Chapter Text
“Yoonji?”
Yoonji’s stomach drops. She’s facing the stained wall, her back towards the street, but that doesn’t change the fact she’s got a newly dead rat jammed between her teeth, and its blood—the little bit she let trickle into grimy fur when she pierced through its skin—warm and slick on her fingers.
She doesn’t move. Right now, she could be any other girl, hiding out in an alley for a smoke. It’s not like she’s stupid enough to do this next to their dorm. They’re about an hour away by foot. Yoonji took the bus to get here. She’s been careful. She’s always careful.
“Yoonji, is that– yah! What are you lurking around in an alley for, you scared the shit out of me!”
Over the pounding in her ears, Yoonji hears Soojin walk up to her. She stuffs the rat under her hoodie, as subtly as she can, pressing its still-warm body to her stomach. Then, with her dark sleeve, she wipes off any trace of blood that might have got on her chin, her lips.
She’s not a messy eater, and she’s definitely not an amateur. It’s just… they’ve been busy, lately. And disappearing every two days when you’re a trainee isn’t easy. She’d been hungry.
Behind her, Soojin stops.
“Uh, excuse me, but,” she says, voice dipping low and careful, distant in its sudden politeness. “Miss, do you need help?” Her certainty from seconds before, that this was her dongsaeng and fellow idol trainee, has vanished.
Yoonji wonders, buying pointless time for herself while Soojin fidgets behind her, if Soojin does stuff like this a lot when she’s out alone. Check up on shady figures in dark alleys.
It’s late. Yoonji had snuck out of the dorm right as the end-of-day-off jitteriness had begun to cloak all of their interactions. Hosook, having just opened the fridge to discover the last of her 3-pack strawberry yoghurt had gone missing, had asked Kim Namjoo to please get her thieving ass to the kitchen right now, and their manager unnie, catching Yoonji stuffing her socked feet into shoes that were probably not hers, had cocked a smile at her. A run while you can sort of thing.
The corner of the alley she’s chosen is dark enough, far enough from the closest street lamp, that she doesn’t think Soojin will notice anything odd. She doesn’t have much of a choice either way, with her standing firmly between Yoonji and the street.
She turns.
Soojin smacks her in the arm. “Why didn’t you answer me?”
The hit has Yoonji tensing her arms tight around her stomach. Soojin takes note of this.
“Why?” Soojin asks again, soft voice sharpening in alarm. “Are you hurt? Did something–,” She reaches a hand forward to brush across Yoonji’s arm, light and so close to where the soft mass of rat lays cradled.
When all Yoonji continues to do is stand in front of her, Soojin looks around them for an explanation.
Yoonji swallows and tastes blood. She shakes her head at Soojin, as much a dismissal as it is reassurance, and changes the subject. “Paper done?”
Soojin had groaned about a paper due, when Jimin had asked her how she was planning to spend her day off. Looking at her now, with her book bag over her shoulders, and hair escaping both her braid and the baby blue Elsa hair clip Namjoo had won out of a capsule vending machine and handed over straight away, it’s clear to see she’s spent it hunched over a table in some cafe. Yoonji can’t tell if the dark smudges under Soojin’s eyes extend from the shadows around them, or if they were born from hours of staring at a screen.
Soojin sighs, pushing her glasses up to rub roughly at her eyes. “Done enough to hand in.” With her glasses back in place and thumbs tucked under the straps of her bag, she taps her shoe against Yoonji’s. Then, she waits.
Yoonji manages not to shift on her feet. She stares at the street behind Soojin, something to do while Soojin looks at her.
“Okay,” Soojin says, “This is my shortcut to the bus stop. Your turn.”
My turn. “I was smoking.”
Soojin blinks at her. “Yah,” she drawls, humour colouring her words even as something irritated pinches at the corners of her eyes. “Don’t you think your lie is a bit…” she tilts her head, sucks air in through her teeth. “You rode the bus all the way up here to smoke, then?” she laughs. “Did Nonhyeon-dong run out of cockroach-filled alleys for you to scare people in?”
Soojin nods at the small lump cradled under Yoonji’s hoodie, that has failed to be as inconspicuous as she’d hoped. “You think I’m going to steal your cigarettes?”
It’s a little too big to be a pack of cigarettes. Yoonji shifts her arms over it, clenching hard around the fabric. She finds she’s a little ticked off at Soojin—for being here and for poking at things she has no business knowing about. “It’s still my day off, isn’t it?” she tells her, a little snappily. Then, “It’s late. I’ll meet you back home, unnie.”
Soojin watches her again, something Yoonji can’t name flickering over her face. Something that makes Yoonji feel a little cold.
She’s been doing a lot of that lately, Yoonji’s noticed. Watching. Soojin’s been watching her for weeks now.
“Let’s go together, Yoonji-yah,” Soojin tells her, cheeks bunching up into a smile. “Like you said, it’s late.” But when she tries to hook her arm through Yoonji’s, it gets shrugged roughly off.
“Unnie.”
The corners of Soojin’s smile slip, giving up the act. She tugs at the straps of her bag and takes a half step back. For the first time tonight, she isn’t watching Yoonji.
Yoonji’s eyes run from it, the hurt and the disappointment, to the safe spot of pavement between their shoes. She would’ve taken her own step back if she didn’t feel glued to the ground.
One wrong move, and the unspoken thing between them, the thing that’s kept Soojin watching but not asking, and Yoonji noticing but not telling, will shatter.
Why do you push? she thinks, glaring into the toe of Soojin’s shoe.
She should’ve gone somewhere further. She should’ve worn something other than the same hoodie and ratty pair of jeans she practically lives in. Whatever happens next, whatever shatters, it’s on her.
Still, she hopes, for Soojin to stick to their silent deal and keep not asking. She hopes for her to leave Yoonji: here; behind. It’s better like that, really. Someone like Soojin, with all of her goodness, with all of her potential, shouldn’t be looking at Yoonji for too long.
Don’t look here, unnie. You don’t have to look here. Why do you always look?
Instead of walking away, Soojin bounces on her heels like she’s a cartoon hyping herself up for a sprint.
Her words when she speaks, tumble over each other in their hurry to get out. Yoonji blinks up at her red face, at her dark eyebrows screwed tight, over eyes that blink too hard.
“Yoonji, I know I’m only three months older than you, and– and maybe I don’t have the right to be your unnie like that. It must be overbearing for someone like you, right? Someone who knows herself, like you, someone so– especially when I’m– when it’s me that you’ve got. But even if– even if that’s how you see it, I–,” she stops here to squeeze her downturned lips together, and breathes unevenly out through her nose. “I care about you,” she continues, her voice defiant in its firmness, even through shaky lips.
Yoonji’s face feels hot. She doesn’t know why Soojin is saying any of this.
“And maybe even if you tell unn– tell me what’s wrong, maybe even then I won’t know how to help. But I can be with you. Can’t I? Because– because right now you look scared about something. And that’s scaring me, Min Yoonji.”
Yoonji really doesn’t know why Soojin is talking like Yoonji’s dying, or breaking her heart or something weird like that. She isn’t supposed to see Yoonji like this, or be here, or think like this. She’s supposed to be home and not looking at her all the time. Home and clean and safe. Home and far from the dirty alley Yoonji routinely hides herself in. “Unnie, I’m fine.”
She gets a raised finger in her face for that. The kind Soojin uses to let them know she’s not done yet. “And since, you know, since we’re both scared now, you might as well tell me why I’m scared.” She flashes her wet eyes at Yoonji, the first she’s looked at her since Yoonji pushed her away, and finishes with a much more subdued, nearly embarrassed, “Anyway, that’s what I think,” and pouting like it’s all Yoonji’s fault she’s had to say any of this.
They stand there, both of them going back to not looking at each other. Yoonji’s arms have started to burn from gripping around herself so tightly and for so long. Whatever annoyance she’s felt for Soojin has drained out of her, leaving her empty and confused. She didn’t know Soojin had been feeling this way.
Yoonji thinks about how, three days ago, Soojin had called her, worried, to ask if she was still at the studio so late. Our hardworking Yoonji-ssi, she’d said, voice softened into a smile that had Yoonji curling around her phone to hold on to its warmth. Okay, okay. Unnie won’t bother you anymore.
She should tell Soojin to go home. She doesn’t want that.
She realises, a little surprised, that what she wants is to not be here, in this alley, by herself.
(What she wants, that other thing she wants, is something so ridiculous she turns from it in her own head, steps on it so anyone looking won’t be able to see. Not even Yoonji herself. What she wants is not worth looking at.)
She breathes around the taste of iron on her tongue, heavy and wanting. She is a creature driven by her wants, for better or worse.
She should tell Soojin to go home. “Don’t freak out,” she tells her instead.
“Oh my god,” Soojin starts freaking out. She rushes close to Yoonji, whipping her head back and forth like someone’s going to come running at them from behind the pile of damp cardboard boxes.
Yoonji adjusts her grip to slide one hand under her hoodie. “It’s dead, don’t worry,” she assures Soojin as she brings out the rat.
Soojin doesn’t seem to find that reassuring at all, given all of her shouting.
Yoonji drops the rat. “Okay, shh, okay, sorry, sorry.” She waves her hands in front of Soojin’s face, remembering too late the blood drying into the grooves of her fingers.
Soojin tries to get away from them, and from Yoonji. But with her hands slapped over her eyes, she manages to get as far as the wall next to them.
“Are you okay?” Yoonji demands, when Soojin cries out from the pain of knocking her head against brick.
“You,” Soojin turns back, one hand rubbing over her reddening forehead and the other flapping at Yoonji. The finger she pushes into Yoonji’s sternum isn’t all that forceful, but Yoonji falls back all the same. She didn’t realise how close she’d got. “Why are you holding a dead rat?!” Soojin shouts.
From somewhere to the left of them, a cat yowls. “Unnie, will you stop yelling?” Yoonji whispers.
Soojin glares at her. “Min Yoonji,” she says, hissing each harsh syllable through her teeth. “Why. Were you holding. A dead. Rat.”
Yoonji has never really thought about how she would say this part out loud. It was never a part of her plan for people to know. She’s never had to explain herself. “I was drinking from it,” she says.
As Soojin gapes at her for a daunting six seconds—Yoonji counts—Yoonji grows increasingly aware of the loud fuss her heart’s kicking up inside of her chest. A little late to be panicking.
“What do you mean, Yoonji-yah?” Soojin finally asks.
Yoonji stares at her. If there is a clearer way to say this, she doesn’t know it. “I drink blood, unnie,” she tries again, a little slower this time, and a little softer. “I have to,” she clarifies.
“Ah,” Soojin says, sounding a little faint. She nods to herself, then turns to the dirty wall behind her and rests her head against it. “You were… from that rat…”
Yoonji waits. For Soojin to run, or shout some more, or laugh it off as a joke, she doesn’t know. The ball’s kind of in her court now.
“Oh, fuck,” Soojin says finally, whispering this time. “I’m going to–,” and then, she vomits all over her shoes.