#36: bones, sinking like stones (3/4)
PART III
2020, November 10. Ganghwado coastline, South Korea.
Atticon makes landfall way ahead of time, appearing in the mouth of the Han river before Artemis has time to defend the miracle mile. Fighting so close to the coastline knowing that there are still people around who haven’t been evacuated makes it ten times harder than usual, and even though this is their second mission together, there is still Myungsoo’s anxiety running through her head and mixing in with hers.
Still, Soojung thinks they’re doing some pretty great damage despite there being limited space in which to throw Atticon around, and with the legendary Cherno Alpha on the way it seems like things are going to end in another win for her and a second for Myungsoo.
Let’s just use the plasma gun and get this over and done with, she hears Myungsoo in her head when Atticon reels after being knifehand struck in the face, and she nods. Catching Atticon’s arm and twisting it behind its back, Myungsoo begins loading the plasma cannon. “Come on!” she cries as Atticon struggles in their grip, gnashing at them with sharp teeth.
“I got it!” Myungsoo unloads two direct hits into the Kaiju’s abdomen, where it falls back into the Han with a great splash that drenches them and spills water out over the embankments into the streets. Panting, Soojun turns to look at Myungsoo as he smiles back at her (she feels a shiver of excitement crawl up her spine) and lowers the cannon.
“LOCCENT, this is Artemis, mission success,” she relays back. “Tell Cherno Alpha to turn back, and sorry for stealing their kill.”
Myungsoo laughs. “Whoops.”
“Hey, you guys did it!” comes a high, girlish voice through the intercom, and Soojung and Myungsoo exchange glances.
“Jinri?” Soojung asks incredulously. “What are you doing here?”
“We always hover around for a little while in case anything happens, you know, as backup, and wow, did you guys kick its ass or what?” Jinri’s excitement is almost infectious, and Myungsoo starts grinning deliriously again. “Hey, look up, can you see me?”
Soojung looks up and spots her best friend’s familiar T-50, the only black one in the whole fleet, circling above them. She doesn’t know any names of any basic flight manoeuvres, nor does she now how to execute any of them properly, but she does know that out of all the PPDC fighter pilots that Incheon has, Jinri is the best.
“I’m waving,” Jinri says. “Wave back to me.” Soojung and Myungsoo oblige, even if Myungsoo thinks to himself that this is wildly inappropriate for a Jaeger to wave at anyone. Jinri laughs. “It’s kind of weird seeing this robot waving at me but it’s pretty cool. Is it done? Are we all going back now?”
“Maybe you should get your orders from Marshall and not me,” Soojung rolls her eyes. “How are you even managing to talk like this? Can’t everyone else hear you?”
Jinri chuckles. “Let’s just say there are some pretty good perks to dating the Chief LOCCENT Officer,” she giggles, and Soojung feels Myungsoo’s deadpan. “Hey, oh my god, I have to tell you something later when we get back, I’ve been dying to tell you since yesterday but you were in the simulator. Oh, and don’t tell Myungsoo.”
“I’ll find out everything in the Drift anyway,” Myungsoo says as the Jumphawks appears in the distance. “Scoot on back now, Jinri, you’re in the way.”
“Blunt as always,” Jinri replies, and Soojung can imagine her sticking her tongue out at him as she does another turn. “You’ll be sorry later, Mister Kim.”
“Jinri -,” Soojung starts, when a sudden beeping on the HUD catches her eye. “Jinri, get the hell out of here!” she yells as Yixing’s voice cuts into the Pod.
“Kaiju signature rising, coming from 8 o'clock! That thing is still alive, Artemis!”
“We got it!” Myungsoo shouts, loading the plasma cannon, when Atticon bursts out of the water and blindsides them, it’s claws digging into their shoulders. “Load already, Jesus - !” he curses as Atticon bites down on the cannon and tears it out of their arm, throwing it behind it into the water.
“Cannon is compromised!” Soojung relays. Thumping Atticon on the head seems like something out of a playground brawl, but with the Kaiju chomping down on their hand it seems to be the only way to deal with it. “Come on, Myungsoo!” she yells.
And then a missile hits it in the back of the head. Soojung sees the black fighter jet zip through the smoke rising from the Kaiju, spraying a barrage of bullets at its face. The Kaiju gives an eardrum-shattering cry, and releases them.
Soojung sees it all in slow motion: the Kaiju lumbering after the jet, them running behind it, the T-50 pulling out and narrowly missing being struck, her screaming at Jinri to get out of here, get out of here, you’re going to get killed, Jinri yelling back at her to kill it already!, Soojung yelling back that you’re too fast, just get the hell out of here!, Myungsoo telling her to use the sword, the Loading Lightning Sword echoing in their ears, and then, and then, and then -
Jinri’s tail crumpling under a fingertip. Smoke billowing out from her engines as she begins to lose altitude. Atticon lifting one giant scaly hand. Bringing it down.
An explosion.
She spots a wingtip crashing into the water, all that remains of her best friend and her fighter jet.
Cherno Alpha finishes off Atticon just as it swims inland and hits Itaewon, leaving behind a trail of destruction in its wake. Most of the city had already been evacuated, but the casualties are devastating all the same. It takes a week to clear the remains of the Kaiju away safely, the spire of the N Seoul Tower protruding from between its eyes. Kaiju Blue leaks for days, but its effects only last hours. The city loses another fraction of its population. Myungsoo curses and says Cherno should’ve known better. After the service (not a funeral, you can’t have funerals for the bodies you don’t find) Yixing takes a leave of absence. Soojung sleepwalks through the next 4 months as she shuttles between her bed and weekly sessions with Jonghyun, wishing she had been more vigilant.
She half wants Yixing to yell at her, tell her it’s all her fault for not checking properly, for being too confident. For not looking out for Jinri when he specifically told her to. He doesn’t. He just leaves.
She buries the charred white helmet with Choi Jinri printed on it beside the Han river. One more to haunt her at night.
2022, September 21. South China Sea.
When Tentalus emerges from the waves it’s clear why Hong Kong called for backup. With a head full of bristling, glowing tentacles, it proves to be a match for both Jaegers as it wraps itself around their arms and trips them up with its tail. It takes minutes for Soojung to figure that it’s relying solely on its tentacles as it’s main offense, and she’s just about to relay this to Typhoon when the Kaiju begins spinning the both of them around.
“What the hell kind of creature even has tentacles and a tail?!” Jongin yells as he wraps a hand around the limb clinging to their arm. “I’ve got it! Let’s load the cannon!”
“No!” Soojung yells back. “I’ve got a plan! Typhoon!” she sends out. “We just need to cut them off! Cut them off and we’ll deal with the rest later!”
“Copy!” One of the Tang triplets responds - she doesn’t know which one - and a minute later Typhoon’s hands are saw blades and they begin swinging. Electric blue tentacles fall into the ocean one by one as Tentalus screams and the Jaeger backs away to regain itself. This is Soojung’s first time seeing the Thundercloud Formation first hand, and she can feel Jongin’s admiration in her head.
“Come on, we can’t let Typhoon have all the fun!” he says, and Soojung nods, unsheathing the sword. Lightning Sword loading, she hears, and she sees Kohryu’s head separate from its body. A black fighter jet burning as it speeds towards a scaly Kaiju hand. The cold ocean slamming into her as it drags her down towards her watery grave.
“No!” Jongin roars, and she’s snapped out of her spell. Lightning Sword load complete. Tentalus has thrown Typhoon back under the water and is holding it down with its weight. “You don’t belong in the past anymore,” Jongin breathes, his expression intense. He raises his left arm, and Soojung does likewise, her eyes locked on his. “You belong here, in this cockpit, right now! With! Me!” And with each word, both he and Soojung slice off the tentacles holding on to them and pull the Kaiju off their partner, slamming it into the ocean. Jongin looks at Soojung and they’re thinking the same thing in her head: as Tentalus shoots the last of its appendages towards them, they drive the sword straight through its chest.
In a few minutes it’s all over: Artemis locking Tentalus’ arms behind it as Typhoon hacks away at its throat. Another potential disaster averted. The clock resets.
It doesn’t hit her until she’s back in the Shatterdome, Yixing looking down at them from mission control with a mixture of pride and sadness written on his face. Beside him, Victoria looks relieved.
Soojung has just bagged her 8th kill. Jongin has just had a taste of his first.
And it feels pretty damn amazing.
The adrenaline is still buzzing in her veins a few days later when she gets up in the morning and heads down to the Kwoon. Minhyuk is already there, tapping away at something on his tablet. He looks up when Soojung enters, and grins. “Look who’s back in the game,” he nods. His way of congratulations, Soojung knows. “I’ve monitored your fight, and I think I’ve come up with a way to meld your defensive style with Jongin’s more offensive one. It won’t be easy, since it won’t be… you know...”
“... the same as what me and Myungsoo had?” Soojung stuffs her hands into her military jacket. She stares down at her boots, tries to keep down the thought that has been gnawing at her ever since she saw Yixing’s face in the mission control window after taking down Tentalus. Her lips tremble. She’s always been bad at this.
“Six months ago you didn’t even want to hear his name,” Minhyuk says carefully. “Are you okay with it now?”
She shrugs and drops to the floor, unlacing one of her boots and pulling it off. She doesn’t want Minhyuk to see that her eyes are full of tears, that she doesn’t want to speak because the lump in her throat will give her away. She doesn’t want him to know that she still isn’t okay speaking about Myungsoo in past tense, that she isn’t okay coming back elated from a mission with a different person in the harness next to her.
She tries to hide her trembling fingers by bending over more, but Minhyuk kneels down beside her and puts his hand over hers. She stiffens, but doesn’t pull away.
“I have never,” he starts, “seen you connect with anyone as well as you did with Myungsoo. That fight you had that day… that was the first time I’d ever seen anyone break past your defense. That was the first time I had seen anyone beat you. That was why you let him in, didn’t you?”
She looks up at him. Her eyes are wet. “Yeah, I did. And that’s why I can’t let Jongin in. If I let him in I’ll fall in so deep that I’ll start to forget. That I’ll forget what it was like to fall in love Myungsoo. What it was like to Drift with Sooyeon. That I’ll forget everyone. And that terrifies me.”
“Look, kid,” he puts a hand on her head. “I picked Jongin out of a batch of 20 kids because he is everything Myungsoo is not. Sure, he’s a great fighter and his mental strength is second to none, but he’s impulsive as hell and he makes the most inappropriate comments at the worst time possible. But I chose him for you because even though I know you’re malleable, Drift compatibility doesn’t always mean that that person would save you.” He chucks her under the chin. “That kid will save you, Soojung,” he says gently. “In all the ways I couldn’t. Just let him in.”
She sniffs, and drags her sleeve across her nose. “I don’t know if I can,” she mumbles. “I don’t know if I can replace Myungsoo so fast.”
“You won’t be replacing him,” Minhyuk heaves a sigh through his nose. “You won’t be replacing any of them.” He taps a finger to her forehead. “They’ll always be with you. You’ll always find them in the Drift. Don’t forget that.” He gets to his feet and holds a hand out to her. “Come on, we’re 5 minutes behind schedule and I need you guys to learn this move today.”
She wipes her face and gets up. “You’re stronger now, Minhyuk,” she remarks as she drops her jacket on to the mat.
He doesn’t even blink. “We can’t live in the past forever,” he replies.
2020, April 17. Kwoon combat room.
“5 - 4.”
Soojung stares into the eyes of her new co-pilot. His hair is jet black, damp with sweat. His chest is heaving. His gaze is cold as the Fightmaster reads out the final score, but when he straightens and holds a hand out to her it melts into a warm smile.
He has eyes like the sun.
She can see Minhyuk in the crowd in front of her. He spots her looking and nods, only a slight smile playing on the corner of his lips for a second before it drops. She can’t imagine what he must be feeling right now, seeing her in the same room where she had fought him only a month before, a new co-pilot by her side. A new stranger standing where he once stood, all because he couldn’t take the mental strain of having her in his head. All because his mind was weak where his body was not. She nods back. She thinks she can imagine how he feels.
“Hi,” says her new co-pilot. His hand is still wrapped around her wrist.
His name is Kim Myungsoo. He is the first person to beat her since Sooyeon did, 4 years earlier.
2022, October 1. Incheon Shatterdome games room.
“His name was Taemin,” Jongin says suddenly in the middle of a ping pong match, sweat dripping off the end of his nose. “He was the first friend I made in the Bone Slums, I met him when I was fighting off a bunch of older boys who were trying to steal my blanket.” He serves the ball to her, and she misses. “He came along and helped me, but he looked so carefree that I almost hated him.” He traps the ball as she bounces it back to him, and looks at it. She decides not to say anything. “But he had this smile that made you feel like a lot of bad things were going to happen, but everything was still going to be okay. You can’t hate a guy like that, not matter how hard you try.”
A boy with a smile like the end of the world.
“I remember when Atticon attacked Seoul. We were working at the bakery that day when the sirens went off. I made it into the shelters, but it wasn’t until after the doors closed that I realized that Taem wasn’t with me.” He’s still holding the ball in his hand, a far-off look on his face as he squeezes it in his palm. Atticon. Soojung tries not to think of a burning T-50. “I didn’t find him til later, when they let us back outside.” Here Jongin gives a dry laugh. “The bastard hadn’t even been in a shelter, but he was still alive. He had nine lives, I swear.” He trails off, and flattens the ball.
“Jongin?” Soojung asks. She puts down the paddle, sensing that the game is over. That was the only ball they had anyway.
“Taemin survived the attack,” Jongin grits his teeth. “He probably would have stood in the path of a Kaiju and survived. But the next day, on our way back to the bakery, we found this giant patch of Kaiju Blue in the middle of the street. It wasn’t even cordoned off, it was like no one even knew about it. And Taemin, he goes closer just to have a look. He tells me not to worry.” Jongin is blinking rapidly, and Soojung sees fire in his eyes. “He just wants to see. And I should’ve said no, I should’ve pulled him away. But I didn’t.” He trails off. She waits. He inhales deeply, exhales just as hard. “Two days later he was dead at my feet. A 3, 000 tonne monster couldn’t kill him when it was alive, but guess what?” He gives a cynical, wobbly laugh. “It killed him when it was dead. Oh, the irony.”
A part of Soojung wants to hug him. Hold his hand and tell him that she lost someone important to her on that day too, that she knows exactly what it is like to keep burying the people you love. Another part of her wants to stay where she is, on the other side of the ping-pong table with a net between them. Tell him that she already knows this story, has seen it in his head multiple times. That his grief is nothing compared to hers.
Jongin drops the ball on to the floor at his feet. “I know you know this story.” The look he gives her is dead, and it makes her blood run cold. “Just like I know yours. I thought that when we got our first win you’d start trusting me more, but I feel like you’re getting worse.”
She wasn’t expecting that last sentence. She bristles. “What are you talking about?” she shoots back. “We’re here playing ping pong together, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, and you’re really sucking at it,” Jongin shrugs. “Something’s off about you, you’ve been acting weird ever since we started training with Minhyuk.” He fixes her with a steely glare. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Something that you’ve been telling Minhyuk. And I don’t like it.”
“Excuse me?” she reels backwards, opening her eyes wide. “You don’t like me talking to the Fightmaster? I’m sorry, but I wasn’t aware I needed your permission to talk to other people,” she claps a hand to her chest in fake surprise. “I must’ve missed the memo. Why don’t you try sending it again, and then we can come back and have a nice long ping pong match that doesn’t end with you talking about your dead friend.”
Jongin suddenly looks dangerous, and she knows she’s hit a nerve. She doesn’t care. She knows she’s been getting better, has definitely been feeling a lot more comfortable being around Jongin since defeating Tentalus, and it riles her that he’s insinuating that she’s only getting worse. It hurts even worse that a part of her knows that he’s right.
“Take that back,” he says quietly. His fist is clenched around the handle of his paddle.
“I might live in the past in my head,” she plants her hands on to the table and stares him down. Her cheeks are burning, just like they always do when she’s mad, but she doesn’t care. “But at least I don’t talk about it. At least I don’t try to drag other people back with me.” She grabs her jacket from the couch and flounces out.
“That’s exactly the problem with you!” Jongin yells after her. “You only live in your head!” She hears his roar of frustration and the crack of wood splintering as she closes the door behind her, and she guesses that he’s flung his paddle into the wall. She doesn’t turn back.
2020, February 11. Incheon Shatterdome mess hall.
Amber bangs her tray down with more force than usual, making Soojung jump. She squints up at her co-pilot, her apple juice straw hanging out of her mouth. “What’s up?” she mumbles around it. Amber remains standing, her hands on her hips. She looks fiercer than usual, and Soojung braces herself for some yelling to happen.
“I’m going to tell you this before you hear it from anyone else!” Amber shoots a finger at her, and Soojung leans to one side to avoid getting her eye taken out. “And I’m really sorry about it, because you have been the best co-pilot anyone could ever have! Working with you has been the best time of my life! I mean, sure, we never actually managed to fight any Kaiju together, but our simulator fights were awesome!”
“Amber, will you sit down and talk at a normal level?” Soojung hisses, noticing the people on the same table as them (and the surrounding ones) watching with interest.
“No, I will not!” Amber huffs, sticking her chest out.
Soojung looks sadly at what is left of her food. Another wasted meal. And it was bibimbap too, her favourite. She sighs. She grabs her juice carton, then her co-pilot’s hand, and drags her out of the room.
“Okay, what the hell is going on?” She leans back against the wall in the corridor, spearing her carton carefully and taking a sip. “What was so important that you had to tell me about it first and make me lose half of my bibimbap?”
“I’m being promoted,” Amber says, her tone and expression completely different from the one she had used just a few minutes before. She looks more serious, more wary. Soojung has always found these two sides of Amber interesting; the loud, playful one she shows to just about everyone and the quieter, more intense one she uses in the middle of a fight.
Soojung stops sucking on her straw. “What?”
“Yeah,” Amber crosses her arm against her chest. “Newly developed Jaeger. They have a pilot from Korea, a Kim Hyuna, but so far nobody has been Drift compatible with her.”
“But you are.” Soojung scratches her nail against the side of the juice carton. Another co-pilot leaving, another to take her place. The circle of her life. “Will you be leaving?”
“No, I’ll still be here,” Amber suddenly punches her on the shoulder. “Who else is gonna take care of ya, huh?” She grins, and Soojung feels a little better. At least not everyone leaves. “Marshall was going to call us both in tonight to tell you but I kinda wanted to let you know first. I felt like I needed you to hear it from me.”
Soojung half-forces a smile. “Yeah, thanks, Amber. I appreciate it. Hey, you’re gonna make a great pilot. What’s the Jaeger’s name?”
“Apparently they named it Zeta Phalanx, but that sounds absolutely terrible,” Amber sticks out her tongue and makes a puking face. “I’m gonna try and change it to Crash Nebula, it sounds way cooler.” She punches the air, and smiles. “Don’t worry, Soojung. You’ll be just as fine with the next one. You always are.” She pats her on the shoulder, but Soojung can still feel her punch bruising her bones.
“Definitely,” she agrees. She doesn’t tell Amber that she wishes she wasn’t.
Later, when Amber goes back to the mess hall to see if her food is still around (Soojung knows it isn’t), Soojung throws herself into her bed and stares up at the ceiling. One year and three co-pilots later and she’s back in this same position: a Ranger without a co-pilot, in a Jaeger that she still doesn’t feel belongs to her.
“How long will this go on?” she asks the ceiling. It doesn’t respond.
She groans and flips on to her stomach, squashing her face into the pillow. The apple juice churns in her stomach with what bibimbap she had managed to get down, and she groans again. Three co-pilots. Four, if you counted Sooyeon. Three co-pilots since Sooyeon. She tries not to think too much about Sooyeon. A year and three co-pilots later and her heart still feels like it’s stabbed by a dozen dulled IV drips.
Soojung can count the number of co-pilots she’s had on one hand.
The first after Sooyeon was Kim Joonmyun. He was friendly and easy to adapt to because of his ultimately bland personality, but they got along well until they went on their first mission 2 months after being assigned to each other. They won, Joonmyun’s first kill and her 4th, but for Joonmyun the sight of a Kaiju being so close completely broke him. He left soon after, and Soojung never heard from him again.
The second was Oh Sehun, who joined her a month after Joonmyun left. His facial expression usually alternated between sleepy, disinterested or confused, but he was the same age as her and also had a wicked (albeit weird) sense of humour, even if his English was absolute rubbish. They worked together for 6 months and had one kill before he was given his own Jaeger and stationed at the Anchorage Shatterdome to replace Gipsy Danger after Yancy Becket was killed. She kept in touch for a while, but even Drift compatibility wasn’t enough to cross the miles between them.
Third was Amber Liu, American-Taiwanese with near fluency in Korean, only her co-pilot for 3 months. It was her success with Amber that alerted Victoria that she was malleable. No one else had ever had more than two co-pilots, and Soojung became some kind of celebrity among the Rangers. It was a pity they didn’t even get a chance to go on a mission together, because Amber’s strategy tactics were one of the best Soojung had ever come across. Still, it was always fun when Amber was around, and she was the only one who could talk smack to Marshall Song and somewhat get away with it. Soojung admired her, but now she was just another ex co-pilot to join the list.
Soojung flexes her fingers. She hopes there won’t come a time when she runs out of fingers to count on.
2022, October 22. Incheon Shatterdome.
It takes her three weeks to work up the nerve to knock on his door. She thinks she might be better off without him, and Crash Nebula can keep defending the area while she continues to rot away in this reinforced concrete cage, but Jonghyun keeps asking her how the trust exercises are going and Minhyuk keeps glowering at her whenever she turns up to the Kwoon alone and the final nail in the coffin is when Victoria beckons to her and tells her to stop behaving like a spoil brat, she didn’t spend hours convincing the UN to get Artemis Fury back just to have her mope around her room because she couldn’t get along with her co-pilot.
Soojung can’t take the hounding anymore, which is why she is here knocking on his door with no intention of apologizing whatsoever.
He opens the door after exactly 10 knocks. “What the hell do you want?” he asks brusquely. He looks like he’s just woken up, his hair sticking up one side and his eyes bleary, dressed in just a tank top and regulation pants. Soojung tries to keep her eyes focused on his face and not his arms. “It’s 2 in the morning for god’s sakes, do you not have a concept of bedtime?”
She ignores the jab and brushes him aside. “We still have some trust exercises to do and we’ve wasted too much time. Are you going to let me in?”
Jongin stares at her, looking completely bewildered. “You’re completely nuts, you know that?” But he stands aside for her anyway, letting her in. His room is almost identical to hers, except instead of an empty desk he has paper strewn everywhere and where her walls are bare he has several posters. He catches her looking at a particularly worn one with curling edges, and huffs. “Having fun there?” he flops onto his bed. Soojung tears herself away from the Jaeger on the propaganda poster - her Jaeger - and the dates of the Ranger recruitment drive - May 2021, Myungsoo was still alive then - and looks at him. He looks back.
“Atticon wasn’t that long ago, was it?” she asks quietly. Jongin’s expression loosens slightly.
“Almost 2 years ago,” he replies without the slightest hesitation, and she wonders how long he’s been counting the days between the death that changed him and this very second. She wonders how long it has been between the death that changed her and this very second. She stopped counting the days after the first 6 months. “There’s nothing left of Taemin by now.”
She rifles through some of the paper on his desk. Kaiju dossiers, the fighting styles of the more well-known Jaegers. She chances on a sheet with Sehun’s face on it. Jongin is still watching her warily. She covers the sheet back up. She feels something bubbling up in her chest, something she desperately wants to get out before it consumes her. “There was nothing left of Jinri the moment Atticon crashed her out of the sky,” she starts before she can stop herself. “And the fish have probably pecked Myungsoo’s bones clean by now. Don’t you think that’s a somewhat peaceful way to go?” She looks up. “We were still connected when he drowned, you know.”
Jongin sits up. “I know.”
“Do you think he felt the fish nibbling at him? Do you think he was happy that he wasn’t torn apart by sharks?” Soojung takes a piece of paper and a pencil and sits on the floor, facing Jongin. “I tell him I’m sorry everyday. If I had just listened to him instead of trying to drown that Kaiju he’d still be here, wouldn’t he?”
“Yeah, he would,” Jongin says quietly. “But I wouldn’t.”
They stare at each other for a few minutes before Jongin looks away. He gets up and walks past Soojung, and she stares down at the paper in her lap. His room smells like him. “Do you think you’d forgive me if I ever let you die?” she asks.
Jongin sits down behind her with a thump. There’s a second where she feels nothing, and then he leans back against her, his head resting on her shoulder. His hair tickles her jaw, and she’s slightly surprised by how soft it is. It feels slightly damp too, as if he’s just washed it. “I would if I knew that you fought for me,” he says. She can feel his heartbeat through his tank top and her jumper and she can feel her own, as if she has two hearts inside her instead of none. She can feel the shift in pressure on her back every time he inhales and exhales. She closes her eyes.
“Trust exercise number 3,” she finally manages. “Shared visualisation. Tell me what to draw without telling me what it is.” She waits a few seconds before the slow, even breath ruffling her hair tells her that he’s fallen asleep.
It’s Amber who spots her when she exits Jongin’s room that morning, her own hair mussed and her body aching from falling asleep on the floor. She can still feel the warmth of Jongin’s back lingering on her own and somewhere in the middle of the night he had actually dragged the blanket down over the both of them (The idiot, she thinks. He could have dragged them up to the bed instead). She’s still thinking about how soft Jongin’s hair is when she finds her path blocked. She looks up. Amber’s grin is Cheshire Cat-like.
“Soooo, what were we doing coming out of our resident co-pilot’s room at 8 in the morning, hmmmmm?” she announces a little too loudly, and Soojung tries hard to keep her nostrils from flaring.
“Nothing,” she says. “I just went in, okay?” She fixes her ex co-pilot with a squint. “Don’t you try and insinuate anything, Amber Liu.”
Amber laughs, showing even white teeth. “Mussed hair, dishevelled clothes, bleary eyes. That is not the sign of someone who woke up in their own room, Jung Soojung. You’d better not let the Marshall find out,” she winks.
“I said nothing happened,” Soojung snaps. “Don’t you have some simulation training to do?”
Amber doesn’t stop grinning even as she walks away. “Nice to hear you yelling at me again, Soojung!” she yells down the corridor, then waves and disappears. Soojung goes into her own room, inspects her red cheeks in her mirror, then bangs her forehead against it.
“I can let him in, can’t I?” she asks her reflection.
(cont)