ” She doesn’t know what she wanted to do. Sleep next to her, maybe. Ask her again why she locked the bathroom door. Ask her why Yuri is always at her side lately, drawn to her like a dying fly to the nearest windowsill. Ask her why Sooyoung suddenly avoids Taeyeon and Tiffany, and why Hyoyeon is always touching Joohyun where Sooyeon can see it, and why Yuri is so thin again, and why Yoona is suddenly the only one who hasn’t been acting like a fucking lunatic lately.
Soonkyu feels her wings weakly flutter. The motion must catch Sooyeon’s eyes because her eyes snap to her back.
“What - ”
“I’m going back to sleep,” Soonkyu says again, slowly.
Soonkyu dreams fitfully of feathers, fat and white and downy and nothing at all like hers.
Sooyeon doesn’t dream.
She opens the bathroom door the next morning to Joohyun perched atop the ledge of the sink, Hyoyeon’s fingers buried in her hair. The sounds they’re making are wet, thick, like they’re sucking on each other’s tongues.
“Lock the door next time,” Sooyeon chokes out before slamming the door shut.
“It sounds like the bathroom is a hot spot for sexual activity,” Taeyeon says around a mouthful of granola. Sooyeon is nursing a cup of coffee, her stomach rolling too much for her to even consider eating, and she flinches when Tiffany scoffs, sudden and loud.
“Soonkyu and Yuri weren’t even - ”
“Hush, my love,” Taeyeon coos with her mouth opened far enough that Sooyeon can see half-chewed cereal sticking like mush to her tongue, her teeth. “You’re too young to know of these things. I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
Sooyeon slams her cup of coffee down onto the table, liquid spilling over the edges. She feels like she’s going to puke.
The bathroom is empty when she sinks down onto her knees in front of the toilet. It smells like bleach.
“Are you and Yuri fucking?” Sooyeon asks bluntly when she corners a sketchy looking Soonkyu making her way to Yuri’s bedroom. “I - Taeyeon thinks you two are and I want to know so - ”
“No,” Soonkyu says.
“You’re lying,” Sooyeon says desperately, “because Yuri is getting so skinny and you’re always avoiding me now, you won’t even touch me, and she’s just trying to impress you, and I’m the only one who - ”
“Sooyeon,” Soonkyu says calmly, slowly, like she’s explaining this to a child. “Yuri and I aren’t having sex. She has a stomach bug. I think I caught it from her and I didn’t want to give it to you, so I didn’t want you getting too close to me on the couch last night.” She stops and wipes a tear dripping dramatically down Sooyeon’s cheek.
Sooyeon jerks away like she’s been burnt.
Perhaps recklessly, she wants it to be Sooyeon who opens the bathroom door.
It’s Joohyun.
“Unnie,” she gasps, “what’s that on your back?”
“Nothing,” she says tiredly, tugging her shirt back on. “I’m going to go nap, I think.”
Yuri feels hollow inside, a triumphant sensation that reminds of her of being light, graceful, able to fly.
“Is this how you feel all the time?” she asks into Soonkyu’s ear dizzily. Her hair smells dirty, but her breasts are pressed up against Yuri’s and it’s a lovely compromise. She’s silent but her breathing isn’t even and so Yuri knows that she isn’t asleep. It’d be the perfect opportunity to sleep, though, her head nestled into her pillow, her chest binder stuffed under the bed they’re sharing, free to rest her hand in the concave of Yuri’s stomach.
“Mph,” Yuri says, drooling into her hair now.
Sooyeon isn’t surprised to find them in bed together, pressed chest to chest, still on top of the bed covers but out like twin lights.
She hates them. She hates Taeyeon for still braying like a donkey in the other room because Soonkyu and Yuri disappeared off together again. She hates Hyoyeon for dancing in the dorms instead of the practice room and she hates Joohyun for watching her attentively. She hates Sooyoung for hating, period, and she hates Tiffany for not sacrificing her happiness for the good of group solidarity. She hates Yoona for not being in the dorms when she needs someone to talk to. She hates Yuri for shrinking down, down, down into nothing. She hates Soonkyu. She fucking hates Soonkyu.
“I was lying before,” Soonkyu tells her that night after she locks herself in the bathroom and cries until her eyes physically hurt.
“Of course you were,” Sooyeon shudders out choppily, still wiping furiously at her eyes. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Yuri and I are - ” she stops. “Well, I’ve been … with Yuri for some time, in a way. It’s hard to explain. But she doesn’t have a stomach bug. Neither do I.”
She strips off her shirt. Sooyeon is confused and then aroused and then angry and then confused again in the span of half a second.
“What are those?” she asks.
It’s a physical malady, they tell her, but it’s not unheard of and it’s treatable and she will only be out of commission for a few months, maybe half a year, and Yuri holds her hand out in the waiting room before they take her into surgery, and then she stumbles into the bathroom and hits her head against the rim of the toilet falling down and she, too, is carted off to be bandaged up after Yoona finds her passed out and bleeding onto the floor.
“I don’t understand why she didn’t just go to the doctor in the first place,” Taeyeon sighs. She doesn’t look terribly upset, possibly because Soonkyu generally has shit under control and can handle a six month vacation from the stage, but there’s a note of disappointment that makes Sooyeon want to get back to the dorms already just so that she can curl up under the bed covers.
“How are you feeling, though, Yuri?” Taeyeon continues, touching at the bandage on her forehead. It was a shallow cut, but Yuri is prone to bleeding out quickly, her blood thin.
“Fine,” she says quietly, still staring distractedly out the window.
“When we get back to the dorms, I’ll make you something eat,” Yoona tells her. “It looks like you lost a lot of blood, and you fainted, so I think - ”
“Didn’t the doctor say you still had a stomach bug?” Sooyeon says. He didn’t, of course, but Yuri is biting her lip, looking very much like she wants to sink onto the floor of the van and cry, and Sooyeon thinks of Soonkyu in a hospital bed across town, of Yuri sleeping in bed alone, of the bathroom door being locked.
“Yeah,” Yuri says after a moment, her voice thankfully not betraying the surprise that Sooyeon can see reflected in her cloudy eyes. “Thank you, Yoona, but I’ll probably just go to bed when we get back to the dorms.”
“Me, too,” Sooyeon says.
Sooyeon sleeps in Yuri’s bed. The bathroom door stays unlocked. There are schedules and movie nights and visits to the hospital, counting down the days until Soonkyu has healed up enough to come back to the dorms. Sooyeon feels strangely empty.
“Is this how you feel all the time?” she asks Yuri in bed one night. They’re not touching - really, except for a stray arm here or a nudging foot there, they barely touch in bed at all - but Sooyeon can feel Yuri’s breath tickling her neck.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Hollow, I guess?”
“All the time,” she says, smiling sleepily.
Recipient: ladadadi
Group(s)/Pairing: SNSD, Jessica/Sunny (Sunny/Yuri, Jessica/Yuri, Taeyeon/Tiffany, Hyoyeon/Seohyun, unrequited Jessica/everyone)
Rating: R
Warning(s): (implications of) disordered eating
Summary: If you're a bird, I'm a bird.
Notes: I hope this is even a fourth as good as your fics, ladadadi!
Taeyeon bellows “Movie night!” into everyone’s rooms until Sooyeon taps her on the shoulder lightly and reminds her that it’s her turn to choose the film.
“Oh, that’s fine,” Taeyeon says. Her tone is deceptively gently, the same voice she uses when she’s trying to coax food from Joohyun’s plate or tugging on Tiffany’s sleeve and pleading to take her for a ride (“Gross,” Hyoyeon says, screwing her face up, “we don’t need to know that you’re going to go have sex,” and Sooyoung barks out a too loud laugh once the entendre registers with her) in her car, and Sooyeon turns on her heel to park her ass in front of the television but not before Taeyeon sniffs, “I’m sure you’ll choose something that we’ll all want to watch. It definitely won’t be like last time,” and Sooyeon turns back around and hits her in the arm.
It’s hard settling nine girls in front of one television - it reminds Sooyeon a little too intimately of the sleepovers that she’d had before moving to Korea; girls who were not impossibly thin or breathtakingly gorgeous but who Sooyeon slept in the same bed with, who Sooyeon giggled nervously in front of when it came time to slip into pajamas, who danced a little too close to her in front of the huge window in the rec room overlooking the water; and with a swallow, Sooyeon shifts in her seat - but after Yuri runs to the bathroom for the millionth time that evening and Hyoyeon stops tying Joohyun’s hair into stupid snarled knots, Sooyeon slips the disc inside of the player.
“The Notebook?” Taeyeon snorts.
Sooyeon presses ‘play’ and says, spritely and sunnily, “Fuck you.”
“If you’re a bird, I’m a bird,” Noah says onscreen.
“I need to go the bathroom,” Soonkyu says into Sooyeon’s ear.
Yuri is there to greet her with a terse grunt.
Soonkyu doesn’t waste words, doesn’t ask her if she’s gone to see the doctor about her supposed stomach bug yet, doesn’t run back into the room and snag some popcorn - no salt, fat free butter substitute - and bring it back for her to nibble on in between bouts of what she’s taken to calling motion sickness like some sort of slowly starving pigeon.
The muscles in her back twinge like plucked guitar strings. Pigeon. Eh.
“Do you want to go lay down?” Soonkyu asks her instead, locking the door and stripping her shirt off. She still has her chest binder on.
“Do you need help with that?” Yuri asks her instead.
“Are they holding a pissing contest in there?” Taeyeon asks.
Sooyeon leans across Joohyun’s lap to pinch Taeyeon. “Shut up,” she hisses, “you’re going to make me miss my favorite part.”
In the mirror, Yuri compares the small curves of Soonkyu’s wings to the concentric circles of her breasts, her aerolas, her pert nipples. The chest binder is warm to the touch from where it’s been hugging Soonkyu’s breasts and back for nearly twelve hours.
“Can I borrow this?” she asks Soonkyu. She doesn’t meet her eyes, but it’s barely out of shame and very much because she’s still staring at her body in the mirror. Her wings are matted little things, a little less dove and a little more - pigeon, maybe. They look like the angel wings that Yuri wore in her first grade school play and then shoved into the back of a closet until her mother unearthed them and threw them in the trash immediately because a family of spiders had clearly made their home in them.
“No,” Soonkyu says. “It’s not even your size.”
Sooyeon dabs her eyes with a tissue handily provided by Joohyun. She can hear Yoona and Sooyoung sniffling near her. No matter how many times she watches this movie, the deliciously indulgent pathos will never fail to trigger the waterworks.
Taeyeon taps Joohyun’s shoulder and gestures for a tissue, too. “This movie was so bad, it made me cry,” she whines while exaggeratedly blowing her nose and wiping her eyes, as if the sight gag needed clarification in the first place. Taeyeon has an awful sense of comedic timing, but God forbid Sooyeon try to lock her in a room with Hyoyeon again, and she doesn’t even think they offer classes on how to be funnier. She’s hopeless. Someone should take her out back and shoot her, put her and Sooyeon both out of their misery.
“You should have just hid in the bathroom,” Tiffany says.
The door handle jiggles impatiently. Soonkyu has maybe fifteen seconds to at least get her shirt back on. Forget the chest binder.
“Who is it?” she asks.
“Why is the door locked?” Sooyeon shoots back.
“Yuri was feeling kind of woozy when I found her, so I didn’t want to leave her alone,” Soonkyu answers, gesturing for Yuri to hide the chest binder somewhere quickly. She throws it into the bathtub and tugs the shower curtain shut.
“Were you in the shower?” Sooyeon asks, sounding appalled. “Wait, you didn’t even answer my question!”
Soonkyu unlocks the door.
From the other room, Taeyeon yells, “They better not have used up all the hot water!”
Sooyeon doesn’t sleep so well that night. More often than not, she falls asleep sooner than Sooyoung, but tonight, she can hear Sooyoung lightly snoring. It feels lonely, and she wants to climb out of bed, let the air hit her bare legs, sit on top of Sooyoung’s bed covers and run her mouth like they used to together before debut. She knows that Sooyoung’s been busy - they’ve all been busy - though, and decency wins out against lonesomeness like it usually does with her.
She slips out of bed, out the bedroom door, shutting it quietly behind her, and means to go to the kitchen for a glass of water but stops halfway there when she sees Soonkyu parked in front of the television. It’s muted; the light casts a bluish glow on her face; the whole scene is a little disjointed, muffled, and she almost wants to turn right back around and go back to bed.
Nope. Lonesomeness wins out this time.
“Soonkyu,” she whispers, “why are you still awake?”
Soonkyu’s eyes squint trying to find her in the darkness of the room. “Sooyeon?” she whispers back. “Why are you awake?”
“What’s with you and dodging my questions today?” Sooyeon laughs halfheartedly. “I just got up to get a glass of water.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Soonkyu answers. She tries not to wear the chest binder on the nights when she’s in the dorm, but the damage was already done when she decided to wear it in the first place, the persistent soreness in her chest and back making it hard to breathe evenly, to lie in bed anywhere but on her side. Possibly she should have consulted someone who had had experience with chest binders before. She briefly entertains the prospect of calling Song Qian, asking her what brand Amber wears on stage and how easy it is to help her put it on, if she could steady Yuri’s hands - or going straight to the source herself, asking Amber if it’s supposed to hurt this much, if it ever gets any easier.
Sooyeon sits on the couch. Soonkyu is warm, her skin goosebump riddled and clammy to the touch when Sooyeon curls up next to her. Soonkyu is good for many things - for sneaking snacks into her bag for long flights and stints in dressing rooms, for fixing your hair at the last minute when the cordi unnies are busy with someone else, for easy and unquestioned touch - but she shrinks away when Sooyeon touches her this time and it leaves Sooyeon genuinely shocked for one stretched out moment.
“Sorry,” she says, stumbling over the word. She’s used to apologizing, but not to Soonkyu. It feels unnatural, and the moment that she realizes that is the moment when Soonkyu gets up off of the couch and says, hastily, “I’m going back to sleep.”
Sooyeon makes a grab for her arm to pull her back onto the couch, but Soonkyu tears it away. It abruptly feels like they’re fighting, and Sooyeon feels nauseous. What the fuck’s wrong with her?
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” she parrots back aloud. “I just wanted to - ” She doesn’t know what she wanted to do. Sleep next to her, maybe. Ask her again why she locked the bathroom door. Ask her why Yuri is always at her side lately, drawn to her like a dying fly to the nearest windowsill. Ask her why Sooyoung suddenly avoids Taeyeon and Tiffany, and why Hyoyeon is always touching Joohyun where Sooyeon can see it, and why Yuri is so thin again, and why Yoona is suddenly the only one who hasn’t been acting like a fucking lunatic lately.
Soonkyu feels her wings weakly flutter. The motion must catch Sooyeon’s eyes because her eyes snap to her back.
“What - ”
“I’m going back to sleep,” Soonkyu says again, slowly.
Soonkyu dreams fitfully of feathers, fat and white and downy and nothing at all like hers.
Sooyeon doesn’t dream.
She opens the bathroom door the next morning to Joohyun perched atop the ledge of the sink, Hyoyeon’s fingers buried in her hair. The sounds they’re making are wet, thick, like they’re sucking on each other’s tongues.
“Lock the door next time,” Sooyeon chokes out before slamming the door shut.
“It sounds like the bathroom is a hot spot for sexual activity,” Taeyeon says around a mouthful of granola. Sooyeon is nursing a cup of coffee, her stomach rolling too much for her to even consider eating, and she flinches when Tiffany scoffs, sudden and loud.
“Soonkyu and Yuri weren’t even - ”
“Hush, my love,” Taeyeon coos with her mouth opened far enough that Sooyeon can see half-chewed cereal sticking like mush to her tongue, her teeth. “You’re too young to know of these things. I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
Sooyeon slams her cup of coffee down onto the table, liquid spilling over the edges. She feels like she’s going to puke.
The bathroom is empty when she sinks down onto her knees in front of the toilet. It smells like bleach.
“Are you and Yuri fucking?” Sooyeon asks bluntly when she corners a sketchy looking Soonkyu making her way to Yuri’s bedroom. “I - Taeyeon thinks you two are and I want to know so - ”
“No,” Soonkyu says.
“You’re lying,” Sooyeon says desperately, “because Yuri is getting so skinny and you’re always avoiding me now, you won’t even touch me, and she’s just trying to impress you, and I’m the only one who - ”
“Sooyeon,” Soonkyu says calmly, slowly, like she’s explaining this to a child. “Yuri and I aren’t having sex. She has a stomach bug. I think I caught it from her and I didn’t want to give it to you, so I didn’t want you getting too close to me on the couch last night.” She stops and wipes a tear dripping dramatically down Sooyeon’s cheek.
Sooyeon jerks away like she’s been burnt.
Perhaps recklessly, she wants it to be Sooyeon who opens the bathroom door.
It’s Joohyun.
“Unnie,” she gasps, “what’s that on your back?”
“Nothing,” she says tiredly, tugging her shirt back on. “I’m going to go nap, I think.”
Yuri feels hollow inside, a triumphant sensation that reminds of her of being light, graceful, able to fly.
“Is this how you feel all the time?” she asks into Soonkyu’s ear dizzily. Her hair smells dirty, but her breasts are pressed up against Yuri’s and it’s a lovely compromise. She’s silent but her breathing isn’t even and so Yuri knows that she isn’t asleep. It’d be the perfect opportunity to sleep, though, her head nestled into her pillow, her chest binder stuffed under the bed they’re sharing, free to rest her hand in the concave of Yuri’s stomach.
“Mph,” Yuri says, drooling into her hair now.
Sooyeon isn’t surprised to find them in bed together, pressed chest to chest, still on top of the bed covers but out like twin lights.
She hates them. She hates Taeyeon for still braying like a donkey in the other room because Soonkyu and Yuri disappeared off together again. She hates Hyoyeon for dancing in the dorms instead of the practice room and she hates Joohyun for watching her attentively. She hates Sooyoung for hating, period, and she hates Tiffany for not sacrificing her happiness for the good of group solidarity. She hates Yoona for not being in the dorms when she needs someone to talk to. She hates Yuri for shrinking down, down, down into nothing. She hates Soonkyu. She fucking hates Soonkyu.
“I was lying before,” Soonkyu tells her that night after she locks herself in the bathroom and cries until her eyes physically hurt.
“Of course you were,” Sooyeon shudders out choppily, still wiping furiously at her eyes. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Yuri and I are - ” she stops. “Well, I’ve been … with Yuri for some time, in a way. It’s hard to explain. But she doesn’t have a stomach bug. Neither do I.”
She strips off her shirt. Sooyeon is confused and then aroused and then angry and then confused again in the span of half a second.
“What are those?” she asks.
It’s a physical malady, they tell her, but it’s not unheard of and it’s treatable and she will only be out of commission for a few months, maybe half a year, and Yuri holds her hand out in the waiting room before they take her into surgery, and then she stumbles into the bathroom and hits her head against the rim of the toilet falling down and she, too, is carted off to be bandaged up after Yoona finds her passed out and bleeding onto the floor.
“I don’t understand why she didn’t just go to the doctor in the first place,” Taeyeon sighs. She doesn’t look terribly upset, possibly because Soonkyu generally has shit under control and can handle a six month vacation from the stage, but there’s a note of disappointment that makes Sooyeon want to get back to the dorms already just so that she can curl up under the bed covers.
“How are you feeling, though, Yuri?” Taeyeon continues, touching at the bandage on her forehead. It was a shallow cut, but Yuri is prone to bleeding out quickly, her blood thin.
“Fine,” she says quietly, still staring distractedly out the window.
“When we get back to the dorms, I’ll make you something eat,” Yoona tells her. “It looks like you lost a lot of blood, and you fainted, so I think - ”
“Didn’t the doctor say you still had a stomach bug?” Sooyeon says. He didn’t, of course, but Yuri is biting her lip, looking very much like she wants to sink onto the floor of the van and cry, and Sooyeon thinks of Soonkyu in a hospital bed across town, of Yuri sleeping in bed alone, of the bathroom door being locked.
“Yeah,” Yuri says after a moment, her voice thankfully not betraying the surprise that Sooyeon can see reflected in her cloudy eyes. “Thank you, Yoona, but I’ll probably just go to bed when we get back to the dorms.”
“Me, too,” Sooyeon says.
Sooyeon sleeps in Yuri’s bed. The bathroom door stays unlocked. There are schedules and movie nights and visits to the hospital, counting down the days until Soonkyu has healed up enough to come back to the dorms. Sooyeon feels strangely empty.
“Is this how you feel all the time?” she asks Yuri in bed one night. They’re not touching - really, except for a stray arm here or a nudging foot there, they barely touch in bed at all - but Sooyeon can feel Yuri’s breath tickling her neck.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Hollow, I guess?”
“All the time,” she says, smiling sleepily.