partially inspired by around the world in 80 days
in a hot air balloon
soyeon-centric (+jessica, taeyeon, minho, jiyeon, seungho). pg-13, 2200 words. au. character study, written for unniefic's valentine day/white day challenge.
"I know you know nothing about PC, but Bill Gates once put in a list of how to be successful, you have to go "find yourself" during your own time," Jessica says. She hasn't stopped following Soyeon around her house and folding every shirt that Soyeon throws at her. At one point, Soyeon throws a skirt that Jessica had given her as a present once, and that's when they stop. Jessica won't let go of her shoulder. They're in the kitchen, and Soyeon's dog wakes up to drag itself past the sink, the refrigerator, and the cupboards until it reaches the pantry. Old food that Soyeon hasn't thrown out has a soothing effect.
"Don't go," Jessica says.
Soyeon crosses her arms. "Why can't I?"
"You just can't."
"Sica."
"Injung."
Soyeon pulls Jessica's fingers off. One by one, a skinny finger goes off. The one with the ring on it is the toughest one to remove, something about the gilded weight. "Don't use that name."
"I will until you promise you won't leave. I will keep calling you Injung-"
"Guess I'll have to leave so I won't hear it coming out of your mouth," Soyeon says, shrugging her shoulders.
"Soyeon!" Jessica shouts. Her hair, which has been long for some time now, swings around angrily as she shakes her head. "Why are you doing this? You have everything here."
"I don't have the one thing I truly want," Soyeon says. She walks behind Jessica and runs her fingers through her hair. All the tangles, and possible the anger and disappointment, gets fixed. Her hands eventually rest on Jessica's shoulders and Soyeon drops her forehead on Jessica's back, the top of her head bumping into the neck. She wishes the headache she's getting came from hitting her head on Jessica's skeletal cord.
"What do you want? I'll get it for you," Jessica says.
Soyeon laughs. "You just don't understand."
Jessica eventually agrees to Soyeon's idea of leaving. While Soyeon is packing, Jessica throws something in her open suitcase. Soyeon finds it before she can fill the suitcase up with clothes, and the good bye or good luck present that Jessica's given her doesn't have to suffer being under her clothes and music for eternity. After squinting at it under the light, Soyeon recognizes the background and the hearts and the flowers to figure out that it's a photo booth picture that Jessica's always hid safely in her wallet. Soyeon kneels down beside the bed that Jessica's on, who is already sleeping (or trying to sleep) under big blanket covers. For a while, Soyeon stares at the lump that is her, and wonders how the shape could have ever been the girl in the photo, the girl whose collarbone and hands had never been decorated with presents that boyfriends had given her.
The sheets start becoming loose and Jessica's sleeping face pokes out of the blankets. Soyeon stares at Jessica's hands, which have stopped clutching the blanket tight. She imagines twisting the ring off Jessica's hand, but the outcome will always be the same if she pulled it off or not: Jessica's still going to have a boyfriend to replace that ring.
Jessica mumbles something in English. On the back of some homework Soyeon forgot to throw out or recycle, she scribbles down every cryptic sound of Jessica's American voice.
Dragging her suitcase into the choir room isn't as quiet as she thought it would be. The wheels squeak and annoy the acoustic levels, and someone comes into the main auditorium to see what the disturbance once. Putting her suitcase on top of a chair is useless. Taeyeon's caught her red-handed.
"The choir director isn't here," is the first thing that comes out of Taeyeon's mouth. "If you changed your mind about leaving and want all your parts back."
Soyeon shakes her hair, all sweaty and damp from the efforts of packing and visiting all her friends. "Nah. I'm still going with my plan."
"Oh," Taeyeon says. They stand apart from each other, filling the room with the silence of deep thinking. Sometimes, there's the noise of batting eyelashes when one of them gets caught staring at the other.
"Well, don't get killed or anything. Don't trust strangers," Taeyeon offers, even though she's never attempted quitting university and escaping into the world outside. The farthest place Soyeon knows she's gone to are competitions, but she's always in closed spaces, practicing her singing. Maybe Soyeon should have been more like her. Maybe.
"Does hitchhiking count? I don't want to take the buses anymore," Soyeon replies. "The buses are clearing away homes for their lines. They're making money off us. They're evil."
"Why are you doing this?" Taeyeon asks. Soyeon can't answer that immediately, especially when she's got evil bus industries on her mind.
"I really don't know. All I know is that I need air," Soyeon simply answers.
"I understand."
Soyeon's eyes widen, and then she remembers the rumors she really didn't care about when she first heard them. Remembers the absence of Taeyeon being in the front and Jessica whispering in her ear that Tiffany found Taeyeon's bed empty sometime last year.
"No wonder they pit us against each other so much," Soyeon says, taking tentative steps forward. She wraps her arms around Taeyeon, and the other girl doesn't protest about her sheets of music wrinkling between them. "We're a lot alike."
She feels Taeyeon's fingers slowly embed themselves in her back. Luckily, her fingernails have been reduced.
"You really wanted to get run over, didn't you?"
Soyeon takes her fingers off the inside of the car windows. Minho doesn't take his eyes off the road, communicating with both hands on the steering wheel. She was lucky he had a family emergency and she just happened to be walking in the many miles to the town where his family lived.
"It's a good thing you yelled outside the window. Your deep voice was the only thing louder than my music," Soyeon says, pocketing her mp3 player.
"People don't walk in the middle of the road. Didn't you notice the cars trying to get around you?"
"They weren't trying to get around me. They were more like, skimming me."
"You used to be so cautious," Minho says, driving around a curve. They drive down a street bordered with signs saying "Drive Slowly, We Love Our Children."
"Drop me off here," Soyeon says. Minho shoots her a weird expression on his face, and steps on the brakes.
"If you tell anyone you saw me here," Soyeon says, opening the door and climbing out. "I will track you down. I will see you years later, with a kid that looks exactly like you or something."
Minho laughs, and shrugs his shoulders. "Maybe you will."
She waits to hear him honk the horn before inserting her earphones again. She sets the volume bar higher until the sound of her suitcase being dragged across gravel is muted. But during the soft, low parts of the song, she hears children screaming and crying and laughing.
"It's like seeing a Pampers commercial," Jiyeon tells her. She's a teenage volunteer, the reason why Soyeon doesn't have to be working at the day care. But Soyeon's immune to used diapers, a duty that all the other volunteers and workers try to avoid.
"It's nothing, really. Nothing compared to watching your whole choir group," Soyeon mumbles. Her eyebrows wrinkle as she tries to get the diaper ends to attach. The baby she's holding stares at her working hands and clean fingernails.
"Choir? You used to sing?" Jiyeon asks, young and full of questions. She doesn't bring up her own stories that much, just constantly reminds Soyeon of how she's going to make it up in the future. She never clarifies what it is that she wants to clean up, though.
"It used to be my life," Soyeon answers.
"What was it like?"
"Fun. Amazing. Tiring. Stressful." She used to write ten-page essays about being in choir, when it was required. Now it's reduced to a string of words.
"Were you on stages?"
"Yeah. Big ones, small ones. I was cooped up in restrooms most of the time, alone or sometimes with-" Soyeon remembers holding Jessica's hand while they tiptoed down the hallway. They would always end up in the dirtiest restrooms, using "Caution Wet Floor" signs to blockade one of the bathroom stalls. "-a friend."
"Oh, because restrooms actually have good sound production, right?" Jiyeon says. "Or am I wrong?"
"No, you're right," Soyeon says. The toddler reaches out to her, and she holds his tiny fists.
She's using a computer whose screen suddenly gets attacked by pop-up ads. She spins her chair around, and waves over the man sitting at the desk. They exchange hand signals, with his pointing at himself and looking around to see if it's somebody she wants, and her shaking her head and pointing at the computer screen anxiously. He puts down his book, so he can grip her table with one hand and click the mouse with the other.
"What site were you on? You weren't watching anything explicit, were you?" he asks.
"No, I was on a travel website."
"Ah. Well, I'll get this problem fixed tomorrow. Did you know what time it said on your computer? So we don't take money off you."
"That's very nice of you."
"Do you know what time it was, miss?"
"This is the nicest internet cafe I've ever been to."
He sighs, and the bags under his eyes become more apparent.
"Thanks. Can you tell me what time it was?"
Sometimes, she perches on his desk, sipping a beverage through a straw. He bookmarks the textbook he's reading through, and turns to her. He disappoints her by facing her with his name tag turned into his jacket.
"People aren't really supposed to be here if they're not using a computer," he says.
Soyeon takes her mouth off the straw and wipes her mouth. "Are you politely telling me to leave?"
He looks around, head turning in different directions. "Sort of. But maybe we can meet somewhere else. So you can do your little staring thing."
"Meet me across the street," she tells him, flipping his name tag before he closes the glass door on her. She makes out the letters "Yang Seungho" and sticks her tongue out at him. There's a tiny grin Seungho tries to hide, if Seungho really is his name and not something he laminated and printed out.
"I feel really bad about kicking you out today," Seungho says, taking a seat across from her. She puts down the menu she was rubbing her nose in, and scrunches up her face. She watches him look away and grab the menu that's in the center of the table.
"Why? Because you think I'm mentally ill? And it's technically illegal to remove someone from a place because of their conditions?"
"Uh, no. It's just I never had a girl look my way before. Not at first sight, anyway," Seungho says. "All my guy friends take away cute girls."
"You think I'm cute?" Soyeon asks.
"I think you're weird."
"Tell me something new," Soyeon says, and kicks his legs under the table.
She used to keep herself on her toes, always using the nearest friend to run to when a guy asked for her number. But when Seungho raises her up off the floor and she's between him and the wall, she's not really left with a choice.
"It's nice, right? Not working on a computer for once?" she whispers.
"Yeah," he answers, and presses his lips roughly into hers.
Seungho has this one friend named Joon, and he boasts about speaking English all the time. When Seungho lets go of her hand to talk to a customer, she sits at the table alone with Joon. They don't have a wide range of topics to talk about, so she starts mumbling to herself. She hears Joon scoot his chair away.
"Why would you ask me that?" he says.
"Ask you what?" Soyeon says, confused.
"You were talking in English," Joon says.
"Really? I was just repeating what my friend told me, a long time ago. What did I say?" she asks, leaning over the table.
"'If I gave up everything for you, would you stay?,' that's what you said," Joon translates for her.
When Seungho comes back, she tries her best to sit up straight. Between smiles, she shoots dirty looks at Joon, and he doesn't talk about the English language for the rest of the night.
"Haven't seen you around in a while," Jiyeon smiles when she sits next to Soyeon. They watch the kids together, all of them that call out Jiyeon's name and refer to Soyeon as a woman they've never seen before.
"Pretty soon, I'll be gone. I'm planning on traveling the world. Right after a few things, of course." Soyeon pulls out a tiny notepad. It's nearly empty, except for the date marking Seungho's graduation. It's near the date she was supposed to graduate at her own school, too.
"Oh," Jiyeon says. "I guess we should make this time count."
"Yeah."
Jiyeon swings her legs, long and pale. Soyeon's brain sears the longer she watches them in motion. The part of her brain that stores memory aches.
"Are there things you regret?"
Soyeon opens her mouth but nods instead of sounding out words, answering Jiyeon's last question. Jiyeon's fingers slide across the bench and tangle with Soyeon's.
wip from last year. it only had one long part to it when i found it again, and i decided to finish it. sorry for the pacing, because it was obviously written fast with the little amount of inspiration i had for it. it was going to be more soyeon traveling to more places, but i just gave up. sorry, bias that i don't do you justice.
* also, i didn't just pull minho out of nowhere. soyeon saw him on hello baby and kept saying she thought yoogeun was his child. she acted very comfortably around shinee. interesting fact.
soyeon-centric (+jessica, taeyeon, minho, jiyeon, seungho). pg-13, 2200 words. au. character study, written for unniefic's valentine day/white day challenge.
"I know you know nothing about PC, but Bill Gates once put in a list of how to be successful, you have to go "find yourself" during your own time," Jessica says. She hasn't stopped following Soyeon around her house and folding every shirt that Soyeon throws at her. At one point, Soyeon throws a skirt that Jessica had given her as a present once, and that's when they stop. Jessica won't let go of her shoulder. They're in the kitchen, and Soyeon's dog wakes up to drag itself past the sink, the refrigerator, and the cupboards until it reaches the pantry. Old food that Soyeon hasn't thrown out has a soothing effect.
"Don't go," Jessica says.
Soyeon crosses her arms. "Why can't I?"
"You just can't."
"Sica."
"Injung."
Soyeon pulls Jessica's fingers off. One by one, a skinny finger goes off. The one with the ring on it is the toughest one to remove, something about the gilded weight. "Don't use that name."
"I will until you promise you won't leave. I will keep calling you Injung-"
"Guess I'll have to leave so I won't hear it coming out of your mouth," Soyeon says, shrugging her shoulders.
"Soyeon!" Jessica shouts. Her hair, which has been long for some time now, swings around angrily as she shakes her head. "Why are you doing this? You have everything here."
"I don't have the one thing I truly want," Soyeon says. She walks behind Jessica and runs her fingers through her hair. All the tangles, and possible the anger and disappointment, gets fixed. Her hands eventually rest on Jessica's shoulders and Soyeon drops her forehead on Jessica's back, the top of her head bumping into the neck. She wishes the headache she's getting came from hitting her head on Jessica's skeletal cord.
"What do you want? I'll get it for you," Jessica says.
Soyeon laughs. "You just don't understand."
Jessica eventually agrees to Soyeon's idea of leaving. While Soyeon is packing, Jessica throws something in her open suitcase. Soyeon finds it before she can fill the suitcase up with clothes, and the good bye or good luck present that Jessica's given her doesn't have to suffer being under her clothes and music for eternity. After squinting at it under the light, Soyeon recognizes the background and the hearts and the flowers to figure out that it's a photo booth picture that Jessica's always hid safely in her wallet. Soyeon kneels down beside the bed that Jessica's on, who is already sleeping (or trying to sleep) under big blanket covers. For a while, Soyeon stares at the lump that is her, and wonders how the shape could have ever been the girl in the photo, the girl whose collarbone and hands had never been decorated with presents that boyfriends had given her.
The sheets start becoming loose and Jessica's sleeping face pokes out of the blankets. Soyeon stares at Jessica's hands, which have stopped clutching the blanket tight. She imagines twisting the ring off Jessica's hand, but the outcome will always be the same if she pulled it off or not: Jessica's still going to have a boyfriend to replace that ring.
Jessica mumbles something in English. On the back of some homework Soyeon forgot to throw out or recycle, she scribbles down every cryptic sound of Jessica's American voice.
Dragging her suitcase into the choir room isn't as quiet as she thought it would be. The wheels squeak and annoy the acoustic levels, and someone comes into the main auditorium to see what the disturbance once. Putting her suitcase on top of a chair is useless. Taeyeon's caught her red-handed.
"The choir director isn't here," is the first thing that comes out of Taeyeon's mouth. "If you changed your mind about leaving and want all your parts back."
Soyeon shakes her hair, all sweaty and damp from the efforts of packing and visiting all her friends. "Nah. I'm still going with my plan."
"Oh," Taeyeon says. They stand apart from each other, filling the room with the silence of deep thinking. Sometimes, there's the noise of batting eyelashes when one of them gets caught staring at the other.
"Well, don't get killed or anything. Don't trust strangers," Taeyeon offers, even though she's never attempted quitting university and escaping into the world outside. The farthest place Soyeon knows she's gone to are competitions, but she's always in closed spaces, practicing her singing. Maybe Soyeon should have been more like her. Maybe.
"Does hitchhiking count? I don't want to take the buses anymore," Soyeon replies. "The buses are clearing away homes for their lines. They're making money off us. They're evil."
"Why are you doing this?" Taeyeon asks. Soyeon can't answer that immediately, especially when she's got evil bus industries on her mind.
"I really don't know. All I know is that I need air," Soyeon simply answers.
"I understand."
Soyeon's eyes widen, and then she remembers the rumors she really didn't care about when she first heard them. Remembers the absence of Taeyeon being in the front and Jessica whispering in her ear that Tiffany found Taeyeon's bed empty sometime last year.
"No wonder they pit us against each other so much," Soyeon says, taking tentative steps forward. She wraps her arms around Taeyeon, and the other girl doesn't protest about her sheets of music wrinkling between them. "We're a lot alike."
She feels Taeyeon's fingers slowly embed themselves in her back. Luckily, her fingernails have been reduced.
"You really wanted to get run over, didn't you?"
Soyeon takes her fingers off the inside of the car windows. Minho doesn't take his eyes off the road, communicating with both hands on the steering wheel. She was lucky he had a family emergency and she just happened to be walking in the many miles to the town where his family lived.
"It's a good thing you yelled outside the window. Your deep voice was the only thing louder than my music," Soyeon says, pocketing her mp3 player.
"People don't walk in the middle of the road. Didn't you notice the cars trying to get around you?"
"They weren't trying to get around me. They were more like, skimming me."
"You used to be so cautious," Minho says, driving around a curve. They drive down a street bordered with signs saying "Drive Slowly, We Love Our Children."
"Drop me off here," Soyeon says. Minho shoots her a weird expression on his face, and steps on the brakes.
"If you tell anyone you saw me here," Soyeon says, opening the door and climbing out. "I will track you down. I will see you years later, with a kid that looks exactly like you or something."
Minho laughs, and shrugs his shoulders. "Maybe you will."
She waits to hear him honk the horn before inserting her earphones again. She sets the volume bar higher until the sound of her suitcase being dragged across gravel is muted. But during the soft, low parts of the song, she hears children screaming and crying and laughing.
"It's like seeing a Pampers commercial," Jiyeon tells her. She's a teenage volunteer, the reason why Soyeon doesn't have to be working at the day care. But Soyeon's immune to used diapers, a duty that all the other volunteers and workers try to avoid.
"It's nothing, really. Nothing compared to watching your whole choir group," Soyeon mumbles. Her eyebrows wrinkle as she tries to get the diaper ends to attach. The baby she's holding stares at her working hands and clean fingernails.
"Choir? You used to sing?" Jiyeon asks, young and full of questions. She doesn't bring up her own stories that much, just constantly reminds Soyeon of how she's going to make it up in the future. She never clarifies what it is that she wants to clean up, though.
"It used to be my life," Soyeon answers.
"What was it like?"
"Fun. Amazing. Tiring. Stressful." She used to write ten-page essays about being in choir, when it was required. Now it's reduced to a string of words.
"Were you on stages?"
"Yeah. Big ones, small ones. I was cooped up in restrooms most of the time, alone or sometimes with-" Soyeon remembers holding Jessica's hand while they tiptoed down the hallway. They would always end up in the dirtiest restrooms, using "Caution Wet Floor" signs to blockade one of the bathroom stalls. "-a friend."
"Oh, because restrooms actually have good sound production, right?" Jiyeon says. "Or am I wrong?"
"No, you're right," Soyeon says. The toddler reaches out to her, and she holds his tiny fists.
She's using a computer whose screen suddenly gets attacked by pop-up ads. She spins her chair around, and waves over the man sitting at the desk. They exchange hand signals, with his pointing at himself and looking around to see if it's somebody she wants, and her shaking her head and pointing at the computer screen anxiously. He puts down his book, so he can grip her table with one hand and click the mouse with the other.
"What site were you on? You weren't watching anything explicit, were you?" he asks.
"No, I was on a travel website."
"Ah. Well, I'll get this problem fixed tomorrow. Did you know what time it said on your computer? So we don't take money off you."
"That's very nice of you."
"Do you know what time it was, miss?"
"This is the nicest internet cafe I've ever been to."
He sighs, and the bags under his eyes become more apparent.
"Thanks. Can you tell me what time it was?"
Sometimes, she perches on his desk, sipping a beverage through a straw. He bookmarks the textbook he's reading through, and turns to her. He disappoints her by facing her with his name tag turned into his jacket.
"People aren't really supposed to be here if they're not using a computer," he says.
Soyeon takes her mouth off the straw and wipes her mouth. "Are you politely telling me to leave?"
He looks around, head turning in different directions. "Sort of. But maybe we can meet somewhere else. So you can do your little staring thing."
"Meet me across the street," she tells him, flipping his name tag before he closes the glass door on her. She makes out the letters "Yang Seungho" and sticks her tongue out at him. There's a tiny grin Seungho tries to hide, if Seungho really is his name and not something he laminated and printed out.
"I feel really bad about kicking you out today," Seungho says, taking a seat across from her. She puts down the menu she was rubbing her nose in, and scrunches up her face. She watches him look away and grab the menu that's in the center of the table.
"Why? Because you think I'm mentally ill? And it's technically illegal to remove someone from a place because of their conditions?"
"Uh, no. It's just I never had a girl look my way before. Not at first sight, anyway," Seungho says. "All my guy friends take away cute girls."
"You think I'm cute?" Soyeon asks.
"I think you're weird."
"Tell me something new," Soyeon says, and kicks his legs under the table.
She used to keep herself on her toes, always using the nearest friend to run to when a guy asked for her number. But when Seungho raises her up off the floor and she's between him and the wall, she's not really left with a choice.
"It's nice, right? Not working on a computer for once?" she whispers.
"Yeah," he answers, and presses his lips roughly into hers.
Seungho has this one friend named Joon, and he boasts about speaking English all the time. When Seungho lets go of her hand to talk to a customer, she sits at the table alone with Joon. They don't have a wide range of topics to talk about, so she starts mumbling to herself. She hears Joon scoot his chair away.
"Why would you ask me that?" he says.
"Ask you what?" Soyeon says, confused.
"You were talking in English," Joon says.
"Really? I was just repeating what my friend told me, a long time ago. What did I say?" she asks, leaning over the table.
"'If I gave up everything for you, would you stay?,' that's what you said," Joon translates for her.
When Seungho comes back, she tries her best to sit up straight. Between smiles, she shoots dirty looks at Joon, and he doesn't talk about the English language for the rest of the night.
"Haven't seen you around in a while," Jiyeon smiles when she sits next to Soyeon. They watch the kids together, all of them that call out Jiyeon's name and refer to Soyeon as a woman they've never seen before.
"Pretty soon, I'll be gone. I'm planning on traveling the world. Right after a few things, of course." Soyeon pulls out a tiny notepad. It's nearly empty, except for the date marking Seungho's graduation. It's near the date she was supposed to graduate at her own school, too.
"Oh," Jiyeon says. "I guess we should make this time count."
"Yeah."
Jiyeon swings her legs, long and pale. Soyeon's brain sears the longer she watches them in motion. The part of her brain that stores memory aches.
"Are there things you regret?"
Soyeon opens her mouth but nods instead of sounding out words, answering Jiyeon's last question. Jiyeon's fingers slide across the bench and tangle with Soyeon's.
wip from last year. it only had one long part to it when i found it again, and i decided to finish it. sorry for the pacing, because it was obviously written fast with the little amount of inspiration i had for it. it was going to be more soyeon traveling to more places, but i just gave up. sorry, bias that i don't do you justice.
* also, i didn't just pull minho out of nowhere. soyeon saw him on hello baby and kept saying she thought yoogeun was his child. she acted very comfortably around shinee. interesting fact.