Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You wake up in a pile of paperwork and a puddle of drool, feeling like shit. 

Your shoulders and legs ache something fierce from where you guess you’d passed out hunched over your desk, but you stay there for a while. You don’t really want to get up– you’ve been at the office since yesterday morning, taking care of any fellow employees’ work that you could in what you’re self-aware enough to admit was a pathetic attempt to keep yourself busy, but you don’t want to get up.

Tomorrow is the first of your hundred and twenty-day sentence. 

You guess it could be worse. It could be shorter.

You shift your head to the side so you can take a bleary peek at the watch on your wrist where your arm is sprawled next to you on the desk. 9:46 AM. Looks like you're skipping your morning run.

With a sigh, you resolve to pull yourself up, ignoring the dizzy spell that makes your vision go black for a couple of seconds. Some probably important piece of paper sticks to the drool on your cheek, and ugh, gross. You rip it off and let it fall to the floor, but you can't be bothered to pick it up. 

…

That apathy lasts all of five seconds, and you sigh again as you roll your chair back to reach down and grab the paper before placing it back on the desk. 

Might as well get up now.

So you do. You brace your hands on your knees and push yourself up, and once you're on your feet you actually, honest-to-God sway and have to right your center of balance. Woah. When was the last time you ate?

Your gaze falls to a lone Chuckles bar wrapper sitting at the corner of your desk. About twelve hours ago.

You don't feel particularly hungry– in fact, the thought of eating anything right now kind of makes your stomach churn– but you know the nausea will only get worse the longer you go without anything in your stomach. Whatever. You'll go to the vending machine again and get a bag of crisps or something.

The vending machine in the break room.

Do you put on a different persona when you’re around me then?

You are ridiculous. You've sat in that break room countless times before, why is that what sticks?

You were planning on leaving?

You don't check your phone. You already know the time. There's nothing else you need it for right now.

Pushing your chair back in under the desk, you head out of the cube farm and step into the main lobby. The break room is through a door at the other side of the main desk, where the secretary has taken over the security guard's post for daytime hours (though there's no real reason for him to be there– it's the week of Christmas and no one is here, so his presence is more of a security measure than a public service). The man looks up from his phone when you step out the door of the cubicle area with a start, obviously not having expected anyone else to already be in the building, but relaxes upon recognizing you.

Well. He doesn't relax entirely. You are the nation's least favorite teenager right now.

Still, he offers you a small grin and a quiet good morning. You want to say you hope the smile you shoot back looks better than it felt, but you're sure that for how shitty you feel right now, you look even worse.

You turn back to the lobby, idly making a mental note to call Nana once you get your crisps to let her know you're fine, and your eyes fall on Shin-Ae at the entrance, looking down at her phone and carrying her book bag on her shoulder. You think it's just the sleep deprivation playing a trick on you at first, so you don't even stop walking as you blink, hard, in an attempt to dispel the sleepiness still clinging to you. 

She's still there, peering into the lobby now. Oh. Oh, shit.

What is she doing here?!

No, it's fine. Maybe she hasn't seen you yet. Maybe you can just… walk backwards… and sneak back into the cubicle area–

Her eyes meet yours, and they go wide. Shit. 

Okay, now she’s hoisting her bag more securely onto her shoulder and making her way over to you. Great. Back to the original plan, you guess, only with added charging and more deliberate avoidance. 

You start on a determined path to the break room, pretending you don’t hear her little indignant squawk and her pace redoubling to catch up with you. “Are you ignoring me?” she cries out, offended.

You don't answer. You can see the door to the break room from here. Final frontier.

"I can't believe you," you hear her mutter darkly, probably more to herself than to you, and you can clearly picture the death glare probably burning a hole into the back of your shirt right now. It's one she's hit you with more than once.

You sigh. “Sh–” you start, but you cut yourself off with a little hiccup in your step. Right. “Yoo. If you and the guys are trying to corner me again, I don’t wanna hear it. I don’t want to talk.”

If I can’t say your name then you don’t get to use mine with familiarity. 

You hear her pause briefly at the correction before continuing after you, and it kind of makes you want to laugh. Had she forgotten already? 

You are a terrible person.

Suddenly, somehow– maybe you weren’t going as fast as you thought you were– she’s caught up with you (man, you'd been so close, too). Her fingers wrap around your elbow to stop you in place like you can’t just yank your arm away and throw her off balance and make her fall to the ground and drop her umbrella and get soaked by the rain and–

“It’s just me, okay? And I don’t wanna talk either, just- come with me."

This actually gets you to stop, more in confusion than in concession. You turn to face her and see the bags under her eyes first and know that yeah, that’s probably your fault. The last time you saw them this bad was that night on the hospital rooftop, after the formal. 

You'd promised her you'd forget it ever happened, but sometimes you swear you can see the crushed look of despair on her face as she apologized for snapping at you when you close your eyes.

She’s wearing a nondescript gray t-shirt under her ever present brown coat and a pair of straight-leg jeans, tied together with a pair of beat-up white sneakers. Her hair is down, tucked behind her right ear but falling in front of the left half of her face. Your fingers twitch with the urge to brush it back.

Her eyes are duller, too. The fiery red you've grown to rely on is petering out, again, and three of the four times you've seen it do so (at the hospital, four days ago, right now) have been your fucking fault.

You have to look away. You actually have to look away, you coward.

But you still give. "What are you talking about?" 

You know what you should do is say Yoo, I mean it. Go home. You should pull your arm out from her grip and go to the break room like you wanted to in the first place. You should ignore her if– no, when– she continues after you. You should probably even tell the secretary that she isn't supposed to be here. 

But damn, do you miss her. 

Four days. It's only been four days (it's already been four days) since you saw her last, but it’s like you feel her absence everywhere you turn. You feel it when the cold air bites through your coat, thinking about the time you draped your coat over her when she’d fallen asleep in Kousuke’s car, when you find yourself hoping that she’s somewhere warm. You feel it when you hear groups of friends walking outside your house, laughing and teasing and ribbing each other, when you find yourself recalling the curve of her smile and the rare sound of her mirth. You feel it every time you skip the song you’d shown her in the booth at Wacs that night, everytime the first few notes of the song that used to calm you down only serve to make your hands itch.

It’s been four days, and you can still feel the shape of her body around yours. You can still feel her hair, wet and tangled, between your fingers. You can still hear her saying your friendship must have all been a lie, can still see the tears in her eyes amidst the rain, can still see the mascara dripping down her face–

She averts her gaze, and it’s only then when you realize you’d been staring. She has yet to let go of your arm. “You go in tomorrow, right?”

Vaguely, you wonder how she knows that– maybe they’d announced it on the news (you wouldn’t know), maybe she’d heard it from someone else, like Kousuke or your father– but you truthfully don’t care enough. You just tip your head in a nod. “Yeah. I do.”

“Then I don’t wanna talk either,” she replies, looking at you again. Despite how almost desaturated she looks, there’s also that determined glint in her eyes you would recognize anywhere. It tugs at something in you, something you’ve told yourself a million times now to ignore. “There wouldn’t really be much of a point, would there?”

You get what she’s implying. Why open a can of worms like that when you have less than twenty-four hours to pick them all back up? 

But then, why come see you at all? If that were the case, wouldn’t it be easier for her to simply not be around you in the first place? To stay away, to not risk starting something the two of you don’t have the time to finish?

The thing is, though, here she is. Risky, dangerous as it may be, she’s standing right here in front of you.

And honestly, it’s hard to argue with her brand of logic. Especially when you miss her this much.

“That isn’t why I’m here,” she continues, her grip loosening on your arm but not letting go entirely. “I’m here to take you away for the day. No strings attached. Let’s go.”

It’s hard to argue, but it does leave you a little perplexed. This is… weird. You’re not used to her acting like this, taking this kind of initiative. You’re more used to her snark, to her proclivity to mask what she really thinks or feels if she doesn’t deem it immediately pressing to share, and you’re used to letting her, more often than not let it all out. She seems off. 

Why do you think that is, you idiot–

“Shall I elaborate?” she asks sarcastically at your lack of a response— rhetorically, you presume, since she keeps going— blinking at you owlishly and her voice lined with her blessedly familiar trademark snark. “It’s been made perfectly clear you don’t want to hear from me again—“ and wow, the urge to cut her off, to correct her, to grab her by the shoulders and look her in the eyes and beg, never, never, never stop speaking to me nearly knocks you over— “but if you go in tomorrow anyway, and you’re probably getting as far away from here as possible once you get out, it’s safe to assume we’re never going to see each other again.”

She takes a breath then, but it feels like a pause, what with the way she blinks and presses her lips together. It’s incredibly brief, and barely noticeable, but it’s enough for her words to coil around your throat like barbed wire and try their damndest to suffocate you.

She trudges on, as Yoo Shin-Ae is wont to do. “So if that’s the case, what’s one more day?” she asks, casually, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, but her grip tightens back up on your elbow. “What’s the harm in acting, for one more day, like we’re still friends?”

You feel like you might be sick. 

You know you should say no. You know it. This, what she’s suggesting? It’s fundamentally counterproductive to what you did to her four days ago, to the reason this interaction is so hard in the first place. The two of you were supposed to keep your distance– she was supposed to forget about you, move on from the lie you’d sold her, and be better off for it, and you were supposed to learn your lesson once and for all: all you do is hurt people.

You were supposed to let each other go. 

But you ask, “What would we even do?” instead. Because you are so, so selfish.

You don’t ask why she’s here, or why she’s proposing this idea. You aren’t an idiot, nor are you deaf. You know how much you mean to her, because she’d told you as much. Her words have played on a loop in your mind for four days.

I don’t want you to disappear. 

The two of you can never seem to agree on anything. 

She shrugs, and it’s stilted in the way most people move when they’re sleep deprived. “Anything. Nothing.” She rolls her eyes and lets her head loll to the side, like she doesn’t want to be having this conversation. You don’t really want to be, either. “I don’t know, Yeong-Gi, just shut up and say yes.”

And oh, you want nothing more than to lean in, give her a shiteating grin, go 'Shut up’? But I’ve barely even said anything. You want nothing more than to see her roll her eyes and say It was a metaphorical ‘shut up.’ And you’d back up and hold your hands up in surrender and go, Oh, metaphorical, huh? Didn’t realize I was in the presence of such literary prowess. My mistake. And she would close her eyes and nod, replying with an Indubitably. And you’d snort and say I bet you don’t even know what that means, and she’d level you with an annoyed smirk and a Watch it.

Maybe five days ago. Not anymore. 

Instead, you just sigh and say, “Okay. Where to?” 

You give in. You give in, and you can beat yourself up for it later because right now,

her face brightens, 

and it’s slight, and it’s dimmer than usual but it’s like a sip of cool water after nineteen years spent wandering the desert, and it’s what makes you realize with a blink that oh. It’s your birthday.

Thanks to the acutely embarrassing and wholly obnoxious growl your stomach decided to let out the exact second you returned from grabbing your stuff from your cubicle, the two of you stop by the Wacs immediately next door. So far your little day trip has not taken you very far.

The restaurant isn’t exactly bustling but it’s not empty, either, so the two of you take your food to a booth near the corner away from everyone (for your sake, likely, though neither of you say as much). You sit across from each other and eat in silence for a while, the atmosphere stiff and stilted. 

You’re not going to lie, you’re already regretting saying yes. You regretted it the moment you said it. You regretted it the moment she brought up the idea, because really, there was no way you were going to say no.

If you’re really never going to see each other again, you’re going to jump on every last chance she gives you to be around her. You have the rest of your life to admonish yourself for it.

All of a sudden Shin-Ae makes a noise around her bite, like she just remembered something, and when you look back up from your food at her she's taking a sip of her drink in one hand and waving the other in your general direction. You wait patiently for her to swallow her food, and when she does she just says, "Rules."

You blink. "Rules."

"Rules," she confirms, taking another quick sip before setting the cup down. "I have a very specific idea for how today is gonna go."

You watch as she reaches over to root around her book bag before pulling out a notebook, nondescript and beat up. She places it on the table and flips through it, past miscellaneous notes and calculations for school, and settles on a clean page. 

“I thought about this extensively last night. We need to establish some ground rules if we want this day to not absolutely suck,” she explains, reaching back into her bag and pulling out a blue ballpoint pen. The cap is unmarred, free of bite marks like the ones you’ve come to realize litter every single writing utensil you have ever used. She probably doesn’t get the same awkward never minds that you do when someone asks to borrow a pencil.

Shin-Ae makes a little dot to the left of the margin, making to start a bulleted list. “Okay. First things first.” She starts writing a sentence out, and you watch as it appears on the paper. Her handwriting is much better than yours. “No… bringing up… what happened… on… Tuesday.” 

She holds her pen differently from the way you hold yours. She rests it on her ring finger, while you rest it on your middle. Maybe that’s why your handwriting sucks.

It takes you a moment to register what she’d even written down. She takes a second to make a second bullet before meeting your gaze. “I think that’s reasonable, right?”

It probably isn’t. You understand that nothing about this situation is reasonable.

You noticed it earlier, but there’s something about Shin-Ae today that feels different. You know how to deal with her cynicism, with her dry wit and occasional dramatics. You know what to say to get her to roll her eyes, what to say to egg her on, what to do to get her to sigh and say fine to whatever it is you’ve suggested.

You don’t know how to deal with her sorrow. You don’t know how to deal with her tears. You don’t know how to deal with whatever this is.

You can acknowledge that this day is probably only going to do more harm than good to both of you, considering how you were supposed to be out of her life forever after what happened four days ago. It was supposed to be like ripping off a Band-Aid for her when it’d felt to you like breaking bones, quick and painless as possible. 

And yet here you are, sitting in a booth across from her and outlining rules to figure out how the two of you can most easily pretend like four days ago never happened.

You can see the merit in that. God knows you would love nothing more than to pretend it didn’t happen either. 

“Right,” you reply, giving her a little nod. “That’s reasonable.”

She raises an eyebrow at you. “You sure?” she questions. “Because that was gonna be the second rule: no lying to each other.”

You blink again. “Oh,” you say intelligently. You hadn’t been expecting that. “N-no, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” she accepts, and goes to write no lying as the second bullet point as she continues to explain. “Because the way I see it, this is almost like a ‘nothing counts’ kind of day. Like, what happens today stays here. If it doesn’t have to do with rule one, there’s no real reason not to just say what we’re thinking.” She finishes writing, making yet another bullet point, and sets the pen down to reach for another bite of her burger. 

A ‘nothing counts’ kind of day. You can’t discern whether it’s relief you feel right now or disappointment. 

“I get it,” you say, picking at your nuggets, when you realize something. “But what’s to stop us from just not saying it?” 

There are so many things I want to say to you. See? You’re doing it already. 

Her brows draw together in a squint and she hums around her bite, setting the burger down and setting her elbows on the table to lean her chin on her palm in thought. She’s almost done with her meal, where you’ve eaten three of the ten nuggets you’d ordered (you’d tried to get just a six-piece, still feeling a little sick, but she’d jabbed you in the side with her elbow and you’d taken the hint). 

She lets out a hm! suddenly as an idea pops into her head, and she takes another sip to swallow her bite down before picking the pen back up. “What if we had, like, a word or something? Something to say if you think the other person is thinking something they aren’t telling you, and then they have to say it.”

You wrinkle your nose in a grimace. “That seems a little… intrusive, doesn’t it?” You lean in closer to point to the first bullet point. “And what if what we’re thinking has to do with rule one?” You’re honestly getting more into this rulemaking thing than you thought you would.

“Hm. You’re right,” she concedes. She taps the end of the pen rhythmically against her lips in thought, looking down at the paper, and you turn back to your nuggets and stuff one into your mouth just so you have something to do. The tapping is. Distracting. 

Suddenly she points the pen at you without looking up. “Okay. Amending rule one. No bringing up what happened on Tuesday or anything we brought up then— so nothing about your name, or our friendship, or anything like that. Basically, nothing important. Anything else seems pretty harmless.” She looks back at you then without moving her head, her gaze inquiring through her lashes. “Sound okay?”

You don’t mention that ‘we’ hadn’t brought up anything that day, that all you’d really said that entire conversation had been multiple variations of sorry. You don’t mention that she’d been the one to tell you how she didn’t want you to disappear, how she apparently still remembers the night you two met (met for real) with the same stark clarity you do. You don’t mention how none of that would have even happened if she’d just let you walk away, if she just hadn’t shown up at your school in the first place. 

That would be against the rules. And also awful of you to say, what is wrong with you?

“Okay,” you say instead. “I can get behind that. So what happens if one of us breaks one of the rules?”

She just continues looking straight at you, not saying anything. You cut your eyes to the side briefly before looking back at her. “What?”

She lets out a huff, then, and shakes her head a little. “You’re poking a lot of holes into my very specific plan here,” she says, and you can tell the annoyance lacing her tone is fake. 

You puff out a laugh through your nose, a small grin starting to tug at the corners of your lips. “Pointing out holes, more like. How extensively did you say you thought about this?”

With another sigh, she sinks down in her chair, crossing her arms across her chest and tucking her chin against her chest. She casts her gaze up to the ceiling petulantly, and it makes your smile stretch even further. “Okay, maybe it wasn’t that extensively.”

You gesture to the notebook with your hand with a chuckle. “You literally didn’t even write down the rules.”

She reaches over and snatches up the notebook, pulling it to her chest defensively and away from your reach, but you catch the hint of a smile forming on her own face before she turns away again and tips her nose upward. “Can you shut up? There was a definite structure.”

“Oh, no, I’m sure. So what’s the third rule?” 

“Who said there was a third rule?”

“You drew a third bullet point.”

“Maybe I just like drawing bullet points.”

“Maybe your structure needs some work.”

“You know what? I know what the third rule is!” She slaps the notebook back down on the table with a little smack, grabbing the pen from where it’d rolled next to her cup and beginning to write so hard you think the ink might bleed through to the next page. “No… talking… if your hair… is red… and ugly!”

Your jaw drops in faux offense but a surprised laugh bubbles out of you anyway. “You are so jealous. It’s the middle part, isn’t it?”

She caps the pen with finality and tosses it in your general direction. It taps against your box of nuggets and you watch it roll off the table and land next to your foot. You decide not to pick it up right now. “I’ve been meaning to ask, actually: why?” she says, her voice taking on an almost pained edge that sends another snicker through you.

Shin-Ae may feel different today, but the familiar back-and-forth and the warmth in your chest tells you that, mercifully, some things never change.

You reach up and touch the hair by your face delicately, schooling your features into a look of disappointment. “I take it you’re not a fan.”

She takes her burger and eats the last of it, chewing as she tilts her head to the side and squinting as if trying to decide how exactly she feels about the style that your hair, truth be told, just lands in on its own when you wash it. You haven’t bothered with sweeping it to the side like you usually do in days. 

She swallows. “Honestly?” she starts. “I liked it better before.”

I liked it better before. Ain’t that the truth.

The smile on your face right now isn’t a fake one, you realize, but it’s fading now. 

Blinking yourself out of it, you reach over the side of the table to pick up the pen, now that the moment’s passed. When you sit back up, she’s looking down at the notebook like she’s thinking. 

“You’re right, though,” she says to you as you hand her back her pen. The tips of your fingers brush when she grabs it from you, and you pretend you don’t still feel it even after she pulls back. “What happens if one of us breaks a rule?”

You shrug, genuinely at a loss. What make-believe punishment befits breaking make-believe rules? 

“What if…” she starts, after a few beats of the two of you brainstorming in silence, “we do some kind of swear jar… system?” She casts her eyes to the side and tilts her head in thought. “Like, if you break a rule, you… owe the other person a dollar. Or something.”

You just kind of look at her after that. “Hm,” you say, noncommittal, trying to be nice. “Maybe!”

She rolls her eyes again with a dramatic sigh and slumps forward onto the table, pressing her forehead to it. “No, okay, shut up, that was really fucking dumb, I know.”

Thank God. “No, okay, because I didn’t wanna say anything—“

“Well, I don’t see you coming up with anything better!” she grumbles defensively, picking her head up and pointing a finger at you with an accusatory glare.

You hold your hands up in front of you placatingly. “Listen, you’re right! This is hard!”

She sits back up and takes a very concentrated sip of her drink, brows furrowed and everything. It’s an amusing visual.

Her… admittedly creative solution had actually given you an idea of your own. “We could do an IOU thing. Maybe not with money, but just…” You shrug, confidence in this idea waning. “In general? Like… like truth or dare, I guess, only you’re racking up dares you need to do every time you break a rule..?” Okay, it’s sounding dumber and dumber by the minute. “You know what, never mind.” You grab another lukewarm nugget, a little bashful.

“No, no, I think I got you,” she assures, nodding slightly. “So like a penalty system, almost? It’s not any less stupid than the rules we’re setting in the first place.”

So she agrees. 

You nod, chewing and swallowing before speaking. “So that’s what we’re going with? Tell the truth or do a dare?” Your eyes go wide and you shoot her an incredibly pleased look. “Holy shit. This is literally truth or dare.”

She rolls her eyes again, a small exasperated smile twitching at the edges of her lips. You love it when she does that. You love getting her to do that. “Hoooly shit,” she mocks, before uncapping the pen again and writing consequences: truth or dare next to a fourth bullet point. It puts a little smile of your own on your face.

You still have one more question. “Alright, but how will we know if the other person told the truth? What if we use the code word and they still lie?”

Shin-Ae looks up at you, her face blank. “I don’t plan on lying,” she replies, matter-of-factly. “Do you?”

Oh. It really is that simple, isn’t it?

“No,” you say, and you actually mean it. “No, I don’t.”

She nods once. “Alright, then. Besides, it’s just us. We don’t have to feel embarrassed or anything.”

Just us.

You’d struggled with figuring out what it was you were feeling a few minutes ago, but you can pinpoint the giddy rush that runs through you at that much more easily. 

“So it’s settled,” she continues on, while you’re trying your best not to smile like an idiot. She caps the pen and uses it to point to the first bullet point. “Rule one: no bringing up Tuesday or anything discussed on Tuesday.” She moves the pen down as she goes. “Rule two: no lying to each other– wait.” She brings the pen to her mouth and uncaps it with her teeth, and you absolutely do not almost choke on your own spit. She adds a little code word next to the rule before taking the cap from between her teeth and continuing down the list. “Rule three: if you have stupid hair, you don’t get an opinion.” You snort. “Rule four: you break a rule, you gotta do a dare.”

She hesitates, then, and looks back up at you through her lashes again, a brow raised in uncertainty. “That feel like enough?”

How the hell are you supposed to know? “I mean, can you think of anything else? If you feel like something’s missing…”

She sighs, scratching her temple with the pen. “I feel like I’m forgetting something,” she mutters, before pointing the pen at you again. “Told you there’d been a structure.”

Now it’s your turn to roll your eyes fondly. “My mistake.”

She starts after a while, suddenly. “Wait. I remember what I was thinking about.” She makes a fifth bullet point and, honestly, part of you is starting to suspect she maybe does just like drawing bullet points. “It’s pretty much directed at you.”

That gets you to perk up. “Sorry?”

She doesn’t respond right away, writing out the rule. No smiling/laughing things off.  

You frown.

“Pretty self-explanatory, I think?” Shin-Ae asks once she’s done, looking over the sentence again instead of looking at you. “I mean, it’s part of the reason we’re here at all, isn’t it?” She cocks her head to the side. “I guess it could almost tie into rule one? But just to make sure...”

You realize you don’t really like that. 

Something about the way she’d explained that off rubs you the wrong way. It’s like she’s pinning everything on you– no, she is, she’d just said as much– although you can admit she’s not really all that wrong in doing so…

…probably. You can’t shake the thought bothering you in the back of your mind, telling you no, this isn’t fully right.

Still. You figure you at least owe it to her to comply, don’t you? Weren’t you already promising to be honest, and isn’t this just more of the same thing? You can deal.

You realize that, ironically, you’re doing almost exactly what she had just banned. You doubt she’d meant it in regards to the actual rulemaking process, though, so whatever.

“Sure,” you say, and it doesn’t even come out as pinched as you feared it might. Look at you. “I guess that’s fair enough. It, uh…” You pause, scratching at the back of your hand absentmindedly. “It goes for both of us, right?”

Now it’s her turn to frown, confused, like she genuinely doesn’t get where you’re coming from. It makes you prickle slightly, almost annoyed, and you immediately feel shitty about it.

“I mean… I guess?” She gives you a little shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m really prone to laughing things off in the first place, but these rules apply to us both, so alright.”

Well, I’m good to go again! Let’s have a do-over since our session got interrupted!

Ahaha… Yeah. You could say that. We got along pretty well before she had to leave.

Yeong-Gi… can we… can we forget everything that happened just now?

The niggling thought becomes more insistent. You ignore it. “Okay.”

“Alright, then. It’s settled. Five rules.” She moves swiftly on, efficient in a way that tells you she would absolutely crush it at group projects if the idiots at her school ever actually gave her the time of day. She taps the pen against the page once, twice. You notice she seems a little more tense after that little aside, but not glaringly so. “Not too hard, right?”

Despite that last rule, despite the feeling of affront it leaves you with, you’ve smiled more during this ten-minute conversation than you have in the past week, and not once did it feel forced. 

“Nope,” you agree. “Not hard at all.”

“Alright. And we’re gonna abide by them, right?” She wags a finger at you as she asks, and it makes you feel like a little kid being reprimanded by their kindergarten teacher in the funniest way possible. 

“Yes, ma’am,” you answer, yet another smile tugging at your lips. “You have my word.”

“Good,” she nods. “Now we just need the actual code word.” She leans back against the seat and scratches at her temple with the pen again, and you do your best to brush off any lingering indignation. “Any ideas?”

You think about it for a minute. “How about… I don’t know. ‘Spill?’” you venture. “Like, if I can tell you’re thinking about something I’ll just go, ‘hey. Spill.’”

She sticks her bottom lip out, considering. “Yeah, that works,” she agrees before leaning back in to write the word spill under her previous addition to the page.

You pump your fist a little. “Nice. Look at me contributing.”

She shakes her head affectionately, attention focused on circling the word. “What would I do without you,” she mumbles sarcastically, but the two of you grasp the underlying weight of those words at the same time, judging by the way she stops with the pen still on the paper.

Neither of you mention it.

It passes as quickly as it’d come, and Shin-Ae leans back again to admire her work. “There. I think we’re done.” She drops the pen in the groove of the notebook and closes it, and you notice you’ve been calling her Shin-Ae in your head this whole time instead of Yoo.

“Wait. I have one more question,” you say, and she looks up at you from where she’s putting the notebook back into her book bag. You stop for a second as you try and figure out how to word this. “So like. This probably has to do with rule one, so real quick before we officially start.” Start?  

She looks away from you and focuses on closing the flap of her bag. “Shoot.”

You don’t really like that she isn’t looking at you– it’s making you nervous– but it almost makes the question easier to ask. You take a breath and go, “What do you want me to call you?”

The moment the question leaves your mouth you cringe, feeling like kicking yourself in the teeth. Some fucking nerve.

She pauses, fingers slowing to a stop at the clasp of her book bag before finishing and closing it all the way, and it’s brief enough that you wouldn’t even have noticed had you not been watching her so closely. It’s enough to let you know that she’d gotten what you meant, despite how vaguely you’d worded the question in retrospect. You see her purse her lips slightly and realize your chest is starting to ache. You try not to let it show. 

She turns back to you after that half-a-second and reaches for her cup again, drinking the last of the orange soda she’d ordered. She still isn’t looking at you— if it were in any other context you probably wouldn’t think anything of it.

She sets the cup back down and goes, “Shin-Ae. Just say Shin-Ae.”

Finally she meets your gaze, and she looks tired all over again for a moment before her expression shifts, before she’s shrugging goodnaturedly with a dismissive shake of her head. “Obviously, right? It’s kind of implied in rule one.”

You think of the fifth rule again. The annoyingly persistent thought is back, but there’s no way you’re going to call Shin-Ae a hypocrite to her face.

I thought you said we weren’t going to lie to each other, you don’t say either. After all, you’re a hypocrite, too.

Instead, you go, “Alright. Just making sure.”

She nods, and the silence stretches between the two of you for a brief moment before she suddenly brings a hand up and thumps it against her book bag. 

“These rules are legally binding, by the way.”

“Oh, of course.”

Chapter Text

After a brief but sparkling debate regarding what mode of transportation to take– the “perfectly comfortable, efficient, and even eco-friendly” bus or your “ugly, clunky, old-man, literally on its last legs” (“You mean last wheels.” “I regret this already.”) car– Shin-Ae plops herself into your passenger’s seat with a grumble. You give her a good-natured elbow, and she swats it away as she affixes the seatbelt on.

Which is when you both realize you have nowhere in mind you want to go.

“Well,” you start, smacking your hands down onto your lap. “Any chance you thought extensively about where to next?”

She shoots you an annoyed glare at the tease. “I did not,” she answers anyway. “I was hoping it would… come to us.”

You curl your index finger and bring it up to your chin, furrowing your brow and squinting your eyes down to complete the whole Thinker look. “Hmmm… there’s not exactly a lot to do around here so early, is there?”

“Please,” she grouses, and you glance up to catch her rolling her eyes. “There’s nothing to do around here ever. Nothing fun, at least.”

Then she blinks, her disgruntled expression giving way to a sort of calm contemplation, eyebrows lifting slightly as an idea seems to come to her.

“What?” you ask, bringing your hand back away from your face. “Where are you thinking?”

She meets your gaze and gives you a little shrug. “I mean, I don’t know how much fun it’ll be with just the two of us, but…” The corners of her lips quirk downwards in a sort of might as well gesture. 

Ten minutes later, you’re standing behind Shin-Ae as she scans the room in search of a game for the two of you to play. 

At 10:35 AM on a Saturday morning, the arcade is not exactly the busiest it’s ever been; the only other people you see are a tween boy struggling with the claw game in the corner and a maintenance guy screwdriving away behind one of the WacMan machines. It was the only thing either of you could think of, though, so here you are. At the arcade before noon. 

As Shin-Ae deliberates, you try your best not to think about the last time you were here.

Yo! What the crap??? Who was the bozo that threw that blue shell???

That was me…

Yup! You got the skills alright! Skills in losing!

You wanna meet my shoes again???

Bahahaha!

What are you laughing at??? I'll get you back for that spiny shell!!!

“Oh, wait! I know what we’re doing.”

And she’s off, snapping you out of your bout of nostalgia without so much as a backwards glance to check to see if you’re following her, which honestly kind of baffles you. After four days ago you can't fathom why she would still so blindly trust in the notion that you won't disappear again the second she turns her back to you.

Maybe she's just afraid that you will, and doesn't want to check and prove herself right. It's not like you haven't set a precedent. 

(Though, if you’re being honest, it’s more likely that it simply didn’t occur to her to check, and you just get awfully maudlin when you’re in the throes of a low.)

She takes you to the Dance Dance Revolution machine and, really, you should’ve guessed. Your last time here had not exactly ended in her favor, and her competitive spirit knows no bounds.

“Rematch,” she says, succinct, as she pulls a chair over from nearby and sets her bag and coat down on it. She swivels on her heel to face you and crosses her arms across her chest, her dulled eyes already sparkling with what you can really only classify as bloodthirst. “I was practically starving last time, and you were still going easy on me. I’m gonna wipe the floor with you fair and square this time.”

You fake a little cringe and turn your gaze to the floor (for the joke and for your own sake). “Does it have to be this floor?”

You see her nod in your periphery. “Yes, this specific floor.”

“This is carpet. Like, shitty carpet. It'll hurt.”

“Well, to lose is to suffer.”

“And it’s dirty. I can see a stain–” You gesture with your hand at a nondescript brown stain next to your foot. “–right there.”

“The next one will be you.”

You look back up at her to watch her pull her mousy brown hair up into a little ponytail. Her gaze is to the floor as she finishes looping the hair tie around and the smirk on her face positively reeks of guaranteed victory– like she hadn’t only fared so well against you the last time because you'd picked one of the easiest songs off the list– but the fact that you contributed to putting it there at all makes you feel like a winner anyway.

But that doesn’t mean you’re not going to give her a hard time. “I’m sorry, what?”

The smugness on her face dissipates slightly, and she blinks. “Like. You’re gonna be the next stain on the floor.”

You snort. “What are you gonna do, liquify me?”

She huffs, her countenance slowly taking on a more embarrassed air, and turns to root through the pockets of her jacket for, presumably, quarters. “You know what, if you don’t leave me alone, I just might!”

Chuckling softly, you drop your own coat over hers and step up onto the machine. “Sure. I believe in you,” you say as condescendingly as you can manage, and stick your tongue out between your grin at the offended o of her mouth.

It’s almost ridiculous how easy it is to pretend like nothing’s changed. You guess, if you want something enough…

Much like the last time you were here, you wind up thinking about Alyssa.

Here’s the thing about playing DDR with Alyssa: you were never going to beat her. Never. It was impossible, what with the way the arrows seemed to bend to her will, with how she glided through every single song with seemingly practiced ease, leaving any who dared challenge her doubled over panting while she barely broke a sweat.

When Alyssa danced, something happened. Hanging out with you and the guys, she was always giggling at your stupid jokes and occasionally poking fun at one of you. Her smile was bright and polite, inoffensive and beautiful just like she was. She was fun, but it was a quiet kind of fun.

When she danced, it was like she forgot to keep that up. Her face would go blank, but her eyes would burn with something you never figured out how to ask about. When she danced, it was like she was keeping herself from being loud.

Shin-Ae is nothing like this.

Playing DDR with Shin-Ae is, in the nicest way possible, like playing with a cartoon character. Every few arrows she lets out a cry of fuck or shit, loud enough to be heard over the music coming from the machine. When you look away from the screen and over at her, she’s gripping onto the back bar for dear life. Her face is pink from exertion, her features twisted into a vaguely terrifying picture of complete determination, and she’s trying and failing miserably not to huff and puff. 

A sudden, slightly complicated beat pattern flashes on the screen, and Shin-Ae’s feet and reflexes are obviously not fast enough to clear it. She tries anyway, causing her to nearly kick her left foot out from under herself with her right, and she lets out an real, honest-to-God yelp as her center of balance is thrown off, her eyes wide as saucers and filled with the fear and adrenaline that comes with surviving a near-death experience.

You can’t help it— it cracks you the fuck up, leaving you doubled over and clutching at the machine in front of you for balance. You see her whip her head towards you out of the corner of your eye, her feet still hopping to and fro, and it makes you squeeze your eyes shut as another peal of laughter rips through you. 

“You think this is funny?” Shin-Ae says (pants), turning back to the massive screen in front of you, eyes still wide.  “Right. Okay. I’ll be… I’ll be the one laughing when— fuck!! When I beat your ass!”

You smack the plastic covering the side of the screen, stifling a guffaw. You’ve given up on the game, and behind your eyelids you can see repeated red flashes signifying all your missteps. “You… why…” you try, but your giggling keeps cutting you off. “Why do you look so mad??” Oh, your stomach hurts. You need to sit down.

Your boutade of hysteria is thereafter ignored, Shin-Ae instead choosing to focus on her victory (that you’ll neglect to point out she only achieved because you literally stopped playing) as you step off the mat and move to the chair housing your belongings. You sprawl out on the tiny chair, kicking your legs out and placing a hand on your belly as you let your head fall back, letting out one last sigh of elation as you finally come down, trying your best not to reconjure the image of Shin-Ae fighting for her life to the beat of fucking Crazy Control— 

You’re hit by yet another wave of laughter. Man, you need a nap.

It’s another twenty seconds or so before the song is finally over, followed by the sound of a crowd cheering and Shin-Ae letting out the most worn-out whoop you have ever heard. You peer up at the screen through slightly bleary eyes and take a look at the scores, a capital C under your name spelling out your defeat and an A under Shin-Ae’s signifying her victory.

“Yeah, bitch!” Shin-Ae taunts, like she’s not bent at the waist with her hands on her knees, wheezing for breath like she’d just fought off an army. She isn’t even facing you, just leaning back against the handlebar behind her, which only makes the visual that much funnier. “Suck… hah… suck on that! ”

You’re too worn out to lose your mind again, but you do let out an ugly snort. “Yeah, okay,” you say, pulling yourself back up off the chair. “I’ll ‘suck on that,’ Shin-Ae.”

It makes her duck her head down and giggle through her panting, which in turn makes something in your stomach flutter. You squash it down like you’re used to.

The two of you spend the next half hour or so meandering around the relatively empty arcade, playing a couple rounds of whatever game you walk past that one or both of you challenge the other to. You beat her at Connect Four a few times, but she absolutely demolishes you at air hockey (“Smaller arms. Less air resistance. Quicker reaction time.” “Of course. I was doomed from the start.”). You keep trying to subtly steer her towards Fabio Kart, but she catches on eventually and shuts that down quick with a whack to your shoulder and a shove in the complete opposite direction.

You exhaust all the options that are any actual fun pretty quickly, and silently agree that it might be time to head out and move on to someplace else when your eye catches on something by the entrance. 

“Wait a sec, Shin-Ae,” you start, stopping your stride behind her. She turns around to look at you, and follows your gaze to a lone photo booth in the corner.

“Ugh, really?” she groans as she walks back to stand next to you, and you turn away from the booth to look down at her. Her hair is unkempt, spilling out from her hair tie just as DDR had left it, messy enough that you know she hasn’t noticed. There’s also a few drops of sweat beading on her hairline, causing her flyaways to curl up and out. Probably not the most photogenic someone’s ever looked, but you don’t think you could care if you tried. ”I hate photo booths.”

You can’t help but gawk a little, already entertained. “How does someone hate photo booths?”

“Well, for starters,” she begins, and you’re immediately invested because you can tell this is something she’s actually thought about before, “they’re cramped. Seriously, I feel like once you're past maybe twelve years old you've got no business cramming yourself and other people into a box the size of, what, a bathroom stall? Max? And they're stuffy, and honestly kind of smelly, and the five seconds where you’re waiting for the camera to go off while you’re sitting there posing or making a face or whatever you’re supposed to be doing are the longest five seconds ever, every single time. And you have to pay!” She’s using her hands to emphasize her point, looking down at them as she counts off each argument with her fingers. “Two thousand won for a terrible few minutes, and all you get at the end is a crappy little film strip of the shittiest photos that have ever been taken of you.” 

She finishes her mini-rant with a huff and turns to meet your gaze again, and the amusement on your face must be apparent because her resolve seems to falter, an embarrassed flush rising to her cheeks as she crosses her arms and looks away again. “So fuck photo booths,” she mutters, marking the (somewhat dissatisfying) end of her spiel.

You tell her as much. “That was… anticlimactic.”

“Your hair is anticlimactic,” she grumbles, keeping her eyes and her frown on her shoes.

Your small smile gives way to a surprised bark of laughter. “Is this gonna be a thing? Are you gonna spend the entire day shitting on my hair?”

She turns to look up at you again, the pretty pink of her fading blush haloing the little shit-eating smirk tugging at her mouth, exposing just past the tip of a canine. “Someone has to,” she replies, an impish little glint in her eye, and your heart thumps hard against your ribcage once, twice, and you feel a blush of your own coming on as you fight to pull your eyes from her lips.

“Well,” you begin to segue, and hey, your voice doesn’t even come out strained! “I can't believe you hate fun."

Her jaw drops in a silent scoff. "I don't hate fun. I hate photo booths. Practically polar opposites."

"Photo booths are so fun!" you rebut. "It's literally supposed to be mindless fun, Shin-Ae, that's the entire point of a photo booth."

"Mindless, huh? Explains why you like them so much."

You cover your mouth with your hand as she points up at you, smiling with her eyes and mouth wide as she lets out a airy chuckle. "I just got you so good,” she breathes, scrunching her nose up as she laughs a little harder at the look on half your face.

You bring your hand down to reveal your own dropped jaw. “Wow,” you reply, deciding to use this disrespect to your advantage. “You know what. Just for that, we’re going in.”

Shin-Ae’s snickers are overtaken by a groan, comically long-suffering (though still lined with mirth). She throws her head back with a noooooo.

“Come onnnnn,” you egg, walking over to the booth as you fish through your pockets for spare bills, willing the warmth you still feel on your cheeks to subside. “Forgo your loathing for a terrible few minutes. Let us immortalize my victory at Connect Four and also every single other game we played today.”

You hear her scoff and sigh at the same time, somehow. “Yeah, fine, okay. Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

You reach the booth and take a hand out of your pocket to grab the black curtain and swish it open with a flourish, but it just falls back to its original position. You hear a snort from behind as you resign to pulling the curtain open the normal way, only slightly embarrassed, and you turn around to beckon Shin-Ae inside, pulling your other hand out of your pocket to present the empty booth to her with grandeur. “After you.”

Rolling her eyes but otherwise graciously choosing to play along, Shin-Ae steps up to the open curtain and offers her hand to you palm-down, and you delicately grab her fingers to help her step into the booth with all the poise of a princess and her knight, neither of which have gotten a good night’s sleep in days. “You’re too kind,” she deadpans, tone dripping with sarcasm, but you let it slide because you’ve already gotten your way. 

You sidle in next to her on the admittedly tiny bench, your left leg not even fitting inside the booth and your other thigh pressed up against hers (which is. Fine. You can manage that much), and once the curtain slips shut (read: falls against your shoulder and stays there) your nose scrunches up in disgust. “You were right. It does kind of smell in here.”

“Then we’d better get this over with,” she sighs, leaning over your lap slightly to get at the money slot the manufacturers of this photo booth were evil enough to place right in front of you, and your entire body tenses as she slides her own two thousand-won bills into the bezel while touching more of you than you’d prepared for. You close your eyes and try to breathe past the sudden cold panic racing through your veins, try to pretend you’re anywhere else for the next couple seconds, and by the time she’s done you already feel drained, trying not to be too obvious about your relief.

Your gaze is drawn to the screen in front of you as it hums to life, broadcasting the feed from the camera built into the top. You look positively huge next to her, despite part of your body not even being in frame, and even past the dreadful video quality it’s apparent how exhausted the two of you look, the bags under your eyes visible from miles away. 

Wow. 

You’ve been looking at her all morning, but it’s the outside perspective of the two of you together that actually reminds you what you’re doing here in the first place. Four days ago had actually slipped your mind.

And that voice is back, spitting things like of course. Of course you’d be enjoying yourself right now. How can someone with a stupid savior complex be so bad at it?

“Ah, shit,” Shin-Ae curses, oblivious to your internal strife. The booth’s tinny little speakers blare out a five. “This is one of those that starts right away. Okay. What do we do for the first one?” 

“Um,” you um, slowly but surely coming back to the present. You have no idea. “I don’t know?” Four. “Smile?”

“But that’s so boring, though.” 

You watch yourself blink at five frames per second before turning to Shin-Ae with a frown. Three. “You literally just asked me to pick something, and now you’re judging what I picked.” 

She turns to look at you, frowning herself. “Yeah, ‘cause you were supposed to pick something fun, not lame.”

You feel ridiculously affronted by this. “How is smiling ‘lame’? It’s classic!” 

Two. “Yeah, on picture day or at a family reunion, not a photo booth!”

“Okay, then, you pick something!”

“That’s not the point—!”

One. Smile!

The two of you barely have time to turn back to the camera before the screen flickers and a camera shutter sound effect fills the booth. The monitor freezes on the frame it had captured of you both, motion-blurred and pixelated but still clearly agitated— almost hilariously so, considering how stupid the argument had been.

Almost immediately the frame disappears, once again replaced by the camera feed and the automated female voice counting down from five.

You don’t hesitate for a second before you start beaming straight at the camera, all teeth and gums, your eyes screwed shut and your cheeks already aching from the force of it, and Shin-Ae knocks her shoulder against you hard enough that you almost fall off the bench. “Cut it out!”

The two of you stand there and each stare down at your respective photo strips. For a while, neither of you say a word, but Shin-Ae eventually breaks the silence.

“Yeah. We look like shit.”

You really are laughing a lot today.

You make a quick stop at your house once the two of you leave the arcade. After all, you'd forgotten to call.

“I’ll be quick,” you assure Shin-Ae, putting the car in park and leaving the key in the ignition so she doesn’t freeze while she waits. “Just wanted to let my nana know I’m. You know. Alive.”

She nods, thankfully picking up on your subtle request that she stay behind, and toes off her sneakers, kicking her feet up on your dashboard. “Alright. I’ll just make myself comfortable,” she says, though she seems more focused on her yellow socks than on you, like she’s thinking about something.

You frown.

You lean back against your seat and decide to make use of the list in that notebook. “Spill.”

Shin-Ae turns her attention over to you, confused for a moment before she blinks as she remembers the code word. “Ah, look at this,” she remarks, gesturing to you with her chin. “Already busting out the rules.”

You don’t say anything, instead waiting patiently as she stretches her arms out in front of her with a little groan and lets them fall back down onto her torso. “I was just thinking about something Kousuke told me the other day. About you and your nana.”

Something black and ugly starts forming in your chest, and you start white-knuckling the steering wheel with the hand still on it before you even notice. “What did he say?” you ask, mind already racing with a number of thinly-veiled insults Kousuke probably leveled towards Nana, the greatest person you have ever and will ever know, who has never done anything to him or his family in their lives, and you must be particularly exhausted because you don’t manage to keep the anger out of your voice entirely. 

You swear, one of these days, you’re going to give that brother of yours the ass beating he’s been waiting for since you were eleven.

Shin-Ae notices, because of course she does, and her eyes go wide. “Nonono, wait! He didn’t say anything bad about her, that’s not what I meant!” she assures him hurriedly, sitting up in the seat and waving her hands in front of her furiously. “He just told me she took you in after some…” She blinks then, cutting her eyes to the side before cocking her head with a furrow of her brow. “I’m still not actually sure. I don’t think I really took in most of what he was telling me, to be honest.”

After some ‘altercation.’ After some ‘violent angry outburst.’ After some two years spent in a behavioral facility for something I didn’t do.

Well, that isn’t exactly true. You just don’t think some shitty prepubescent punch to a seventeen year-old warrants time in a psych ward.

You wonder if she’s lying about not knowing, but you realize you don’t actually want to know the answer to that. Also, you’re pretty sure this particular topic falls under some area you two banned. So you drop it.

You also acknowledge, as you pry your fingers from the steering wheel, that you get really angry really fast. It’s not the first time you’ve noticed, and if past experience plus your genetic makeup are any indication, it won’t be the last. You hate yourself more and more every day.

“He said something about you being dangerous,” she adds, bringing you back to the moment. You look back from where you’d been staring at your hand over to her, and she’s looking right at you. It reminds you of the last time she’d been in your car, when you felt your skin crawl at the feeling of her eyes on you as you drove, like it was a physical thing. Luckily, you’ve always been good at hiding your discomfort. “But I didn’t really believe him.”

Then she turns away, crossing her arms across her chest and making herself comfortable, letting her eyes slip closed like she’s planning on taking a nap. “If it’s any consolation.”

And that’s that.

You blink once, twice, trying to figure out how that makes you feel. 

Your first thought is, predictably, that she doesn’t even know who you really are. You’d sure hope she doesn’t think you’re dangerous, after you’d spent the past three months convincing her you were anything but. 

Shin-Ae knows Yeong-Gi Hirahara, as does everybody else. Bright, non-threatening, easy to like. A paper boy with a Sharpie smile, just close enough to a real person that no one is ever any the wiser. She doesn’t know you. The only people who do are right to hate you. 

Your second thought is that you have never heard anyone say they aren’t scared of you before.

Why would anyone feel the need to? Yeong-Gi is a lot of things, depending on what he needs to be, but he isn’t intimidating. He isn’t a risk to be around, and purposefully so. You made sure of it.

And then here you have someone who’s gone and taken a peek behind the curtain, only to tell you the same still applies. That connection between who you really are and who you’ve claimed to be for so long, clear enough to be noticed by someone on the outside… you’re not sure. Something about it makes you feel… real, somehow. Even if she is completely wrong.

As if you know yourself well enough to claim that she can’t possibly know you better. She did say you were one and the same. 

Don’t you trust her?

This isn’t a matter of trusting her or not, you tell the voice in your head. You trust her with your life. You just can’t keep ruining hers.

And with that, you push the car door open and step out into the bleary December morning air. The temperature change helps bring you out of your own head, even if just a little.

You lightly jog up the stairs of the complex to the second floor, shoving your right hand into your pocket as you walk to your apartment door and knocking with the other. You hear a little oh! from inside, followed by a shuffle of rushed footsteps and the door swinging open.

Nana stands in front of you, five feet of indignation and a little bit of worry. The hand she hadn’t used to open the door rests in a fist on her hip, and her face is one part concerned, one part relieved, and three parts vexed.

“You forget how to use that phone? Not one measly little text letting me know you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere?” she huffs, shaking her head, but you’ve lived with her long enough to know when she’s seriously pissed at you and when she’s just giving you shit.

“I’m sorry,” you apologize anyway, holding your hands up placatingly. “I crashed at work. I was gonna call you when I woke up, but I lost track of time. It won’t happen again.”

“You’re damn right it won’t,” she affirms, letting the door go to adjust her robe, and you quickly reach out and hold it open yourself so it doesn’t slam into either of you. She looks you up and down. “Are you feeling well? Have you eaten anything?”

You know she’s asking about your physical state of being, but you still feel bad for not talking to her about how you’re doing mentally. You’ve brushed her off at every turn, until eventually she’d stopped asking. All she can do is make sure you aren’t one foot in the grave.

She is your favorite person in the entire world. She’s breathtakingly strong with whip-like wit and a heart of gold, and the two of you used to talk about everything. And, like with every-fucking-one else, you’re shutting her out.

Emotion grips you like a vice, a sick cocktail of love and nostalgia and grief, sudden and strong enough that it nearly chokes you, and you clear your throat. “Yeah, I, uh. Hit up the WacDonalds a bit ago.” You pat your stomach with your free hand, shooting her a small smile. “Nice and full.”

“Alright,” she says, stepping back to re-enter the apartment. “Well, get your butt in here and take a shower, tiger, you must stink.”

You blink. “Oh, no, I…” you start, and she pauses to turn back and look up at you, a brow quirked. “I was just dropping by. I actually…” How to put this. Made a deal with the girl whose heart I broke to pretend like I didn’t for a day? That wouldn’t really go over too well, would it? “…I have plans.”

She blinks, momentarily confused, before some flicker of understanding shines behind her eyes and something in her warms. “You’re with your friends?”

There are a lot more people that support you than you think and I’m not going to let you lose that. You’re not alone in this, and you shouldn’t force yourself to be!

If this is supposed to be you forcing yourself to be alone, you’re doing a super shit job at it.

You sigh through your nose, feeling your photo booth strip burn a hole through your wallet in your back pocket. “Yeah,” you nod. “I’m with a friend.”

Nana levels you with a genuine little grin before she reaches a hand up, and you bend down so she can pat your cheek twice. “Good,” she says. “Let them take care of you.”

You don’t think you know how. That was always supposed to be your thing.

You give her another close-lipped smile, and say, “I will,” anyway. She’s not the one you promised not to lie to, after all.

Chapter Text

The déjà vu just won’t stop vu-ing today, it seems, because next thing you know you’re tailing Shin-Ae as the two of you make your way through the mall.

It becomes very obvious very quickly that Shin-Ae’s plan for whisking you away did not extend very far past picking you up, so you guys decide on a new rule: you’ll take turns picking your next destination (literally– you’d annoyed her into pulling out the notebook again and making the necessary additions to the list, and when she scrawled stupid ping-pong where to next with a huff, you’d grinned and thanked her kindly). Turns out you’re not much better at this than she is. 

(“Give me a hint or something.”

“A hint? Is this hangman? You’re supposed to come up with something yourself.”

“Mean. I don’t know! What do well-adjusted teens do when they hang out on the weekend?”

“Okay, I don't know why you’re asking me that like I would know–”

“Wait. Never mind. I know what well-adjusted teens do when they hang out on the weekend.” You put the car into reverse. “We’re going to the mall.”

She’d snorted. It had pleased you an absurd amount.)

You’d failed to account for how packed the mall would be four days before Christmas.

There are so many people here, it’s honestly kind of ridiculous. The tinny carols playing over the loudspeakers are barely audible over the bustle of the crowd searching for last-minute gifts. It’d taken you twenty minutes just to find a parking space; you ended up having to leave your car at the complete far end of the lot, and you and Shin-Ae had powerwalked in a pseudo-huddle to the entrance of the department store to escape the December cold. 

Most of the stores are decorated with glittering tinsel or fake pine trees or intricate light displays, and peering into some of the stores you catch glimpses of employees walking around in holiday-themed sweaters, all drained enthusiasm and customer service smiles much better than Shin-Ae’s. Some stores brandish signs advertising End of 2017! sales (one of which boasts that everything is 17% off. Clever).

“This is almost worse than that anime convention Min-hyuk dragged me and Maya to in middle school,” Shin-Ae grouses, scowling as a woman shoulder-checks her on her way to the perfume store behind them. “Hey, watch it, lady!”

You redirect your attention from using your “vertical advantage” (her words, not yours) in search of a way out of the jumble of bodies, endlessly grateful for the amount of layers everyone is wearing as they press against you, to the back of Shin-Ae’s angry head. “Anime convention?” you ask, intrigued.

“Yeah, years ago.” Two small children run past her, and she nearly trips in her efforts to avoid them barreling into her. “Hey! We went as pirates or something. I don’t fully remember.”

You hum in acknowledgement. “Argh.”

You can tell she rolls her eyes at that even though you can only see the crown of her head. 

Like you had in the arcade, you’re following her lead as she makes her own way through the mall. You’re reminded vividly of the last time you’d been here, too, how you’d chased her around almost just like this, back when all she’d wanted from you wasn’t your friendship, or your time, or your honesty, but just to be left the hell alone.

The dynamic between you and Shin-Ae has always been a funny one, and you recognize it. You never manage to run away from each other at the same time.

“Man. People like that have always pissed me off, but I think working at Wacs might have given me some weird kind of spidey-sense for asshole customers or something?” You come back to the land of the living and follow her gaze to a Wubwerry, where you see a middle-aged man pointing and shouting in a poor employee’s face. The worker has his hands up placatingly and looks like he’s trying not to cry. “Or maybe it’s just trauma. It’s your own fault for waiting until the week of, dude!”

“I take it all your Christmas shopping has been long since completed,” you say, a visual forming in your head of Shin-Ae walking out of a mall like this with a big red bag of presents like a hundred-sixty centimeter Santa Claus, and it brings an amused little smile to your face.

“Yeah, back in November.”

You falter. “What? November?”

She gives you a look like you’re the one talking crazy. “...Yeah? When do you get your Christmas shopping done?”

You’d be lying if you said you’d gotten around to buying any gifts this year at all. It’s not like you’re going to be around by Christmas, anyway. You elect not to mention this. “Maybe the week before? Two weeks max?”

Her jaw drops a little in shock, her brisk stride slowing to a crawl. “What the hell takes you so long?!”

You bristle a little bit, matching her pace. “Hey! I get by just fine waiting for Christmastime to do my Christmas shopping, like normal people do!”

“How do you even find anything by then?” A little alcove has opened up to your left, under the signs for the emergency exit, and you put a hand on Shin-Ae’s arm and usher the two of you over into it so you have room to move freely and discuss this without worrying about being plowed over by the unforgiving hustle and bustle of the crowd. In her outrage, she barely seems to notice. “It’s all either gone or crazy overpriced! God, you’re worse than Maya.”

“Are you one of those flash holiday sale fiends, Shin-Ae? Is that it? Do you camp outside department stores in the middle of the night with a thermos and a dream?” You’re mostly kidding, but you find you actually can picture Shin-Ae fighting for her life over a steeply-discounted blender like you see in the movies.

But then the judgmental look in her eyes shifts to one of abject, far-off horror. “...Never again,” she almost mutters, her voice haunted. 

It kind of haunts you as well, and you stop in your tracks to frown down at her in vague fear. “What? What happened to you?” you ask, all apprehension and sudden concern. 

Shin-Ae looks like she’s reliving bloody war, looking down at her trembling hands. “I didn’t…” she starts, and you’re actually afraid for a second that she might cry. “I swear I didn’t mean to…”

Your eyes go wide. “What?!” you squawk, horrified.

Shin-Ae meets your gaze again, her expression the picture of dead-serious battle fatigue, and she holds eye contact with you for four, five, six terrifying seconds before her mouth twitches up at the corner.

You feel your face fall and you narrow your eyes. “Oh, screw you.”

Shin-Ae brings the back of one of her fraudulently-shaky hands up to her mouth to smother a giggle fit, and you roll your eyes in annoyance you don’t feel as strongly as you normally would. “Yeah, yeah, yuk it up. You’re hilarious.”

“I’m sorry!” she manages, not sounding very sorry at all as she continues to snicker. “I just– what did you think I was gonna say?”

“I don’t know, that you killed a man?! That is a terrible way to start a story!”

She lets out a long-winded mirthful sigh as she comes down. “You accepted that I committed manslaughter during Sale Festa faster than the fact that I do my Christmas shopping in November?”

“Shin-Ae, you have to understand. Doing your Christmas shopping in November is almost neurotically responsible. I’ve seen you try and climb out the window of a public bathroom to escape a potentially awkward social interaction. I have no idea where your ‘I-have-my-life-together’ line is drawn.” And you’ve seen her sprawled on the floor of an elevator because her heels were too tall, and passed out in your arms next to a DDR machine, and groaning on the ground in the break room, her forehead pressed against one of the benches, effectively dead to the world. By most accounts, she’s kind of a mess.

You have also, at every turn you’ve been witness to, seen her stand up to her bullies and win, and that alone is worlds more than you can say for yourself. You’d be a bigger hypocrite than her if you pretended her strength didn’t astound you.

But enough of a hypocrite to make her think you never gave a fuck about her, right? What happened to all that 'caring?'  Shut up.

It’s then that Shin-Ae’s jaw drops a little in indignation, her hand flying up to her head seemingly subconsciously. “I just remembered! You totally stole my hat!”

It takes you a brief second to pinpoint what exactly she’s talking about, but the recognition hits you like a ton of bricks as the memory comes back to you in full: the smell of freshly baked bread, the chill of permanent marker ink on your cheek, the gentle pressure of a too-small baseball cap fixed onto your head. 

“Oh my God, I completely forgot I had that,” you admit. You genuinely have not given that green ball cap a second thought since the morning after you and Shin-Ae met; you’d snagged it from her in a last-ditch effort to force your paths to cross again, an attempt at insurance to try and keep her from running away again, but three months gone and you realize with a sinking feeling somewhere in your chest that the only collateral to come from that fateful meeting had been damage. 

It’s sitting in your closet, if you remember right, up in the left corner of your shelf. It’s placed on top of a crumpled sheet of paper with two eye holes and a mouth cut into it, a strip of grayed and useless tape on each side holding a flimsy length of string in place. It was the worst mask you’d ever seen in your life (and you knew a bit about masks) but something had kept you from just tossing it in the bin.

Maybe you’d wanted some insurance of your own, a keepsake from the first time you’d actually, earnestly enjoyed yourself at one of those stupid parties. Maybe you’d wanted to hold onto a piece of the girl who had made you feel like a person for one night— an aggravating and slightly stalker-ish person, maybe, but a person nonetheless. (You realize now the irony in that, when she hadn’t even asked you who you were. Maybe that had been part of the appeal.)

Maybe you wanted to ensure you wouldn’t forget that you could still feel that way.

If you were home right now you might reach into your closet and take it out, turn it over in your hands and just… look at it. You don’t know. It really is just a hat, but you’re left marveling at how desperately sad the damn thing is making you, when you hadn’t ever spared it a second thought before. 

Somewhat melodramatically, the thought arises that you’ve been taking from her since the day you met, unbidden and unwelcome, but even you can admit it’s a little much. True, yes, but absurd all the same.

Shin-Ae’s talking again. “You know what,” she starts, blessedly nipping the start of what was sure to be your most ridiculous spiral of the day in the bud, “consider it yours. That thing is probably dripping in grease by now.”

“Oh, would you lay off already.”

You need to get it together. This back-and-forth between you and the annoying voice in your head is getting old, and it’s going to ruin the day sooner rather than later if you don’t shut it up. (Though it’s not like the day was all sunshine and rainbows to begin with. Shut up.)

“You know what,” you announce, suddenly determined. “I’m gonna buy you a new hat.”

Shin-Ae’s nose scrunches, looking like she’d smelled something foul. “No. What the fuck. Don’t do that.”

You ignore her, nodding to yourself as the idea begins taking shape in your mind. “Yes. This’ll be your Christmas present.” You look around at the stores that are in your field of vision over the other shoppers’ heads, scanning for a sporting goods store or something similar, as Shin-Ae starts shaking her head in your periphery.

“No! What? I don’t want a hat, weirdo, don’t buy me a hat,” she protests, and you turn back at her to find she’s looking at you like you’re crazy. “I was just kidding, I can take the hat back, you thief.”

You hold a finger up in front of her face. “First of all, crazy that you’re calling me a thief when I’m standing here offering to completely reimburse you.” Her stare goes from confused to deadpan, and you put your hand down with an amused smile. “Second of all… we can turn this into a teaching moment.” You nod to yourself again, knowing it’ll make her roll her eyes. “It’s perfect. I’ll learn the error of my procrastinator ways when it takes us eight million years to find you an acceptable cap, and you’ll walk away vindicated and newly hatted. Think about it.” And before she can cut you off— “Besides, a ball cap is like, what. Ten thousand won? At most? Because I know that’s your biggest gripe here. I promise ten thousand won will not put me out, especially not if it’s a Christmas gift.” You watch a retort die on her tongue in real time, and you know you’ve hit the nail on the head. 

She squints at you, her gaze cold and steely, and after a moment goes, “…You’re not gonna move on from this until I say yes, are you.”

You school your features into a look of dead-seriousness. “Not a chance, no.” 

The two of you stare each other down for a moment or two, and you watch the resolve behind her tired eyes crumble little by little until finally, with a tense of her jaw and a new pinkness to her cheeks, she casts her gaze down to the doorstop on the floor next to her and mutters, “Fine.”

You pump your fist, victorious. “Yessss. Let’s do this.”

You usher a grumbling Shin-Ae into the nearest sneaker store, already honing in on a wall of ball caps by the cash register. The hip hop playing over the speakers is nearly drowned out by the sounds of the crowd, and it is just as loud inside the shop as it is out. “Now, tell me,” you start once you’re standing in front of the shelves, hands on your hips while she crosses her arms across her chest. There are dozens of hats in neat rows all the way down the wall, ranging from nondescript to flat-out garish, some even boasting the logos of American teams– you think those are the Yankees, if you’re not mistaken?– and you wonder if you can manage to get her to try on every last one. “What are you in the market for?”

“Yeong-Gi, I don’t care,” she grouses, but you’re committed to this now. “Surprise me.”

You shake your head resolutely. “Nope. Not your birthday.”

She doesn’t answer you right away, but after a beat or two you see her frown shift from petulant to puzzled, and she looks away from the shelves to peer up at you in confusion. “Wait, what? What does that mean?”

You blink and face her right back. “You know. You get the stuff you asked for on Christmas and the stuff people surprise you with on your birthday…” And then you frown to yourself, realizing you’ve never actually heard anyone else talk about this distinction before and that there’s a very real chance you just convinced yourself at some point that it was a fact of life. “Is that… not a thing?”

Shin-Ae’s annoyed pout is slowly turning into something resembling an incredulous smile. “No??” she responds, halfway a laugh. “That is not a thing, who taught you that?”

“What? Are you serious?” you ask, a bit incredulous yourself (and a little embarrassed, your ears are burning). “That’s how I’ve always done it!”

“Okay, but it isn’t, like. A thing,” she chuckles lightly, but her gaze drifts off into the distance as she ponders on it more. “I guess it works, though.”

“It does!” you affirm, feeling a little bit defensive of this completely arbitrary approach to gift-giving that you apparently devised out of nowhere one day in your youth. “It’s like, on Christmas you take care of the stuff on people’s wishlist, right? And then on their birthday, you… I don’t know. You get them things that you think they’d like.” You think of waxy crayons and printer paper. You think of cake.

You don’t fail to notice the irony in explaining this to Shin-Ae, who showed up to whisk you away on your birthday. It’s not like she knows it’s your birthday, of course, but it does align with your theory.

(You’ve also been surprised on past birthdays with things you can’t say you liked very much, but now is not the time for lighthearted flippancy about your mom, even if it’s just in your head. One perpetual, never-ending blow to your mental health a day is enough, even for you.)

“No, I see the logic,” she says, thoughtfully, before shaking her head, “but I’ve never heard of anyone denoting a clear difference like that.”

“Well, now you know,” you conclude, reaching over and poking her bookbag. “That’s the new rule, by the way. Take out that notebook and add it to the list: ‘Shin-Ae has to pick out her own damn hat.’”

She throws her head back and lets out a long-suffering groan, loud enough that it draws the attention of a group of teenagers in line for the register. “I don’t want a stupid haaat!”

Her histrionics never fail to amuse you. “But Shin-Aeeeee!” You drag out the last syllable for as annoyingly long as possible, until she snaps her head back up and glares at you to stop. “You’re in need of one! And ‘tis the season of giving!”

“Please,” she huffs. “If anyone’s ‘in need’ of a hat–”

“Stop.” You hold a hand up in front of her face. “Enough.”

But she smirks anyway.

She ends up caving and agreeing to be the one to pick a hat for you to buy her, but she seems to have resolved to make the process as agonizing as possible. She has something negative to say about every single cap, complaining about the size or the color or the logo or the lack of a logo (“A plain white ball cap. Am I a serial killer?” “In what world does a boring hat make you a serial killer?” “So you think it’s boring! You were gonna buy me a boring hat!”) You suspect that she’s trying to get you to give in, to call the search off and just pick one yourself if only to shut her up, but what she doesn’t know is that you could listen to her pretend to bitch and moan about the “faulty stitching” on the inner lining of a purple fuzzy ball cap for the rest of your life. So there’s that.

Thirty minutes later it’s Shin-Ae who grows bored of the charade first, and it’s been long enough that she knows you aren’t going to drop the subject until she lets you buy her one, so she ends up picking a gray one from the fourth store you go to, nondescript save for a tiny tangerine embroidered on the front. She shoves it onto her head and glances in the mirror for half a second before holding it out to you. “This one. Happy? I’m starving.”

You pluck the hat from her impatiently bobbing hand and give her a pleased smile. “Peachy,” you reply, and it isn’t until you’re at the cash register forking over a crumpled five-thousand won bill that she gasps to herself and whacks you on the bicep with an angry it’s not even a peach, dumbass!

The two of you set off for the food court after that, stomachs rumbling and the gift you’d just bought Shin-Ae sitting snugly on your own head (“Not this again. Would you just give me the stupid hat already.” “Not before Christmas, Shin-Ae, c’mon. That’s how you get on the naughty list.”), but Shin-Ae stops suddenly along the way and you nearly trip.

“What? What is it?” you ask once you’ve righted your center of balance, but she just holds a finger up in a silent wait as she… sniffs the air?

“There’s a pretzel stand somewhere,” she explains before setting off in what you assume is the direction of the smell of dough and cinnamon, dead-serious like the fact that she just bloodhounded a pretzel stand in the middle of the most crowded mall you’ve ever been in isn’t insanely fucking funny. All you can really do is blindly follow after her in bewildered amusement and, honestly, awe.

Sure enough, you squeeze your way around a couple of corners to find a pretzel place in between a candle shop and a children’s apparel store. The line at the register doesn’t exactly go around the block, but it’s a close thing— the mouth-watering aroma wafting your way from behind the counter and the subsequent growl of your stomach, on the other hand, leave you feeling awfully persuaded to wait. Those nuggets earlier had not been enough.

“Yesss,” Shin-Ae hisses, leading you to the back of the queue. “It’s been ages since I had pretzel bites.” You watch her rub her hands together in anticipation, an amused twitch at the corner of your mouth at the honest-to-God glimmer in her eye.

“I am genuinely impressed,” you tell her, craning your neck to look in the direction the two of you had come from. “You sniffed this place out from a good three corridors away. Did you know this was here?”

She shrugs. “Meh. I knew the mall had a pretzel stand.” She shifts her weight from leg to leg, and you frown at the vague discomfort on her face. Is she… embarrassed? No, you know what she looks like when she’s embarrassed. This is something else. 

“You okay?” you ask as she rolls out her left ankle, bracing herself against the wall for balance. “Does your leg hurt?”

She looks back up at you for a moment before batting her free hand in your direction, redirecting her attention to her opposite ankle. “Don’t worry, I’m good. I just get achey sometimes. You should see me after a shift at Wacs.”

“That… doesn’t make me feel any better,” you inform her, more than a little distressed at the thought of Shin-Ae forcing herself to withstand what seems to be chronic pain for hours at a time for a shitty part-time job. 

“I’ll be fine, relax,” she assures you. You are not very assured, and as the line trudges on as slowly as physically possible and Shin-Ae keeps stretching and fidgeting you only become less so. The only chronic pain you’ve ever had to deal with was when you hit your growth spurt in middle school and your spine and shoulders didn’t know what to do with themselves, but just watching her is setting off some sort of sympathy pains in your own legs. 

“You can take a seat somewhere if your legs are really bugging you, you know,” you tell her as you watch her pull her foot back behind her for the third time in as many minutes. “I’ll get us a bag of pretzel bites.”

For a second Shin-Ae looks like she wants to protest, but when she lets go of her foot and lets it hit the floor again her face betrays her soreness, and she sighs. “Fine. I just need to sit down for a bit.” She looks around at your surroundings as best she can through the throes of patrons, presumably searching for a place to sit, as she shrugs her bag off one shoulder and reaches a hand in to search blindly for something. “But I’m gonna pay.”

You don’t fight her on it, knowing she probably still feels a bit upset about letting you buy her the hat you’re still wearing. She finds her wallet and fishes out a crumpled green bill, and when you take it from her outstretched hand she points somewhere off to your right. “I’ll be over there,” she tells you, and when you take a look you think you can make out some sort of centerpiece in the corridor. “Come get me.”

You meet her gaze again and nod your assent, and you swear she hesitates for a beat before setting off in the direction she’d pointed, and this is when you realize you haven’t been more than three feet away from Shin-Ae all day after having spent four nigh unbearable days apart, and you feel that suffocating distance stretch wide all over again with every step she takes away from the pretzel stand. Oh, God. It takes a shamefully considerable effort not to forget the damn pretzel bites and let your feet carry you after her, and it’s that embarrassment that keeps you where you are. 

You do watch her go, though, for as long as you can until the back of her head is swallowed by the crowd, and even after she's escaped your field of vision you continue to stare off in her general direction. Just losing sight of her has your hands clamming up and your heart beating funny, and you hold out a completely unnecessary amount of hope that she'll turn back, realize her legs don't actually hurt at all and that she'd rather wait here in line with you than take a breather you already feel is lasting way too long. 

The man behind you clears his throat loudly, and you realize you haven’t been moving up and you’re already third in line. How long have you been watching her walk away? Oh, that’s a weighted question you don’t feel like pondering any longer. You catch up with the line and reread the six menu options over and over and over and over until you’re next at the register and you resolve never to ponder anything ever again until the end of time. Jeez, what the hell is wrong with you?

Thankfully, ordering some pretzel bites and handing over a ten thousand won bill does not take much brain power, so soon enough you’re holding the warm bag in your hands and beelining (or rather, as close as one can get to a beeline in a crowd of what feels like hundreds of people) in the direction she’d pointed in. Good God, man. You feel less ashamed about the borderline withdrawal symptoms you just experienced, though, in the wake of the instant relief that floods your system when you catch sight of Shin-Ae’s brown hair and brown coat amidst the crowd, and you decide to put a pin in analyzing that brief bout of madness. Preferably forever. 

“Dig in!” you call out to her when you get close enough, having slowed your stride upon locating her. She’s leaning against the ceramic vase of a giant decorative plant in the middle of the corridor, too short to perch herself on the lip of the vase like you’d be able to if you tried. She looks up from her shoes at you and you shake the bag of pretzels invitingly as you make your way to stand in front of her, the sweet smell emanating from within filling you with a cozy warmth.

Her expression shifts at the sight of you, though, from neutral boredom to something more somber. Her eyes crinkle just slightly at the edges and her mouth twitches to the side almost imperceptibly, like a twinge of pain has just shot through her, and the warmth you’d felt dissipates like it’d never been there at all.

You say, “Spill,” before you’ve even consciously decided to, and you immediately wish you hadn’t.

Really, would it have been so hard to just let it go? Would it have been so hard to just act like you hadn’t noticed the look on her face, offer her a pretzel bite while popping one in your mouth yourself, about-face and pick a random direction to walk in and enjoy the relief of having her next to you again? 

But you know the kind of person you are. If you give yourself even one pass on the rules, you’ll more easily justify another, and another, and another until you end up ignoring them entirely. They’re stupid and you both know it, but after everything you owe it to her to at least try and commit to them. 

(You also find part of yourself hoping, in a convoluted sense of self-preservation, that she refuses to answer, just so you won’t feel as pressured to do so yourself when the tables turn against you and she decides to level you with a spill of her own.

But no. You’d given her your word that you’d abide by the rules, even the inconvenient ones. And besides, you can’t exactly take it back now.)

And perhaps the most important part: God, you want to know.

She doesn’t say anything. She just keeps looking at you for another second or two before pulling her gaze away with a sad, nostalgic-looking little quirk of her lips and shakes her head. “Nah.”

You’re not as relieved as you thought you’d be. In fact, right now you kind of feel like you might die if you don’t know every single thought she has ever had about you, but tough luck, you guess. Rules are rules, no matter how idiotic. At least the score is more or less settled, and you know now for certain that you’re allowed to opt out when it’s your turn.

You heave a great, dramatic sigh, unfurling the bag of pretzel bites and popping one into your mouth (though you don’t feel particularly hungry anymore). “Well,” you start through a mouthful of dough, and she grimaces at the sight. You swallow and continue. “You know what that means, Shin-Ae.”

She rolls her eyes, more tired than annoyed, and crosses her arms as she faces you head on. “Yeah, yeah,” she sighs, like her heart’s not in it. It sends a twinge of pain of your own through you. “Hit me.”

You open your mouth and nothing comes out for a few seconds. You close it again. “Hm.”

Shin-Ae’s face drops in annoyance. “Oh my God, you don’t even have a dare yet.”

“Don’t pressure me, miss ‘extensive planning,’ okay? Give me a second,” you retort as you take a look around above the other shoppers’ heads. You see Shin-Ae throw her head back in a groan in your periphery, and you hold out the bag of pretzel bites for her to take. “Here, have some.”

She takes the bag from you and has just opened it when your eyes land on a pair of mannequins in the window of some trendy fashion store— or, more specifically, the absolutely horrifying matching swimsuits the mannequins are wearing. They’re the most visually assaulting shade of electric green, and the bikini the feminine mannequin has on has, of all things, twin pinwheels affixed to the top’s cups. You angle your head to the side to take a closer look at the masculine mannequin’s boardshorts, and you feel your mouth begin to stretch into a delighted grin when you make out that there’s another two pinwheels on the back. The back! Right on the ass!

“Wha,” you hear Shin-Ae ask, tone of voice suspicious, through a mouthful of bread. A swallow. “What are you smiling about…”

You cup your hands around your eyes like blinders in an attempt to make out what the rest of the clothes look like in this store. It’s December! Why are there swimsuits on display?

Frustrated by your lack of a response, Shin-Ae steps up onto a little ledge at the base of the ceramic vase to try and follow your line of sight, straining herself up on her tip-toes to see over the rest of the bustling crowd, and you hold out a forearm for her to pull herself up with. “What are you— oh,” she says, and the sound of horrified realization in her voice makes you smile even wider. “Absolutely not.”

You turn back to each other at the same time, her face the picture of apprehension and yours, you’re sure, the picture of impish excitement. She starts shaking her head. “Yeong-Gi, no.”

You start nodding back. “Yeong-Gi, yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Yessss.”

“No, Yeong-Gi, we’re not doing this. No! No–”

“– way I’m trying this on. I’ve seen napkins that would cover more than this.”

You won. Cue mischievous laughter.

You wiggle the hanger in front of her, the black sweater it’s holding– if you can even call it that– waving with the movement. “Whatever could you mean?” you ask, not even trying to sound oblivious. “You don’t think winter calls for a nice new jumper?”

She glares at you briefly as she reaches out and pinches one of the mangled sleeves with her thumb and forefinger like she’s afraid it’ll tear even further if she so much as breathes on it. “Winter where? The Maldives?”

You snort, lifting the sweater up to eye level so you can peer at her through the wildly impractical hole in the middle. “Yeah. Not the most insulating, is it?”

The rest of the store sports clothing of a similar style, most of the articles you see on the racks and the mannequins uncomfortable-looking at best and flat-out unwearable at worst. You wonder if this is what they call “high-fashion.” You wonder if Alyssa might like to wear any of it. 

The arm that isn’t currently gently returning the practically threadbare top to the rack you picked it from is draped with a few articles you had gotten Shin-Ae to agree, however begrudgingly, to try on, ranging from flouncy dresses to oversized blazers to “dress pants” you think Kousuke might actually faint at the sight of. All of them are matching sets. That’s right. You’ve dared Shin-Ae to take part in a two-man fashion show.

The two of you are slowly making your way through the women’s side of the store, having seen all there was to see over on the men’s. (Shin-Ae had seemed less adamant about her distaste for the clothes you two picked out back in that section, and you caught her mindlessly trailing her hand along a rack or two as she took a peek at what was hanging there. She definitely hasn’t been doing that over on this side of the store. You give a quiet hum and don’t think about it again.) The clothing over here is certainly more… innovative, to put it nicely. There hadn’t been any Swiss cheese sweaters on the men’s racks, that's for certain, but the level of overall eccentricity seems to be unisex, much to your delight and Shin-Ae’s utter dismay. 

It takes the two of you about half an hour of perusing until you’re satisfied with your bounty, and you trail behind an unenthusiastic Shin-Ae on the way to the fitting rooms, where an adequately eccentric-looking employee whose haircut reminds you of Soushi seems quite amused by the large bundle of fabric in your arms and the lack of any in Shin-Ae’s.

After divvying up the clothes, you and Shin-Ae take the two stalls closest to the back where the floor-length mirror sits. You swish your curtain closed and kick off your sneakers and jeans before grabbing the hem of your hoodie and lifting it over your head, wincing as the steadily increasing ache in your ribs flares up with the motion. You’re beginning to sorely (ha) regret wearing your binder this long without a break– you’d put it on yesterday morning after your post-run shower and haven’t taken it off since– but you’re not about to peel it off now. You hold out your hoodie in front of you and wonder for a moment whether it’s baggy enough that your admittedly small chest won’t be noticed if you do decide to forgo it, but you’ll deal with that when you’re done here. 

“How the fuck…” you hear Shin-Ae mutter to herself over on the other side of the wall as you finish pulling the too-short slacks on and slip the loud-looking button-up off its hanger. “Where do you put your arm through?” she calls out to you.

“Uh, give me a sec. I’m still unbuttoning it.” You make as quick of work of the buttons as you can (why in the world are some of them flat and others snap? Who designed this?) and quickly realize the dilemma Shin-Ae is facing when you notice the lack of armholes leading into the sleeves. “What the hell?”

“Oh, wait.” You hear a quiet little zip come from Shin-Ae’s stall. “Jesus. There’s a hidden zipper.”

You frown and turn to look at the wall separating the two of you, brows furrowed. “In the armhole?”

“In the armhole.” The sound of fabric rustling. “For some fucking reason.”

You locate the world’s thinnest zipper in the folds of the fabric where there reasonably should just be a normal armhole, and soon enough you manage to get the shirt on. 

“Oh, yeah,” you say, turning your body as you fasten/snap the buttons back together to get a good look at yourself in your cubicle’s floor-to-ceiling mirror from all angles. The tassels (the tassels!!!) along the shirt sway with you. “This one’s a hit.”

“For sure,” Shin-Ae deadpans, and you hear her curtain swish open as she steps out of her stall. “I’ve always wanted to look like the son of a circus carny.”

You smile as you step out yourself, and do your best to stifle a bark of laughter at the sight of her. The shirt had been labeled as one size fits all but that was clearly not the case, judging by the way Shin-Ae’s hands are completely engulfed by the sleeves and the hem sits nearly halfway past her thighs. She seems to have improvised an off-the-shoulder look out of the much-too-large collar, and she’s holding herself at an angle to keep it from slipping off entirely. It would look almost avant-garde if you thought it was in any way intentional. She looks very unhappy about all of this.

You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from bursting out laughing as the two of you look at yourselves side by side in the mirror at the end of the corridor. She looks even more ridiculous by comparison like this– you hadn’t noticed before, but the slacks are much too long for her too. Only the tips of her sneakers peek out from under the holographic pant legs. 

Yeah. Nothing’s saving these clothes, but at least they fit you. More or less.

“What’s the word?” you start with a gleeful wobble in your voice, twisting your right leg about to watch as the fluorescent lights above you catch and bounce off of the metallic fabric. “Haute? Haute couture.”

Shin-Ae’s unamused glare burns holes in the mirror as she shakes her head as softly as she can, probably in an effort to not disturb the shirt’s precarious balance on her shoulder. “This is so unfair. Why does it actually look kind of okay on you?”

Your brain immediately calls back to the forefront of your mind a comment you’d resolved to forget the second she’d uttered it, all those months ago. You’re really handsome. Stop.

And yes, you realize that you’re taking an inch and making it a mile by stretching her complaint about the world’s ugliest clothing into a compliment about your physical appearance, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’s said something or other about finding you attractive. You look good today. Stop that!!

And now you’re caught in this weird limbo between trying not to blush over an off-handed grouse and trying not to groan out loud at how fucking ridiculous of a struggle that is. You do your best to squash the superficial giddiness down before your ears burn any hotter. You don’t even like the way you look in the first place.

That strikes a sour note in you. Just like that, the flush on your cheeks dissipates and gives way to a frown, and you don’t even need to look in the mirror to know it looks just like your father’s.

Shin-Ae catches your gaze in the reflection. She’s stopped fiddling with the shirt and is watching your reflection like she wants to ask you a question, or perhaps hit you with your first spill of the day, and you watch back with bated breath as your body freezes in place and your mind hopes to God that she doesn’t.

Blessedly, she does neither, instead letting out a huff as she redirects her attention back to her feet, holding a knee up to showcase just how long the legs of the slacks are given they still brush against the floor. “I hate this,” she grumbles. “You know all this means is I expect the same cooperation from you when you’re the one getting dared, right?”

You try to ignore the sting you feel at the fact that she seems to think it inevitable that you will eventually end up breaking the rules. After all, it’s not exactly an unfair assumption. “‘Cooperation,’ she says. Like she hasn’t been complaining this entire time.”

“Hey, I’ll complain as much as I want. I’m doing what you asked, aren’t I?”

So am I, you don’t say. Why else would I be here?

Even to yourself the half-lie is glaring, and you hate yourself slightly more. Another drop in the bucket.

“Yeah, yeah,” you reply, dropping the subject and turning back to your fitting room. “Let’s do the sunflowers next.”

A pained groan like she’s been stabbed. “Ugggghhhh.” You feel her flop a sleeve at your retreating back. “Hey, what say you try on the dress and give me the suit, huh? Level the playing field a little.”

You grin at her over your shoulder as you reach a hand over to the bar where you’ve hung your clothes and grab the hanger holding the highlighter-yellow slacks and blazer. “Hey, I’m up for it if you are.”

The look on her face is stuck somewhere between bemused and delighted at the mere prospect, and when you hold out the hanger to her she snatches it from your hand with an evil little grin.

Three minutes and more than a few ripped seams later, Shin-Ae is clapping a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter at the sight of you in a sundress that was made for someone much smaller than yourself, and you decline to point out that she looks just as ridiculous swimming in swaths of electric yellow that almost drag behind her like a bridal train, and you give her a cautious twirl while making sure the skirt doesn’t ride up too much so you can hear her try and fail cover up another cackle, and for a moment, all else is forgotten.

As you step out of the dressing room, binder stuffed into one of the inner pockets of your jacket, you make some joke about the clothing haul the two of you will be going home with today after you've handed the mountain of fabric to the employee waiting outside with an apologetic smile, and Shin-Ae guffaws as she fishes out her wallet again with a promise that there’s a chance a real living fly will come out when she opens it, but when she does she pauses.

“Oh, shit,” she mumbles, and you stop next to her and watch her fish out a crumpled slip of white paper from what looks like the very bottom of the wallet. At first you think it’s a receipt of some sort, but when she flips it around to show you you see the words FREE ADMISSION: FILM OF CHOICE written in big bold letters next to a clipart bucket of popcorn. “I forgot I had this.”

You suddenly remember you and Shin-Ae helping a little girl lost in the mall find her older sister. “Oh, yeah!” you exclaim, and you snap your fingers at her. “Well, now we know what we’re doing next.”

Shin-Ae squints at you. “You’ve sure been taking the reins here, haven’t you. Were you even gonna ask me if I wanted to watch a movie?” she accuses, and your face drops as a rush of cold guilt floods through you so suddenly it leaves you panicked– before she shrugs and continues on towards the exit of the store. You catch a glimpse of a cheeky grin on her face before she turns away from you entirely. “Kidding. I was gonna suggest that too.”

You can't help the acerbic quirk at the corner of your mouth as you trail after her. “Oh, you are so…”

After another brief but sparkling debate regarding what movie to watch— you were instantly drawn to the awful-looking werewolf romance that just dropped a few days ago, if only for how hilarious it would be to make Shin-Ae sit through it, and were just as instantly shot down, and Shin-Ae was lamenting the fact that the new Bathuman wouldn’t be playing for another two weeks more than anything— you ended up closing your eyes and holding a finger out towards the movie posters, spinning in place until Shin-Ae told you to stop. Thing is, Shin-Ae didn’t tell you to stop until you were dizzy enough that you crashed into the damn things yourself, much to her sadistic amusement.

Your shoulder nearly left a dent in the poster for some thriller called Nothing Left that neither of you had heard of before, and you’d unanimously agreed that it was as good a pick as any. Horror doesn’t really faze you like it does Soushi, and Shin-Ae had insisted she didn’t care much either way.

(“Unless it’s Moonlit Liaisons, you mean. Fuck, my arm.”

“Sorry. And yes. I do have some standards.”

“What, and high fashion doesn’t fit into those standards?”

“Please. I’m no Kousuke, but even I know you’d have to be ‘high’ to appreciate that as ‘fashion.’ And no, that doesn’t count as a pun, so put that grin away.”)

“You go ahead and get the tickets,” you tell Shin-Ae as you hold the door to the movie theater open for her. “I’ll get our snacks.”

She nods. “Alright. Get me a medium popcorn and an orange soda. Or, you know what, we could probably share a popcorn if you get a large. Do that.”

You try not to be too excited about the prospect of sharing a popcorn with Shin-Ae, but your, “On it, boss” comes out a bit giddy anyway because you are ridiculous. You see her roll her eyes goodnaturedly out of the corner of your own as you walk away, heading over to the snack counter as she stays behind with the girl working the front desk.

“Good afternoon,” you hear the girl say. “How many– oh, hi!”

You glance over your shoulder to see the employee reach over and grab Shin-Ae’s hand excitedly, to the latter’s blatant surprise. “It’s good to see you again!! How are you!”

“I-I’m good, thanks. Hold on, how many jobs do you have here?”

You turn back around to order your food, keeping an ear on the unfamiliar interaction behind you. You feel an uncomfortable prickle in your chest at the idea of someone else having Shin-Ae’s attention today, even if just for a moment, and then you feel fucking insane for it because woah. Seriously? “Ugh, like five. This place is way understaffed. But the shifts are short, so they just cycle us around.”

“That… sounds like a terrible way to run a business.”

“That’s what I’m saying! But I’ve been here a couple years already, and the pay is decent enough. I give this place another decade max.”

“Seems… kind of generous, honestly. Whatever.” You can hear the lack of real interest in Shin-Ae's tone, and it feels like a small victory. It also feels like you’re a possessive nutcase. “I have that gift card you gave me. It’s good for two, right?” Oh, it’s this girl!

You hear this girl gasp as you take your food from the one lone employee behind the otherwise abandoned counter. Yeesh. Luckily there seems to be no one else going to the movies today. “Oh my God, yes! Was that your boyfriend I saw with you–”

You and the girl both turn around at the same time, your arms full with one large popcorn and two large sodas, and you watch her excited expression freeze in place when she lays eyes on you like a deer in headlights, and you’re confused for all of two seconds before you remember once again that you are currently the nation’s least favorite teenager.

You suddenly feel very, very tense.

“Hi..!” the girl manages, still smiling but clearly forcing it. She turns back to look at Shin-Ae, who has caught on to the sudden shift in atmosphere and is too busy looking at you. Her jaw is set slightly, braced with a sort of tension barely visible but apparent to you. The look in her eyes does nothing to unstick your feet from the ground beneath you. Maybe that’s on purpose. Maybe she’s trying to make sure you don’t run away again.

You stay where you are, suddenly rooted to the linoleum tile beneath you as you watch the girl scan Shin-Ae’s face for some sign of distress, presumably, or a wordless cry for help. Shin-Ae doesn’t notice this inspection, keeping her eyes on you a moment longer before looking back to her and holding the gift certificate out. “Yeah, two tickets, thanks. For Nothing Left,” she confirms, before meeting your gaze again.

The girl hesitates for a second, glancing back at you before nodding carefully. “Of course! The previews should be just about done,” she replies, all strained artificial cheer, and it takes her two tries to swipe the card correctly. Your hands have started to sweat in spite of the chill of the cups, and your heart has begun to pound.

You’re still stock-still when the girl hands Shin-Ae her receipt and Shin-Ae takes it without another word, a mere hum of acknowledgement escaping her as she walks towards you again. She shoves the receipt in her pocket and takes the two sodas from your clammy grip without breaking your gaze, and when the girl calls out a faint um, th-theater five, guys! she still doesn’t look away, not immediately. 

You can’t exactly parse what the look on her face means, but it makes you feel like something a scientist would put in a petri dish, or a glass slide under a microscope. You feel impossibly small, and impossibly pinned down. You feel the inescapable urge to bolt.

She’s looking at you like she already knows what you’re thinking. She’s looking at you like she’s afraid you just might.

The moment drags on just long enough that you feel like you might throw up (a few seconds or a hundred years– it’s hard to tell in your state), but finally Shin-Ae breaks it by cocking her head to the left and turning towards the corridor. “Theater five,” she repeats, leading the way. “Let’s go.”

You go. Your legs take you trailing after her automatically, your mind whirring away against your every wish. You don’t want to, not even a little bit, but you turn your head to glance at the girl at the booth and find her staring right at you. Her face is the picture of apprehension, like part of her wants to keep you from leaving with Shin-Ae, and when you meet her eye she flinches and immediately faces away from you, pretending to busy herself with rearranging the trinkets on her desk. You feel queasy as you look away.

It isn’t as if you hadn’t known, on some level, that something like this was bound to happen. You’ve been telling yourself since this morning, from the very moment Shin-Ae caught up to you at the office— or, if you’re really gunning for accuracy, for months now— that sticking around is a terrible idea. Getting as close as you had in the first place had been a mistake, and part of you always knew it, and even the reaffirmation of that truth had not been enough to keep you from caving and joining her today, because at your core you are selfish and stupid. You have known that for a long time.

But knowing for yourself that you shouldn’t be around Shin-Ae and having someone else remind you are two vastly different things.

No one had recognized you today. To everyone who saw you, you and Shin-Ae were just two kids enjoying a Saturday together, laughing and bickering and playing arcade games and trying on clothes (a simple, easy kind of fun you used to allow yourself, that you convinced yourself for years you were allowed to take part in under the guise of playing guardian angel, that you lied to yourself and called absolution for the sin of your existence, that you had truly begun to believe for a moment you might actually be allowed to enjoy—). No one had seen you today and thought to themselves, I hope that girl’s alright. Not that you’d noticed, at least. Not until now. 

(And this is one lesson you fear you will never, ever learn, despite knowing the truth of it more intimately than you know much of anything: your very presence is a magnet for ruin. The space next to you is ground zero, and the detonator sits firmly in your grasp. You know this, and yet you are still here.

In every sense of the phrase.)

Theater five is pretty much empty. You think you can make out a small group sitting in the very back row, but other than that the theater is almost barren. Maybe you’ve never heard of this movie because no one else has either.

You don’t make a quip about this to Shin-Ae. You don’t say anything to Shin-Ae at all on account of your tongue being stuck to the roof of your mouth. Your jaw feels like you’re bracing it for impact. Shin-Ae doesn’t say anything either, and it’s not like the two of you are strangers to comfortable quiet every once in a while, but this particular bout of silence is making you freak out just a little bit. You’re not a fan of silence on a good day.

Your heart is still pounding as you follow her lead, hands cold and sweaty as she makes her way to the seats at the front of the second level, right up at the partition separating this half of the theater from the other (it’s where you like to sit, too). The movie seems to have already started— you recognize the actor from the poster, at least— but you don’t take in any of the dialogue, your mind’s churning keeping you too distracted to. 

You’re thinking about so many things at once. You’re thinking about the look in the clerk’s eyes as she watched the two of you, the blatant unmistakable uneasiness she’d exuded as she reluctantly let Shin-Ae leave with you. You’re thinking about Shin-Ae herself (not that you’ve thought about much else in days), the sharpness of her expression as she’d stared you down in the lobby, not so much daring you to run away as she was warning you not to– not on pain of punishment, exactly, but on pain of causing more pain. (How many times will she be forced to ask the same of you? To not cause her any more pain?)

You’re thinking about her laughter back at the dressing room, how light and free and safe the atmosphere had felt not even fifteen minutes ago, when there’d been nothing, not so much as an inkling of anxiety or fear, to burst the bubble of peace the two of you had found yourselves in. But it had burst, as all bubbles do; it’d been unrealistic of you both to assume that it wouldn’t, but you in particular should’ve known better. You know better than anyone what you attract, know better than anyone that you are a living, breathing causality, both the cause and the effect, and nothing escapes you unscathed.

She’d told you earlier that she didn’t believe you were dangerous, and it hadn’t made you feel better then and it’s not making you feel better now, because it doesn’t matter what she believes, does it? You’d believed you were doing the world a bit of good, and you had been wrong. You’d believed you could offset the space you were wasting by filling the empty spaces in others, and you had been wrong. Believing something doesn’t make it true. A villain in disguise is still a villain.

You’re trying, you swear you’re trying your hardest not to look as sick as you feel, but your limbs feel stiff in a way that has nothing to do with how awfully you’d slept last night when you take your seat, and you catch Shin-Ae glancing at you out of the corner of her eye and you want to sink into the floor and leave and never come back— this is not a foreign desire for you, but you find no more comfort in the familiarity than you always have, which is absolutely none— and she opens her mouth to say something and you think if she levels you with a spill right now you’ll actually explode but all she says is, “Quit thinking about it.”

You stop breathing for a second. 

“You’ve kind of been all over the news these past few days,” she continues, quietly enough that only you can hear her, and you stare dead at the screen in front of you because you don’t think you can look at her right now. “Social media too, judging by what Maya’s told me. So Soo only knows what everyone else has been saying.”

Maybe they’re not as full of shit as you think. You don’t say this. You don’t say anything.

“They weren’t there,” she says, her tone inviting no further discussion on the matter. “You and I know what really happened. So stop worrying about it.”

Maybe they’re not as naive as you. You don’t say this either, and you feel the intense urge to beg for her forgiveness for having even thought it.

And of course that’s what she thinks this is about: your reputation. The fact that she thinks you care about something as insignificant to you as the opinion of strangers stings more than you expected it to. Does she really believe a tainted image matters more to you than the harm you’re doing to her? The pain you’re causing her? Doesn’t she know you better than that?

Of course she doesn’t. How could she? You spent your entire friendship actively convincing her you were someone else. Forget what you’d thought before, about her seeing the correlation between you and your mask, because what does she really know about you in the first place?

It’s no wonder she thinks you care more about yourself than her. Part of you thinks– knows– it’s her natural instinct to assume that of everyone. Everything about this day in particular has proven to you that she hasn’t yet learned the lesson on putting herself first. (But you’re not about to preach to her about learning any lessons now, even if it’s only in your own scrambled head.)

She doesn’t say anything else and you don’t say anything at all, focusing more on quelling the need to throw up that’s been steadily welling up over the last twenty minutes. You’re frozen in your seat, and you recognize that you should be breathing more than this but you can’t muster the incentive to try and take in more than the shallow pants you’re only just managing as it is.

You screw your eyes shut, trying to limit your scope of sensation in an attempt to curb the overstimulation, but it only makes everything that much louder. You can almost feel the bass from the speakers rumble the theater floor, travel up your seat, leave you bracing every time a character says anything or the soundtrack ratchets up or some prop or other crashes or clatters or bangs during a more high-energy scene, and you white-knuckle the bucket of popcorn you and Shin-Ae haven’t so much as picked at as you struggle to make out the sound of anything, anything else besides the film because you feel stretched so thin you don’t even think you have the strength to get up and walk out of the room for a breather, and that’s when you hear Shin-Ae exhale next to you. 

Your eyes shutter open. You mistake it for a sigh at first, if only because of how much louder it was than her usual breathing, but her next inhale is just as distinct, and it isn’t until she breathes in and out and in and out the same way another three times that you realize, oh. She’s trying to get you to match her.

You try. Letting your eyes slip closed again, you try to focus on nothing save for the purposefully rhythmic inhale-exhale to your left, consistent in a way that grounds you, just a little, just enough to keep you from feeling like a gust of wind could blow you away like dust, and you do your best to time your next exhale to hers. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. It makes you feel the slightest bit better— not enough to get you to unclench your fists or relax your bow-taut frame, but it’s something. You only wish it helped more.

Here is what you are able to grasp of the movie’s plot:

The protagonist’s wife has been kidnapped by a faceless monster, one who has seemingly haunted them both for years, and the protagonist is committed to doing whatever it takes to find her and bring her home. He searches high and low for clues, explores the locations his investigation leads him to, but never seems to get any closer to finding her or figuring out where she was taken. As the story progresses, the protagonist begins to doubt whether or not this monster even exists, or if his distressed mind has merely fabricated one to help him come to terms with his wife’s disappearance. But why, then? he asks himself, desperate and mad. Why did you vanish?!

This is when Shin-Ae stands up and whispers to you that she needs to use the bathroom.

You very, very nearly reach out and grab her wrist, almost blurt out a request for her to take you with her, but your rattled brain thankfully realizes before you do that that would look and sound absolutely fucking insane, so all you do is give her a slightly jittery nod and say, “Okay.” Don’t leave me.

She hesitates for a split second before turning and going, and you watch her step out the door into the corridor until you’re left alone in a virtually empty theater on the verge of what is probably a panic attack.

Suddenly everything is ten times worse. The movie is suddenly ear-splitting, every thrum of the bass that pours in through the speakers making you flinch in your seat; the theater is suddenly sweltering, little beads of sweat trickling down the back of your neck and making you want to crawl out of your skin; her split second of hesitation before she’d left warps itself in your mind, stretching into hours, weeks, centuries where you could’ve offered to walk with her, acted like you needed to use the bathroom too, asked her to stay just a little while longer– and Jesus, who the hell do you think you are? Where do you get off thinking you can ask anyone, much less Shin-Ae of all people, to stay?

You set down the bucket of popcorn and take the chance to fidget, letting the restless energy that had been building in you spill out through your jostling leg, your hands smoothing down your thighs and the armrests and back, your progressively more haphazard breathing. It doesn’t help. 

You turn your gaze back to the increasingly uncomfortably familiar movie playing in front of you, knowing that it is probably unwise to attempt to distract yourself from an imminent anxiety attack with something that makes you think of the reason for your imminent anxiety attack, but you need something— anything— to keep you from losing yourself in your own head, even if part of you knows you’re merely delaying the inevitable. 

Then the movie reaches its climax, and it’s revealed that the monster who stole the protagonist’s wife away was none other than the wife herself, agonizingly aware of the role she played in her husband’s pain and madness and desperate to disappear, ignoring her loved ones’ prayers and pleas that she return safely because the beast of a story is never the one who gets the happy ending, and that’s when the room around you feels like it’s begun to lean.

You are not a superstitious person. You don’t really believe that a good coincidence is anything more than just a coincidence. You don’t believe in fortune cookies or angel numbers, not really. What you believe in is luck, good and bad. You believe there are people who are blessed with fortune, and those who are saddled with the short end of the stick, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. 

(For a while, you believed you could be this beacon of hope for people who thought they were destined for misfortune and pain. You thought you could act as living proof for them that there is someone out there who cares, that not everything in their lives is sent to hurt them. Maybe that’s all fate is— someone coming along right when you need them.)

You bring yourself to your unsteady feet, grabbing the back of the seat in front of you for balance. Your breathing is shallow and your awareness is hazy, and all of Nana’s tips for calming yourself down are drowned out by your heartbeat thundering in your head. There is no quiet rhythmic breathing for you to match anymore.

(Just what complex does thinking of yourself as divine intervention fall under?)

You are not a superstitious person, but you can recognize a sign. You know better than to ignore when it is time to go.

(Doesn’t matter. Nothing divine came out of any of your efforts anyway.)

Go. That’s the word playing on loop in your head, louder than the rest of your thoughts, drowning out you were planning on leaving and I don’t want you to disappear and poor girl doesn’t deserve to get hurt like that and how can you be fine when I’m not???

You’re not. You are not fine.  

You’re stumbling down the row of seats, is what you are, propping yourself up with one hand on the row in front of you as you go, and every chair you grip onto takes you farther and farther away from your own, and you’re not gasping for breath because all of the air in the theater feels like it’s stuck in your chest, like your lungs are about to climb up your throat and choke you, and the fluorescent red EXIT sign above the side door grows bigger and bigger the closer to it you get, and everything else in your periphery fades away save for those four blood-bright letters and you’re suddenly out of the row and reaching blindly for the handle, and you miss once, twice–

The outside world is so much louder than the inside of a stuffy theater and the winter air is still frigid and none of it does anything to snap you out of your head as you barrel out the door, not when you barely have the presence of mind to even really feel it, and a small part of your brain lets you know that it feels even colder out than it had a couple hours ago because you left your jacket inside in the theater, crumpled in the groove between the back and the seat of your chair, probably on the ground now that the seat has flipped back up without your weight to keep it down, and you walk as fast as you can, trying not to picture her still in the mall, returning from the restroom and seeing your jacket on the floor and knowing immediately what had happened, and you remember her leading the way through the arcade earlier without waiting to make sure you were following her, and you remember thinking it was almost naive of her not to, and you know that all you’re doing right now is proving yourself right, and you find yourself on the sidewalk a couple blocks from the mall already and you keep going, keep running away despite your promise, despite that stupid rule book because what good has your word ever done you, and you acknowledge that you aren’t getting enough air into your lungs but you ignore it like you’ve been ignoring the cold drops of sweat inching down the back of your neck and the straightjacket tightness in your chest, too focused on trying not to look crazy or draw too much attention to yourself as you get as far away from her as possible, feeling like you’ve fled the scene of a terrible crime where the corpse is still cursing your name, whose ghost has haunted you far longer than it’s been dead but really, what’s one more ghost to a boy who almost— who tried to— barely a month ago— and the cars that drive past you are shiny, shinier than they should be even with the light of the gray December sun casting bleary rays of light down on them, and everything else around you is shiny too, and you finally realize that the world had turned into a shiny staticky blur to match the taste of static at the back of your tongue without you even noticing and you finally realize with a start, or more of a slight hitch in your step, really, because your entire body is a live wire and every movement is a start, that your own car is still parked at the far end of the shopping mall parking lot, the only open spot left, and she is still in the mall, and you remember, four days ago, sitting on the ground and wiping bile off your chin and thinking, amidst the rest of your misery, how is she going to get home? 

and you stop walking. 

“Fuck,” you mutter, under your breath and almost involuntarily, then— “Fuck!” You press the heels of your palms to your eyes, black and white kaleidoscope spots swimming behind your eyelids. There’s an advert for skin cream next to you, and you turn to lean back against it as you catch your breath and will the nausea to subside. When you breathe in it’s stilted, and your exhale is even shakier.

What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?

I don’t want you to go away.  

One more day. That’s all she’d asked for, and you are such an asshole you couldn’t even give her that. Six years you’ve spent honing the art of self-sacrifice and you couldn’t tough it out just a little bit longer, God, you are so fucking–

Your feet won’t move. You’re still leaning against the wall, your body frozen in place and every muscle in your body keeping you rooted where you are. Your familiar, tried-and-true method of self-flagellation doesn’t even make you so much as twitch. You think you might be too tired.

Your hands come down to cover the rest of your face, eyes staring out unseeing into the road in front of you, barely acknowledging the cars that drive past and the people that shuffle along, some of whom chance a glance up at you briefly as they pass. The cold December breeze picks up long-dead leaves and little bits of dust and debris and carries them a couple feet away before they fall, and then does it again. 

You tell yourself you are terrible, and the world continues on anyway. What now?

Who are you kidding, the voice in your head (it sounds an awful lot like you) berates, and you squeeze your eyes shut again. Stop. It would be so much easier if this was about how she feels, wouldn’t it? Stop it. If she were the one who couldn’t live without you.

You’re back in the pool. Chlorine burns your eyes, or maybe it’s something else (it’s been years; you’re not as familiar with the feeling as you used to be). You feel like drifting off to sleep. 

There is one reason you aren’t dead right now, even if you don’t exactly feel alive. She’s still here because of you (she’s hurt because of you), and she’s still there because of you, and you’re not there because of you. You.

It always comes back to you.

I don’t want to go away either. 

It’s childish, selfish, almost painfully pathetic even to your mind’s ear (and every thought that crosses your mind feels pathetic), but it’s true. It’s true, God, when was the last time anything about you was true? How long has that kind of thought been waiting for you to get to this point, to be so sick with loneliness and longing and plain fucking heartache that you had no choice but to think it? To be so exhausted there’s nothing left to do but let the sentence exist in your mind without dragging it kicking and screaming back into the padlocked box you keep it in?

It’s such a simple thought, too. What an innocent thing to be so desperate for. It kind of makes you want to laugh. It makes you want to throw up. It makes you want to curl up in some alley you probably passed however many blocks ago and cry your bloody heart out, to mourn the little boy who was innocent enough to think it. 

You shakily push yourself up off the sign on the wall, sway a little on unsteady feet, and you go back.

You walk fast, practically jogging, as you retrace your steps as best you can, having been more focused on the getaway than on where you’d been getting to and regretting it fiercely. It takes you a moment to get a tentative grasp of your surroundings, and in that split second you’re grappled by the sudden all-encompassing fear that you’re so lost you won’t make it back, and won’t ever see her again, and that suffocating distance yawns so much wider than last time it threatens to suck you in, to crush you under the weight, to drown you—

Your phone. 

Frantically, so frantically you almost drop it, you wrench your cell phone out of your back pocket and unlock it with fingers that are shaking from something other than the cold, ignoring any and all missed call notifications and unread texts and opening her contact information for the first time in a week, and it takes your trembling thumb a couple of tries to land on the call button. You use both hands to press the phone to your ear so tightly you can faintly hear your heartbeat against it over the roaring of your blood, and the line rings for half of a second before an automated voice message beings to play, reminding you that it appears the caller you are trying to reach has been blocked from contacting this number, if you wish to— and you let out a quiet wordless sound of distress as you pull the phone back to your face, fumbling in your haste to unblock her number, and you swear if you could go back in time to last week and grab the version of you who put you in this position today and wrap your hands around his neck and squeeze until his face blues— and you start running a little bit, no longer caring about making a scene or looking insane, I don’t want to go away either, and when you put the phone back up to your ear to try again it half-rings once before telling you that your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system and your heart sinks to the asphalt beneath your feet.

“No,” you mumble, an empty and terrible syllable. “No, no, no, no, no, no—“ over and over, echolalia, and you’re running in earnest now, calling her again and again like a madman who hasn’t yet learned the lesson on insanity, who refuses to acknowledge the lunacy in repetition, in changing nothing but expecting a change regardless, in hoping that by some miraculous chance one of his calls will go through to a number who has blocked him back. 

It feels like karmic retribution. Finally, a sentence befitting the crime.

It doesn’t stop you, though, and you leave angry drivers honking after you as you carelessly cross the streets, leave utter cacophony in your wake to match the cacophony in your head, cymbal crashes of anxiety and blaring brass panic, the orchestra in your mind turned all the way up, harmonizing in get-the-hell-back-there sharp, and you make it back to the side of the mall after what feels like an eternity but can’t have been more than a few minutes (you have no way of knowing how long you’d been gone, but you know it was much too long), still compulsively redialing and redialing and redialing until your fingers learn to manage it without you even needing to look at the screen, and the words your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system are ringing in your skull louder than your haggard panting breaths, and you catch glimpses of the people you pass on the sidewalk exchanging glances or watching after you bewildered but they’re not the ones you care about seeing you, and you finally make it to the theater exit door and yank it open and Shin-Ae tumbles out from the other side with a surprised gasp, a large wad of black fabric tucked into the crook of her elbow, one hand wrapped around the door handle and the other holding her phone to her ear.

You freeze. 

You’d been a frenetic ball of restlessness and panic not ten seconds ago, but suddenly you’re unable to move as you watch the look on Shin-Ae’s face shift as she registers your sudden presence in front of her, from mild alarm to recognition to the smallest, faintest shimmer of relief you’ve ever seen, to a much more palpable expression of pain. Her eyes flicker through every emotion like a camera shutter as she slowly lowers her phone, and peripherally you catch a glimpse of her screen: CALLING: Yeong-Gi…

Why did you vanish?!

You hang up your own phone and let your arm fall like deadweight. You have nothing to say. 

She takes you in, your residual shivering and your shaky panting and the mess of distress and regret and frenzied exhaustion you know you are barely, if at all, keeping from showing on your face, as your body forces you to breathe, and you stare at the red lining the rims of her eyes and you hope, God, you hope that she lets this blatant breach of her trust slide. You hope that she simply walks past you with a nudge to your side and a roll of her eyes, ignoring your third betrayal in a single week and betting you that she’ll make it to your car before you do or something just as inconsequential rather than asking you where you went, or where you’d been going (you’re sure she can guess). You don’t know where you get off wishing for something so cowardly and unfair, or why you think you have the right to, especially when it wouldn’t be the first time today that Shin-Ae brushes something serious off thinking you won’t notice her doing it, but you don’t even care about her hypocrisy at the moment because yours is so, so much more flagrant.

I’ll let you get away with it, you try to tell her with your eyes, desperate for her to understand what you can’t bring yourself to say. I’ll let you get away with all of it, do all the stupid dares in the world, answer any question you ask as long as it isn’t about this. I’ll never lie to you again if you don’t make me.

The pain doesn’t leave her expression, but she does sigh after a few moments more, and it sounds like defeat. She is the first to look away, letting the door close behind her with a soft thud and reaching for the jacket crumpled in the crook of her arm before holding it out to you. “You forgot something,” she says, and she can’t keep all the bitterness out of her blank and tired tone, but you are endlessly grateful for it despite the way it fills you with tar-black dread.

You take the jacket from her outstretched hand. “Th-thank y—“ you begin to mumble, the adrenaline seeping out of you and feeling too ashamed to even really speak, but she doesn’t even give you the chance. She simply strides past you, angling her body so her arm doesn’t so much as brush against yours as she storms off in the direction of your car, and it hurts worse than if she’d shoulder-checked you, makes you feel sicker than if she’d touched your skin, but you try your best to refuse to let it.

Let her be mad at you, you think. Let her see you for what you really are now, so she has less to miss when you’re gone. 

You refuse to rationalize that you yourself will not think back on her unkindly for all the times she yelled at you, or struck a nerve, or refused to let you run away when she’d done her fair share of it herself early on in your relationship. You can name multiple things you could hold against her if you two were different people, and infinitely more that she could hold against you, even before you’d left her in the rain four days ago. If there is anything that either of you do resent, today is not the day you will find out.

You refuse to think the thought that brought you back here ever again.

(It occurs to you much later: even way back then, when you’d chased her and chased her and she hadn’t wanted anything to do with you, she hadn’t blocked your number. You won’t pretend to know her reasons, but you think you can guess. It’s not as easy as you make it look, committing to being alone.)

You’re still wearing her hat, you realize.