Work Text:
“I’m going to make a video out of these,” says Lisa, fiddling with her camera. They’re in the backseat of a car in Tokyo, and Jisoo’s holding her own ice cream in one hand and Lisa’s in the other.
Jisoo eyes their manager up front.
“I already talked about it to our managers,” assures Lisa.
“Travel video style? With music?”
“Yeah.” Lisa goes silent for a few seconds, focused on her camera. Then, “I was thinking, one of our songs.”
None of their tracks really sound like travel songs, but she asks anyway, “Which one?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I just,” Lisa gestures with one hand, the other still curled around her camera. “Find out as I put it together.”
Lalisa Manoban
November 5th, 2018
(10:00) Unnie, I posted it!! >> https://youtu.be/oSX33Mfr5pw
The title reads, “LILI’s FILM #1 - JISOO in JAPAN.” She watches it, its bright colors, and smiles.
“How do I look?” asks Chaeyoung, displaying her newly made-up face to Jisoo.
It’s a little different from her usual make-up look, courtesy of the stylists; there’s glitter on the inner corner of her eyes and her eyelids reflect with a slight sheen.
“Looks good,” says Jisoo, giving her a cheap thumbs-up, before returning to her phone.
“There’s so many people here,” says Chaeyoung, and Jisoo hums in agreement. She continues, “I’m gonna go talk to them.”
Jisoo watches from her makeup chair as Chaeyoung goes around befriending the staff. Talking high-pitched, exclaiming, “I’m so nervous!”
Jisoo is amiable at heart, but she’s thinking about their debut stage in an hour more than making friends. She thinks over the dance steps in her head as the stylists makeover her face, spotting Chaeyoung in the mirror chattering away. By the time the four of them - Jennie, Lisa, Chaeyoung, and herself - are lined up and ready to go, the staff members are enamored with Park Chaeyoung.
When they come back from their debut stage, Chaeyoung cries, and the staff members she’d taken such care to befriend gather round to hug her and wipe her face.
“You seem close with the staff,” says Jisoo once, before bed. They’re seated on the couch of their dorm, in front of a tiny television screen. They’re both in pajamas, and Jisoo’s got her hair in a messy bun. Chaeyoung has a pale pink face mask plastered to her visage.
“They’re all so nice,” is Chaeyoung’s only response, before she picks up the remote to switch channels. She settles on a food network.
“Ah,” says Jisoo, frustrated. “Watching this makes me hungry.”
“Then eat something,” says Chaeyoung, focused on the screen. Then she perks up. “Oh! I found a vitamin drink online, there’s a few in the fridge if you want one.”
“I think I’ll just sleep,” mutters Jisoo, getting up from the couch. She’s dieting a little bit. Just enough that she can match the waistlines of the other members, or so she tells herself.
Chaeyoung seems to believe a little too much, behave a little too sincere. Jisoo is all too aware of how it could all fall apart. Still, with Chaeyoung, it’s hard not to be a little optimistic.
"When I first saw you, in that krump class, I thought you were so cool." Chaeyoung drops a huge glob of her Australia-imported Vegemite onto her toast. It’s a few days into filming their first reality show, in one of those pockets of time where whatever’s being filmed will probably be cut for time.
Jisoo pauses the slow consumption of her own, Vegemite-free toast. "When was that?"
“I’m not sure. Sometime when I first got here. I didn’t know anything about dancing - well, I was a cheerleader, but it’s not the same…”
“So you saw some girl do some krumping and thought that was cool.”
“No! You were really good, unnie.” Chaeyoung frowns. “How come you stopped?”
There were a lot of reasons she stopped.
The company decided it wasn’t going to be their concept. They would be girl crush, but not girl crush ; that is, only the bark and not the bite. Somewhere along the way, among lacking trainee diets and vigorous dance lessons, she’d lost too much muscle to do it properly anymore. And then, after losing so much weight in both fat and muscle, the toll on her stamina was too much to keep trying.
Instead she shrugs. “I moved on.”
“Hm,” says Chaeyoung, eyeing her as she bites down on her toast. She chews on it a little bit. “I think I get it.”
Not really, but Jisoo doesn’t comment on that. “I tried your Vegemite once. It wasn’t good.”
“More for me,” sings Chaeyoung through her mouthful, to which Jisoo replies, “I didn’t want it anyway.” Chaeyoung shoves her gently with her free hand.
Watching Chaeyoung chomping away at her toast, freely and excitedly, Jisoo wonders how that will translate on camera, when Blackpink House finally airs.
“Hey, wanna know something?” asks Chaeyoung after finishing her toast, licking her fingers clean of Vegemite. “I know we’re not supposed to eat that much on camera. But I don’t really care.”
“Oh, really?” Jisoo thinks of the garish orange self-help book Chaeyoung totes around during their travels, bold lettering staring Jisoo down during airplane rides.
“Once, a staff member tried to talk to me about it. You know what I said?” she leaned in, widening her eyes in a display of innocence. “‘But we eat like this in Australia...’”
“Do people really eat like that?”
Chaeyoung tilts her head down and smiles, mischievous. “Well, I did.”
They laugh together; Jisoo’s short and staccato, Chaeyoung’s long and high-pitched.
It was a competition, during trainee days, so Jisoo and the others sized her up when she first arrived.
First it was Chaeyoung-ssi with the guitar, and, though Jisoo was loath to admit it, the voice of an angel. In the beginning, the guitar was with her everywhere; before class started she’d play, and sing, and the other trainees would listen and sometimes even join in. Others, like Jisoo, simply watched. Deciding if this girl was a threat.
It’s only after the company places them closer together, when they realize that they’re at the top of the trainees, that they start to relax and really know each other. So it’s sort of hilarious when Chaeyoung declares that they’re going to be “like a family,” and that Jennie agrees, and that Lisa nods and smiles wide.
It’s true that Jennie and Jisoo were close to begin with. There was a sauna trip involved, and some naked feelings, and who wouldn’t bond through that? But the more Jisoo looks back at that time, all the cheesy things they said then (sitting across from each other, saying to each other, “Dominate the stage!”) seem more and more like a pipe dream.
Well, maybe more for her than the others.
It’s not like she didn’t think about line distributions. Or how every comeback, she’s lucky to get a few lines and even that was a privilege shrinking fast; the moment Jennie decides she wants to focus on singing she can basically kiss goodbye to a second verse. And when she thinks about it - well, she tries not to think about it. It’s better not to dwell. She knows whose fault it really is.
Sometimes, she thinks about it at inopportune moments. Times when she’s looking out over the crowd, and it just hits her. A sinking sensation, sand through an hourglass. Thousands of cheering fans and a cold stomach.
Other times it sneaks up on her in quiet moments. A small dinner when Jennie’s phone buzzes and she leans over Jisoo for the couch-side table to pick it up.
“Manager-nim said we’ll start working on the video for my solo song,” whispers Jennie, meeting Jisoo’s eyes with an eyes-wide look of her own.
With the way their company worked, neither of them had thought this would happen. They had a comeback once a year, some variety show appearances, and this year, finally, a world tour. The world tour was their one moment of excitement. That Jennie would be able to release and promote a song of her own was unprecedented, for them.
“Ask him for details,” says Jisoo, leaning in to take a look at the conversation. Jennie types in, Any details yet, Manager-nim?
They wait for a response. Jennie squeezes Jisoo’s arm, and then lifts chopsticks wrapped in ramyeon to her lips. In the end, it’s Jisoo who waits most intently, holding Jennie’s phone for her while she eats.
“‘Nothing final, but we’ve been looking at international spots to film for the look of this music video,’” says Jisoo aloud when Jennie’s manager finally answers.
“International,” sighs Jennie, awed, maybe a little wistful.
Jisoo thinks about Jennie going off to another country, filming her music videos, and then about the rest of the members at home, following the same old routine. “Which country do you think you’ll film?”
“I don’t know.” Jennie swishes her chopsticks, twirling her ramyeon in its plastic container. “It would be really cool to film in New Zealand though.”
Jisoo makes a noise of agreement, and after thinking for a moment, says in English: "That’s cool."
"Yeah, it’s cool." Jennie, hand still on her chopsticks, pushes her ramyeon container to knock against Jisoo’s. “This is gonna get cold though.”
Jisoo holds her ramyeon container in one hand, chopsticks circling the noodles with the other. Looking to her right, she watches Jennie hum as she typed out a response to their manager. Wonders when one of their managers would be contacting her for a solo, if it would be this year or the next or not anytime soon at all. If it was up to her to be better or it’s all out of her hands.
She finds herself back on “LILI’s FILM #1 - JISOO in JAPAN,” the little time capsule of happiness that it is. This time, though, she scrolls down.
The first one she spots with her name in it is one that she can almost understand, but not quite. She puts it into Papago.
“Lisa promotes Jisoo better than YG,” it says.
She translates another one. “Imagine if Jisoo had screentime in the MVs...”
She’s not sure if it’s relief that others see what she sees. That it really isn’t fair. Their fans want to see more of her. It’s not about her being better; it is out of her hands. The situation is out of her grasp.
“I can’t wait for Jisoo’s solo,” says a third comment, one that she can read on her own, and she thinks to herself, wouldn’t that be nice?