hide all your cracks from the shining lights [hello venus, alice/lime, pg]
hide all your cracks from the shining lights
hello venus, alice/lime, pg, 2488 words
five times juhee runs away, and one time she doesn't. title from the hoodies' i am glass.
originally posted here for the ambitiousgirls fic exchange.
i.
When Juhee leaves, winter still hangs chill and heavy on her skin. She pulls her scarf in closer against her neck, double-checks the money and the train ticket in her wallet, and tightens her fingers around the handle of her suitcase.
It still hasn't quite hit her -- the reality of what she's doing. There is the nervous curl of anticipation that constricts her chest, the images of the one-room apartment she'd picked out in Seoul. None of it carries the weight of something solid or present. She's not quite convinced she's not dreaming, that she won't wake up and have her mother lecture her (again) about the uncertainty of celebrity, of an unforgiving public, of wasted potential.
Juhee knows her potential -- or at least, she's pretty sure. But more than that, she knows what she wants.
(She knows guilt, too. It settles in her stomach, burns on her tongue as she looks her mother straight in the eye and says words like college and Seoul and computer programming. She makes it an anchor.
She'll write a letter home, later, apologizing. After. When she's successful.)
She watches her breath steam and dissipate in front of her as she walks toward the train station, and doesn't let herself think in ifs.
ii.
what were your first impressions of one another?
Juhee stares at the magazine's interview sheet and taps her pen against her knee, considering. Most of them she met across the table of a Pledis board room, or else under the fluorescent light of a Fantagio hallway, fine features blurring together until a few hours spent trying to move in unison in front of a mirror hammered both their limbs and their faces into something sharp and distinct. Still, it shouldn't be a hard question.
Very tall!! she writes next to Nara's name, and, after a moment's consideration, (very pretty ostrich!! ♡). Ara, pretending that she's not reading from the seat beside Juhee, manages to stifle a laugh.
"What?" Hyelim says, leaning right over Ara to look at Juhee's sheet, earning her a half-hearted smack on the shoulder. "What mean things are you saying about me?"
"You know the world doesn't revolve around you, right? Besides," Juhee says, "I'm saving my best blackmail material on you for later."
Hyelim squints at her, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "I've got my eye on you, Song Juhee."
"Stop conducting this conversation over my lap," Ara says, and pushes two fingers at Hyelim's forehead. "I'm trying to write."
Hyelim sits back up and rubs at her head, muttering about the corrupting forces of power. "You and Juhee-unnie, I'm writing about how stardom has inflated your egos. Remember how you were actually nice to me when we first met?"
"Hm," Juhee says, pulling her best exaggerated furrow of confusion across her brow. "You know, I don't think I remember meeting you at all." When Hyelim pouts at her she grins, wide and toothy.
Juhee remembers their first meeting like this:
The way the light glints off Hyelim's dark hair as she reaches down to grab a pen that Juhee dropped. The bright blue of her nails, the soft warmth of her fingers. The shape of her lips as she smiles.
The jolting feeling in her stomach as Juhee says thank you and turns around, trying not to think about all the things she can't have.
iii.
Juhee is nine.
She sucks at the cut on her hand, scratched from climbing up the tree she's perched in, and imagines slowly dismembering and burning all the action figures of the boys in her class who'd pushed her into the mud twenty minutes ago.
By now it's stiffened in her hair and dried to a dull, burnt brown in against the yellow of her uniform, but shame still stings at her eyes and cheeks. She'd stood long enough to fling a fistful of dirt at one of them -- still laughing at her -- before the combination of her vision blurring and an approaching teacher proved too great a threat to her remnants of dignity, and she'd broken out into a run.
Now she is here, in a tree, surveying the damp grass below her and plotting intricate schoolyard revenge.
Revenge, she figures, should involve making as many boys cry as possible. It's only fair.
She's on step four of her multi-part plan (1. Acquire action figures. 2. Tear apart action figures. 3. Set fire to action figures. 4. Watch boys cry. Possibly also set fire to boys.) when she hears footsteps squelching towards her in the mud near the tree.
"Hey," a voice calls up to her. "That's my spot."
Juhee stares down at the girl, who stares right back -- she's in her grade, if she's remembering correctly, or close -- and she hopes her eyes aren't too puffy, her nose too red.
"It's not your spot if I'm sitting in it," Juhee says eventually. She puts on what she thinks should be a stern face, the face her mother's features always fall into whenever she catches Juhee reading comics instead of memorizing multiplication tables. "Now it's my spot."
The girl shrugs. "Whatever," she says, and grabs onto the lowest branch, beginning to pull herself upward.
"Um."
"You can't sit on the entire tree," she says, nimbly bringing herself up to a spot on the branches almost level with Juhee, face partially obscured by leaves. "It's a big tree."
Juhee opens her mouth to respond, realizes she doesn't know how to refute that, and closes her mouth. She supposes she can share. It is, after all, a big tree.
They sit in silence for a few minutes, Juhee watching the blurring colours of her shoes as she swings them back and forth in the air. She wonders how fast she'd have to be going to be able to run around the world and be back in time for dinner. Or kick mud in bullies' eyes without them noticing her.
"I saw them push you earlier," the girl says suddenly, like she can tell what Juhee is thinking. "Sorry."
"For what?" Juhee asks.
"For not, like... helping." She waves her hands vaguely.
"Oh. You don't have to fight for me or anything," she says.
"No, I know, it's just." The girl stops, tries again. "One of the kids is my cousin. Sometimes when I say I'm gonna tell his dad he's being a big bag of goat turd, he doesn't do it so much."
Juhee stares steadily at the ground, several feet below her. "It's not your problem."
"No," the girl agrees, and out of the corner of her eye Juhee can see her biting at her lip. "But sometimes if you can do something, you want to."
She's not sure what to say to that. She thinks she should feel grateful, maybe, but she just feels like her insides are being twisted into something tight and angry, like she shouldn't need to be sitting in a tree with a kid she barely knows offering to help solve her problems.
Juhee, finding herself dangerously close to crying again, swings herself around and starts clambering out of the tree.
"Hey," the girl says, "where are you going?"
Juhee drops to the ground, stumbles, rights herself. "Recess is almost over."
She does not hide out in the bathroom for the rest of the day, nor does she vengefully put chewing gum in anyone's hair. She thinks it's fair to say that she's growing as a person.
iv.
Juhee is staring absently at the coffee shop's menu board when she feels someone hook their chin over her shoulder, and isn't surprised when she turns her head and sees the bridge of Hyelim's nose, the green of her freshly dyed hair. She blows a puff of air directly into her face and laughs when Hyelim wrinkles her nose and pulls away.
"You need a breath mint," Hyelim says, poking her in the back.
"Is that how you speak to your elders?"
"Nah," she says, "just you," and Juhee ignores the way her stomach flops, the sparks of heat where Hyelim's arm is pressed against hers. She knows that's not what Hyelim meant.
Instead, she just says, "I'm not sure I appreciate your special treatment."
"You appreciate everything I do," Hyelim replies, which is -- Juhee fights both the desire to lean back into Hyelim's warmth and the desire to commit herself to a nunnery until her brain stops sending her traitorous mental images of exactly how Juhee could appreciate Hyelim.
"That is absolutely not true," she says, voice steady. Relatively. "You fall asleep on my bed when we watch movies and snore loudly and steal the blankets, and you always whine when it's your turn to do the dishes, and you keep poking me. Like, all the time. I have bruises."
Hyelim hasn't stopped grinning. "Like I said: you appreciate everything I do."
"Delusional." Juhee shakes her head, walks up and greets the smiling but faintly haggard-looking barista. Her skin is cold where Hyelim isn't touching her anymore. Later, she makes sure to press in between a wall and Yooyoung on the coffee shop's couch.
v.
Juhee has three months of Seoul under her belt and maybe just enough coins for the payphone.
She had meant to go straight back to her apartment from the subway stop. She passes this payphone everyday, barely registers it in the fatigue of dance and vocal lessons and a roulette of young, earnest faces at Elso's trainee building, but today she's been sick with hunger and the bone-deep ache of missing home, and she's already done dialing her Gangwon-do number before she realizes she has no idea what to say.
I'm sorry I lied.
Nothing here smells like it should.
I'm never sure what it means when people look at me now, and you never had all the answers but I wish you were here to pretend.
To Juhee's credit, she does not hang up as soon as she hears her mother's voice come across from the other line. She sounds tired, older, like it's been three years instead of three months, but then, it's also past midnight. Juhee grips the cold plastic of the phone in her fingers and tries to will her silence into words.
Moments pass, and her mother's repeated "Hello?" comes with a slight tinge of impatience.
"... Mom." Her voice is whisper-soft. She wishes she could take it back.
Two beats. Three. "Juhee? Is that you?"
Juhee hangs up.
She calls again two days later, from a phone inside the training centre, and cries for an hour straight. They don't try to bring her home. She's not sure whether that feels like a victory or a loss.
vi.
There's a tree in a park near their dorm that reminds Juhee of home. She'd passed it by for four weeks after she'd run away before she caved and, feeling only a little silly, climbed the branches and settled in to watch the sun rise.
Now that she's debuted, it's a little harder to find time for tree-climbing, but she still likes to walk out here sometimes, streets quiet and moon peeking out from behind leaves and high-rises. Tonight, the roughness of the bark beneath her skin as she grips the branches is familiar, the humid summer air only slightly stifling. She wouldn't trade her life for the world, but it's nice to be able to let everything be still for a while.
She hears Hyelim coming before she sees her, the distinct pattern of her steps echoing off the pavement making Juhee's gaze turn, settling on the bright blue tips of her hair escaping from underneath her hat.
"Fancy meeting you here," Hyelim says when she's almost underneath the branches.
"Are you trying to pretend you aren't a huge stalker?" Juhee says, sticking out her tongue. "Because you totally are."
"Hey, quit slandering my name." Hyelim sticks her tongue out right back, because they are both completely mature grown adults.
"As if I would ever. Are you coming up or what?"
"Has anyone ever told you're kind of impatient?" Hyelim says, but she's smiling as she grips a branch to pull herself up. "Also, really weird. Who hangs out in trees in the middle of the night?"
"You, for one," Juhee retorts, shuffling over to make room for Hyelim to settle down next to her. "Why are you even here?"
It takes a moment for Hyelim to reply, staring intently at a leaf in front of her. "You were really quiet today. Like, you only insulted me twice --" Juhee laughs despite herself and Hyelim looks over and grins -- "And then you disappeared before I got a chance to ask, and I figured... well, I figured I'd find you here."
Juhee leans against the trunk of the tree, considering. It'd be easy to brush it off as nothing. It'd be even easier to say she was tired, which would have the added benefit of also being true.
It might even be easy, under the dark shelter of leaves, to tell Hyelim everything. I've wanted to kiss you for over a year. I've wanted to hold your hand and have it be a promise that you're mine. I've wanted to fall asleep to the sound of your breathing and wake up and feel your heart under my hands.
She wonders if they give out awards for Idol Most Disgustingly In Love With Group Mate, because she would have to place at least second.
"You get quiet sometimes," Hyelim says, when the silence draws on. "And we're never sure whether you want to be left alone, but you know you don't have to deal with stuff on your own, right? We're a team. We're your friends."
Juhee shakes her head. "I know, it's just. I don't think you could help."
"I can still listen, if you want," Hyelim says softly.
Juhee chances a glance at Hyelim's face. The glow of the street lights through the leaves casts yellow patterns over her skin. She's leaning slightly over in Juhee's direction, face open, eyes bright.
"I like you," she says, and she feels like she's walking over the edge of a cliff. She might be walking off this branch in a second. "I like you a lot, Kim Hyelim."
Hyelim blinks at her. Juhee tries to make herself very small.
Then Hyelim is kissing her and Juhee isn't trying to do anything at all except not fall out of the tree, because -- Hyelim is kissing her, and her mouth is warm and her fingers are soft where they're pressing into Juhee's neck and Juhee is seriously going to fall over.
"God, I've been throwing myself at you for like -- for like forever," Hyelim says against her mouth. "You're so dumb."
"How was I--" Juhee says, pulling away slightly. "Why didn't you say anything?"
"I was! With... signals!"
Juhee stares at her, then breaks out laughing. Hyelim tries to pout at her and expound upon all the ways she was being obvious ("Signals! Yooyoung got me this book!"), but Juhee just laughs harder, and eventually Hyelim gives in and joins her, hiding her face in the crook of Juhee's neck.
Juhee is pretty sure they sound maniacal to anyone within hearing distance. She grabs Hyelim's hand with her own, linking their fingers together, and finds she has trouble caring about anything else at all.
hello venus, alice/lime, pg, 2488 words
five times juhee runs away, and one time she doesn't. title from the hoodies' i am glass.
originally posted here for the ambitiousgirls fic exchange.
i.
When Juhee leaves, winter still hangs chill and heavy on her skin. She pulls her scarf in closer against her neck, double-checks the money and the train ticket in her wallet, and tightens her fingers around the handle of her suitcase.
It still hasn't quite hit her -- the reality of what she's doing. There is the nervous curl of anticipation that constricts her chest, the images of the one-room apartment she'd picked out in Seoul. None of it carries the weight of something solid or present. She's not quite convinced she's not dreaming, that she won't wake up and have her mother lecture her (again) about the uncertainty of celebrity, of an unforgiving public, of wasted potential.
Juhee knows her potential -- or at least, she's pretty sure. But more than that, she knows what she wants.
(She knows guilt, too. It settles in her stomach, burns on her tongue as she looks her mother straight in the eye and says words like college and Seoul and computer programming. She makes it an anchor.
She'll write a letter home, later, apologizing. After. When she's successful.)
She watches her breath steam and dissipate in front of her as she walks toward the train station, and doesn't let herself think in ifs.
ii.
what were your first impressions of one another?
Juhee stares at the magazine's interview sheet and taps her pen against her knee, considering. Most of them she met across the table of a Pledis board room, or else under the fluorescent light of a Fantagio hallway, fine features blurring together until a few hours spent trying to move in unison in front of a mirror hammered both their limbs and their faces into something sharp and distinct. Still, it shouldn't be a hard question.
Very tall!! she writes next to Nara's name, and, after a moment's consideration, (very pretty ostrich!! ♡). Ara, pretending that she's not reading from the seat beside Juhee, manages to stifle a laugh.
"What?" Hyelim says, leaning right over Ara to look at Juhee's sheet, earning her a half-hearted smack on the shoulder. "What mean things are you saying about me?"
"You know the world doesn't revolve around you, right? Besides," Juhee says, "I'm saving my best blackmail material on you for later."
Hyelim squints at her, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "I've got my eye on you, Song Juhee."
"Stop conducting this conversation over my lap," Ara says, and pushes two fingers at Hyelim's forehead. "I'm trying to write."
Hyelim sits back up and rubs at her head, muttering about the corrupting forces of power. "You and Juhee-unnie, I'm writing about how stardom has inflated your egos. Remember how you were actually nice to me when we first met?"
"Hm," Juhee says, pulling her best exaggerated furrow of confusion across her brow. "You know, I don't think I remember meeting you at all." When Hyelim pouts at her she grins, wide and toothy.
Juhee remembers their first meeting like this:
The way the light glints off Hyelim's dark hair as she reaches down to grab a pen that Juhee dropped. The bright blue of her nails, the soft warmth of her fingers. The shape of her lips as she smiles.
The jolting feeling in her stomach as Juhee says thank you and turns around, trying not to think about all the things she can't have.
iii.
Juhee is nine.
She sucks at the cut on her hand, scratched from climbing up the tree she's perched in, and imagines slowly dismembering and burning all the action figures of the boys in her class who'd pushed her into the mud twenty minutes ago.
By now it's stiffened in her hair and dried to a dull, burnt brown in against the yellow of her uniform, but shame still stings at her eyes and cheeks. She'd stood long enough to fling a fistful of dirt at one of them -- still laughing at her -- before the combination of her vision blurring and an approaching teacher proved too great a threat to her remnants of dignity, and she'd broken out into a run.
Now she is here, in a tree, surveying the damp grass below her and plotting intricate schoolyard revenge.
Revenge, she figures, should involve making as many boys cry as possible. It's only fair.
She's on step four of her multi-part plan (1. Acquire action figures. 2. Tear apart action figures. 3. Set fire to action figures. 4. Watch boys cry. Possibly also set fire to boys.) when she hears footsteps squelching towards her in the mud near the tree.
"Hey," a voice calls up to her. "That's my spot."
Juhee stares down at the girl, who stares right back -- she's in her grade, if she's remembering correctly, or close -- and she hopes her eyes aren't too puffy, her nose too red.
"It's not your spot if I'm sitting in it," Juhee says eventually. She puts on what she thinks should be a stern face, the face her mother's features always fall into whenever she catches Juhee reading comics instead of memorizing multiplication tables. "Now it's my spot."
The girl shrugs. "Whatever," she says, and grabs onto the lowest branch, beginning to pull herself upward.
"Um."
"You can't sit on the entire tree," she says, nimbly bringing herself up to a spot on the branches almost level with Juhee, face partially obscured by leaves. "It's a big tree."
Juhee opens her mouth to respond, realizes she doesn't know how to refute that, and closes her mouth. She supposes she can share. It is, after all, a big tree.
They sit in silence for a few minutes, Juhee watching the blurring colours of her shoes as she swings them back and forth in the air. She wonders how fast she'd have to be going to be able to run around the world and be back in time for dinner. Or kick mud in bullies' eyes without them noticing her.
"I saw them push you earlier," the girl says suddenly, like she can tell what Juhee is thinking. "Sorry."
"For what?" Juhee asks.
"For not, like... helping." She waves her hands vaguely.
"Oh. You don't have to fight for me or anything," she says.
"No, I know, it's just." The girl stops, tries again. "One of the kids is my cousin. Sometimes when I say I'm gonna tell his dad he's being a big bag of goat turd, he doesn't do it so much."
Juhee stares steadily at the ground, several feet below her. "It's not your problem."
"No," the girl agrees, and out of the corner of her eye Juhee can see her biting at her lip. "But sometimes if you can do something, you want to."
She's not sure what to say to that. She thinks she should feel grateful, maybe, but she just feels like her insides are being twisted into something tight and angry, like she shouldn't need to be sitting in a tree with a kid she barely knows offering to help solve her problems.
Juhee, finding herself dangerously close to crying again, swings herself around and starts clambering out of the tree.
"Hey," the girl says, "where are you going?"
Juhee drops to the ground, stumbles, rights herself. "Recess is almost over."
She does not hide out in the bathroom for the rest of the day, nor does she vengefully put chewing gum in anyone's hair. She thinks it's fair to say that she's growing as a person.
iv.
Juhee is staring absently at the coffee shop's menu board when she feels someone hook their chin over her shoulder, and isn't surprised when she turns her head and sees the bridge of Hyelim's nose, the green of her freshly dyed hair. She blows a puff of air directly into her face and laughs when Hyelim wrinkles her nose and pulls away.
"You need a breath mint," Hyelim says, poking her in the back.
"Is that how you speak to your elders?"
"Nah," she says, "just you," and Juhee ignores the way her stomach flops, the sparks of heat where Hyelim's arm is pressed against hers. She knows that's not what Hyelim meant.
Instead, she just says, "I'm not sure I appreciate your special treatment."
"You appreciate everything I do," Hyelim replies, which is -- Juhee fights both the desire to lean back into Hyelim's warmth and the desire to commit herself to a nunnery until her brain stops sending her traitorous mental images of exactly how Juhee could appreciate Hyelim.
"That is absolutely not true," she says, voice steady. Relatively. "You fall asleep on my bed when we watch movies and snore loudly and steal the blankets, and you always whine when it's your turn to do the dishes, and you keep poking me. Like, all the time. I have bruises."
Hyelim hasn't stopped grinning. "Like I said: you appreciate everything I do."
"Delusional." Juhee shakes her head, walks up and greets the smiling but faintly haggard-looking barista. Her skin is cold where Hyelim isn't touching her anymore. Later, she makes sure to press in between a wall and Yooyoung on the coffee shop's couch.
v.
Juhee has three months of Seoul under her belt and maybe just enough coins for the payphone.
She had meant to go straight back to her apartment from the subway stop. She passes this payphone everyday, barely registers it in the fatigue of dance and vocal lessons and a roulette of young, earnest faces at Elso's trainee building, but today she's been sick with hunger and the bone-deep ache of missing home, and she's already done dialing her Gangwon-do number before she realizes she has no idea what to say.
I'm sorry I lied.
Nothing here smells like it should.
I'm never sure what it means when people look at me now, and you never had all the answers but I wish you were here to pretend.
To Juhee's credit, she does not hang up as soon as she hears her mother's voice come across from the other line. She sounds tired, older, like it's been three years instead of three months, but then, it's also past midnight. Juhee grips the cold plastic of the phone in her fingers and tries to will her silence into words.
Moments pass, and her mother's repeated "Hello?" comes with a slight tinge of impatience.
"... Mom." Her voice is whisper-soft. She wishes she could take it back.
Two beats. Three. "Juhee? Is that you?"
Juhee hangs up.
She calls again two days later, from a phone inside the training centre, and cries for an hour straight. They don't try to bring her home. She's not sure whether that feels like a victory or a loss.
vi.
There's a tree in a park near their dorm that reminds Juhee of home. She'd passed it by for four weeks after she'd run away before she caved and, feeling only a little silly, climbed the branches and settled in to watch the sun rise.
Now that she's debuted, it's a little harder to find time for tree-climbing, but she still likes to walk out here sometimes, streets quiet and moon peeking out from behind leaves and high-rises. Tonight, the roughness of the bark beneath her skin as she grips the branches is familiar, the humid summer air only slightly stifling. She wouldn't trade her life for the world, but it's nice to be able to let everything be still for a while.
She hears Hyelim coming before she sees her, the distinct pattern of her steps echoing off the pavement making Juhee's gaze turn, settling on the bright blue tips of her hair escaping from underneath her hat.
"Fancy meeting you here," Hyelim says when she's almost underneath the branches.
"Are you trying to pretend you aren't a huge stalker?" Juhee says, sticking out her tongue. "Because you totally are."
"Hey, quit slandering my name." Hyelim sticks her tongue out right back, because they are both completely mature grown adults.
"As if I would ever. Are you coming up or what?"
"Has anyone ever told you're kind of impatient?" Hyelim says, but she's smiling as she grips a branch to pull herself up. "Also, really weird. Who hangs out in trees in the middle of the night?"
"You, for one," Juhee retorts, shuffling over to make room for Hyelim to settle down next to her. "Why are you even here?"
It takes a moment for Hyelim to reply, staring intently at a leaf in front of her. "You were really quiet today. Like, you only insulted me twice --" Juhee laughs despite herself and Hyelim looks over and grins -- "And then you disappeared before I got a chance to ask, and I figured... well, I figured I'd find you here."
Juhee leans against the trunk of the tree, considering. It'd be easy to brush it off as nothing. It'd be even easier to say she was tired, which would have the added benefit of also being true.
It might even be easy, under the dark shelter of leaves, to tell Hyelim everything. I've wanted to kiss you for over a year. I've wanted to hold your hand and have it be a promise that you're mine. I've wanted to fall asleep to the sound of your breathing and wake up and feel your heart under my hands.
She wonders if they give out awards for Idol Most Disgustingly In Love With Group Mate, because she would have to place at least second.
"You get quiet sometimes," Hyelim says, when the silence draws on. "And we're never sure whether you want to be left alone, but you know you don't have to deal with stuff on your own, right? We're a team. We're your friends."
Juhee shakes her head. "I know, it's just. I don't think you could help."
"I can still listen, if you want," Hyelim says softly.
Juhee chances a glance at Hyelim's face. The glow of the street lights through the leaves casts yellow patterns over her skin. She's leaning slightly over in Juhee's direction, face open, eyes bright.
"I like you," she says, and she feels like she's walking over the edge of a cliff. She might be walking off this branch in a second. "I like you a lot, Kim Hyelim."
Hyelim blinks at her. Juhee tries to make herself very small.
Then Hyelim is kissing her and Juhee isn't trying to do anything at all except not fall out of the tree, because -- Hyelim is kissing her, and her mouth is warm and her fingers are soft where they're pressing into Juhee's neck and Juhee is seriously going to fall over.
"God, I've been throwing myself at you for like -- for like forever," Hyelim says against her mouth. "You're so dumb."
"How was I--" Juhee says, pulling away slightly. "Why didn't you say anything?"
"I was! With... signals!"
Juhee stares at her, then breaks out laughing. Hyelim tries to pout at her and expound upon all the ways she was being obvious ("Signals! Yooyoung got me this book!"), but Juhee just laughs harder, and eventually Hyelim gives in and joins her, hiding her face in the crook of Juhee's neck.
Juhee is pretty sure they sound maniacal to anyone within hearing distance. She grabs Hyelim's hand with her own, linking their fingers together, and finds she has trouble caring about anything else at all.