Farewell Alphaville
A/N This was for the unniefic 24 hour challenge but I woke up to find that I confused the time zones and thus I was too late.
Prompt 6
If I die young, bury me in satin
Lay me down on a, bed of roses
Sink me in the river, at dawn
Send me away with the words of a love song.
lyrics: The Band Perry - "If I Die Young"
----------------------------------------------------------
Taeyeon’s pet hamster died two summers before she entered high school. She had it for three years and spent her pocket money on it’s feed and cage.
It was a quiet afternoon and she had been playing in the sprinklers, hair dripping wet. Her brother chased her through to her room, a water pistol in his hand.
“Wait,” she uttered quietly, staring down at the small metal cage.
She picked it up from the bed of bark and it lay in her hand, eerily still and limp. Her brother placed his water gun onto the table and said, “Is she…?”
“Yes,” she responded, with the realization settling right where it was supposed to, somewhere in the pits of her small belly.
They did what they learnt from the movies and wrapped the lifeless body in a satin towel and placed her pet hamster in a hole they had dug under a tree from their backyard.
---
She had her first taste of liqueur hiding behind the back of her father’s van while everyone else was in the villa. Tiffany giggled, her cheeks pink and flush, “Here,” she said placing the glass bottle into Taeyeon’s slight hands.
Taeyeon tentatively took a sip, squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed what she could without spluttering.
“It’s good isn’t it?”
The unsavoury bitter lingered in her mouth and her throat stung but Tiffany watched her expectantly, like it was supposed to be some kind of agreement.
Taeyeon looked at the label of the bottle, tracing her thumb over the cursive print and replied confidently, “Yes,” taking another sip just to show it so.
---
Taeyeon took piano lessons for a little less than a year when she was in seventh grade.
Her teacher was a college graduate, strikingly beautiful with skin the shade of olive and long black locks that met just below her shoulders. Her hands, Taeyeon thought were so soft and slender and yet her own could never reach for an octave and were callused from playing on the monkey bars after school.
She never got past to learning the B minor scale because her teacher stopped their lessons.
Taeyeon forgot the reason for her departure; only that her teacher arrived to her house on the last day with a cheap goodbye card with roses on the cover. Taeyeon ran outside to her back garden and gave her teacher a real rose in return.
---
Tiffany passed a note to Taeyeon which said that the cute boy that sat three rows away from them had a huge crush on her.
Taeyeon looked around and it didn’t really seem so.
Half a year later, she gave him her first kiss and she received his. Their teeth clacked and she felt the cool metal from his braces and the rough of his tongue brush just slightly on her lips.
“I kissed him like this,” Taeyeon placed the torch in front of their feet, rested her hands on the bed, shut her eyes and puckered her lips.
“Like this?” Tiffany replied, imitating Taeyeon, and the second time, sticking her tongue out, “Or like this?”
“The second one.”
Tiffany giggled, “That’s gross.”
“It’s not,” Taeyeon laughed in response, “It was nice.”
“Will you kiss him again?”
“Maybe.”
Taeyeon liked kissing so she kissed him twice more, and two other boys before Tiffany showed her what a kiss full of feelings could mean.
---
By the time they were sixteen Taeyeon figured boys liked Tiffany more than her and sometimes at parties, they’d take her upstairs. Whenever Tiffany came back down, reeking of what Taeyeon thought sex would smell like, sometimes she’d ask Taeyeon to take her home.
More often than not, rides in the car were quiet and purposely forgotten by Tiffany the next day so Taeyeon made a habit out of not bothering her with too many questions.
---
Taeyeon spent half her prom night by the ledge of the creek next to the venue.
Her ex and that pretty girl in her Geography class had been dancing together, and she had lost the spirit to dance herself silly.
She took off her heels and sat by the bank, soiling her canary yellow dress in the process and watched the water move leisurely through the creek bed.
“Hey,” she heard, and she turned watching Tiffany bunch her dress and curl beside her as the wind blew soft from upstream.
“Hi,” Taeyeon replied, picking the small tuft of grass on her side.
“Tonight is a wonderful night,” Tiffany pointed out, because she was Tiffany and stated the optimistically obvious.
“It was,” Taeyeon said and threw the corsage from her wrist into the creek.
“Nope,” Tiffany decided there and then, “It is.”
She pulled her dress to her waist and slid into the stream, her bloomers peeking through and the water rised to the level of her knees. The calm of the water was broken with the swirl and slush or her feet.
Tiffany stood across from Taeyeon whose legs dangled off the ledge. It was dark and the chill started to bite at their skin. She leaned over, kissing Taeyeon flush on the mouth, still tasting faintly of strawberry punch, “Am I right?”
Taeyeon blinked and nodded, staring at round curious eyes and let Tiffany pull her into the icy cold blue. She shivered and hugged Tiffany tighter at the waist when her feet sunk deep into the sludgy mud.
---
“Where will you go?” her brother asked on the phone.
“I want to go to college and then I want to travel overseas,” she shrugged.
He laughed, “Mom will never let you.”
“I will.”
“Then I will too,” her brother replied.
“No,” she said, “You can’t copy me.”
“Yes I can,” he teased, “I’m a college student. I’m an adult. I can do whatever I want.”
---
She worked at the ice cream parlour during summer after graduation.
Taeyeon gave extra scoops for the cute girls and boys that passed by and recommended the fresh fruit sundae, because she was good at cutting fruit.
She got up an hour before sunrise to churn the milk and by lunch there would be a line of children waiting outside.
When Tiffany visited, she secretly gave her a banana split sundae topped with extra caramel without her manager knowing. Tiffany ate messily and sometimes she got ice cream accidentally on the corners of her mouth, and Taeyeon wanted nothing more to lick the it all off.
But when Tiffany brought her boyfriend, Taeyeon never offered them a sundae to share.
---
Summer turned to fall and Taeyeon watched Tiffany in flesh, turn slowly into a small speck in the distance and finally nothing as the cab drove away to the airport and college dorms, where grown up things were supposed to happen.
--
Two weeks short of adulthood she let Tiffany lay her down, allowed her to nip at the cords strung across her neck and between her breasts down to the midline of her abdomen.
They both returned from college for the spring, distance did a funny thing.
Tiffany looked up and smiled, “I’ve missed this.”
“But we’ve never, I’ve never-,” Taeyeon gasped, jerking when Tiffany clutched the back of her knees and dragged her lips across the insides of her thighs.
Tiffany touched her tentatively for the first time, stroking tenderly, carefully and kissing the dip where rib cage met abdomen.
Taeyeon leaned her head into the pillow, snapping her eyes shut and suddenly missed this very much, whatever it was, maybe a vague memory of a fleeting feeling in bed at night.
And when she had Tiffany guide her hand down past her belly and Tiffany began to sing a broken chant filled with only her name, Taeyeon felt a friendship wither and the bloom of an unspoken devotion that had lay dormant for years too long.
At the ripe age of twenty, Taeyeon bid her youth farewell and laid it to rest prematurely with Tiffany as her one and only witness.