Work Text:
chenli stared at the textbook. the textbook stared back at chenli. chenli stared at the textbook even harder . the textbook metaphorically smirked.
“mool-go-gi-neun t-tt-oh san-ho-eh soom-eo-eoss-seub-nee-dah?” she asked thin air, trying to piece together the meaning of the hangul that taunted her from the page. that’s it , she thought, if sejong the great comes back during the zombie apocalypse, i’m gonna be the one who kills him .
she’d already figured out the meaning of neun tto and e easily, and she was pretty sure sum-eossseubnida was something to do with being hidden. but whatever the heck (chenli didn’t like to swear because she was a lady, unlike jisoo, the foul-mouthed peasant) mulgogi and sanho were, they apparently hadn’t made it into her (admittedly lacking) korean vocabulary yet.
chenli sighed, flopping onto her back and sinking just a little bit deeper into her mattress. she briefly toyed again with the idea of looking up the words on her phone, but she was stubborn and, in the 5 minutes she’d been staring at that single page, had managed to convince herself that their meanings were on the tip of her tongue, and if she just thought a little but harder she’d get it.
1 frustrating minute later and she was no closer to deciphering the statement and resigned to her fate of [ shivers] g o o g l e.
approximately 30 embarrassing seconds later she was contemplating how the words yú and mulgogi c ould be so different while shānhú and sanho were so similar.
“this sucks. i’m never gonna get it.” she sighed, dropping the textbook (that she had such a strong love-hate relationship with they might as well be renjin and dohee) down onto the floor beside her bed.
she ran a hand through her hair; it was still the soft pinkish-orangey brown it had been dyed for their last comeback, but her roots had started to show through and she knew that the managers not instantly dragging her to a salon for touch-ups meant that the group would be switching up their looks again soon.
sometimes chenli wondered if she made the right choice in moving out of the dorm. don’t get her wrong, she loved being able to wake up every morning and have a breakfast that smelled like home with her mother, chatting easily in a rapid fire mix of shanghainese and mandarin. but sometimes she just really wished she could toddle (because really, that’s what her awkward, ‘i-need-help’ walk looked like) into another member’s room and ask them what a word meant, instead of having to figure it out on her own.
(could she just call or text them? yes. did she also, for some reason, think that was more likely to bother them than wandering into their bedrooms unannounced at random moments and so therefore she shouldn’t do it? also yes.)
sighing one again and leaning over the side of her bed, chenli grabbed her
beloved
hated textbook again and lay back to study some more.
chenli stared at the textbook.
the textbook stared back at chenli.
chenli stared at the textbook even harder .
jisoo literally smirked.
she was sat quite comfortably in the group’s van, having just witnessed dohee loose spectacularly at rock-paper-scissors. this meant she was the one who had to wander up to chenli’s
rather
incredibly large and imposing house, ring the doorbell and explain to mrs. zhong, ‘yes, hi, could we please borrow your daughter? we wanna go buy some instant ramen and get nongshim-faced while watching all the best disney films made before 1980.’
now while this request was genuinely completely innocent, trying to communicate with chenli’s mom was difficult for every member in the van besides their chinese-speaking leader, renjin. and renjin liked to watch them suffer, meaning they had to play rock-paper-scissors instead of just sending her up. (a 1/10 leader move but 12/10 mischief move. jisoo kinda approved.)
dohee tried to act like her typically cool and cheery self but was noticeably awkward as she faux-sauntered up to the door. her nerves were almost instantly proven unwarranted, however, as mrs. zhong opened the door, saw it was dohee, and immediately called chenli down.
one 15 minute car ride later, all the girls were crowded around the tv in their group dormitory watching peter pan and stuffing their faces with noodle-y goodness.
(chenli had long ago decided she liked this way more than studying.)