Archive of Our Own

It’s snowing when Eric boards his plane. Fluffy white flakes dance in the air outside his window, a stark contrast with the dark of the night sky.

The plane is mostly empty; no one wants to board a flight to America at two in the morning except for single, caffeine-addicted business people like him. He laughs at that description, watching the high-strung suit-clad woman in the seat across from him bark orders into her phone in Chinese, brown eyes wide with delirium. He supposes he must look somewhat similar, although he was at least smart enough to change into sweats for the flight.

There’s also the fact that it's Christmas Eve and more people are flying into Korea than out of it. Most people’s extended family is here, after all. Most people want to spend the holidays with their parents and grandparents and every single one of their cousins. He’ll be content with a nice dinner in New York with his family, though.

He rests his head against the window, letting the contact with the cold glass wake him up a little bit. I’ll be home for Christmas, he thinks. If only in my dreams. Or, more accurately, if only they ever get off this runway, because they’ve been stuck here for half an hour already, and he’s not quite sure how much longer they’re going to remain there.

“Excuse me,” Eric calls, trying to get the attention of one of the flight attendants sitting a row behind him, in their own seats at the back of the plane. One of them looks up - the one who was reading a booklet of something - her dark ponytail brushes over her shoulder as she turns to face him. “Do you know if we’re going to be leaving anytime soon?”

She quickly stands up, low heels clunking when they hit the ground. “Oh…” she starts. “Um. No, I’m sorry. I can go ask the pilot, though, if you want.”

Something about her makes a smile begin to creep across his face. He’s not sure what it is, maybe it’s just that it’s two in the morning and he’s been people-watching for half an hour now.

The flight attendant hurries off, leaving her booklet behind. He can just barely see the cover, but he recognizes it from a few stores he’s been in. He’d reluctantly admit he has the same copy.

It’s a music theory book, and it looks well-read too. There’s a pink highlighter sticking out the top, and a lot of the pages seem to be dog-eared as well. So, he thinks, she’s a musician.

She comes back before he realizes, walking straight up to his seat. “He said the storm is moving out and that we should be able to leave soon.” Her smile reassures him more than her words do.

“Thank you,” Eric tells her, already responding to the text asking about it, and he means it, too, suddenly sorry he had to pry her away from her book. “I’ll tell my mother that.”

“Ah,” she nods her head. “Is your family in America?”

“Yeah.” He crosses his legs towards her, more out of instinct than anything else. “I haven’t seen them in months but we’re spending the holidays together.”

She laughs at that, and he’s puzzled for a moment before she explains. “Jae Eun owes me a drink now. I told her you were a foreigner.”

Eric smirks, somewhat intrigued. “How’d you guess?”

The flight attendant leans one arm on the back of the seat in front of him and gives him a look. “Earlier, when you were boarding, you accidentally slammed the door for the overhead compartment on your finger and cursed in English. Your accent’s just too perfect for you to be anything but.” She trails off, grumbling. “And here she was, going on about private tutoring and all that. I’m smarter than she thinks I am, you know.”

“Well,” he sighs. “You were right. What’s this about private tutoring?”

She rolls her eyes, surprisingly laid back with him for a first conversation. “When she was younger she was privately tutored by a foreigner or something. She brings it up every time we talk about accents. Between you and me, though, I think she’s got his accent confused with that Australian guy she used to date.”

He thinks she’s done, but then she opens her eyes wide, as if she’s just remembered he’s still there. “Oh, I’m sorry. We were talking about you and your family, weren’t we?” She frowns, lips twisting to one corner of her mouth. “I’m always doing things like this. See, this is why I shouldn’t take these shifts.”

“It’s okay…” Eric reads her name in Hangul off of her name tag. “...Kim Yongsun. You seem like you have a lot of interesting stories.”

She shrugs brightly, still looking down from the mention of her name. “Perks of the job, I guess.”

“Well,” he pats the empty seat next to him. “We have some time to kill. Why don’t you tell me some of them?”

“Okay, Mister…” she trails off, obviously asking for his name.

“I’m,” he begins, and then finds himself stuck between giving her his Korean name and his English one. This always seems to happen on airplanes, when he’s in between the two countries and there’s not really a correct answer. Eventually he lands on using his English one, since she’d already brought up the foreigner thing. “Eric Nam.”

Kim Yongsun tilts her head to the side, examining him with questioning eyes. “Your last name is Eh?”

It’s his first real laugh in over twenty four hours.

Before the plane takes off, they end up talking about music. He’d danced around the topic a few times, but kept finding that they were gravitating towards it. Before he knows it, he’s asking about the book.

She blushes when he brings it up, shifting in her seat. “It’s interesting to me,” Kim Yongsun confesses to him at about 2:30 in the morning. “Music theory has always been interesting to me. And, I don’t know. I’ve been trying to fill my spare time with things lately…”

“Breakup?” he guesses.

Her laugh is only kind of bitter. “The worst kind.”

Eric raises his water bottle at her in toast. “Me too.” Her face softens a little bit at that. “I’m actually worried how my parents are going to take it. They liked her a lot. I liked her a lot.”

“What happened, may I ask?” She’s cautious with her question, as if she can’t tell that he’s already about to share the whole story with her.

“It just fell apart, I guess. At least, that’s what she said was happening. I don’t know, I thought we could fix things.” He looks away then, eyes going towards the window again. “She was the reason I started permanently living in Korea, though. They aren't going to like hearing that I'm living alone now.”

“Oh?” she asks. “What are you doing in Korea now, then?”

He gives her a small smile. “I’ve been doing some consulting for YG. It doesn't pay quite as well as my last job, but even just being around all that music…”

“Yeah.” Her sigh is soft, like the large flakes falling outside. “I understand that. There was a time when I thought…” she shakes her head, as if to shoo away the thought. “But, I’m here now, in the end. I’m happy for you, though. That sounds like a great offer.”

“They’ll be upset that I lied, though. I already feel bad about it. I just didn’t want to tell them over the phone.”

They’re interrupted by a tap on her shoulder by one of Yongsun’s co workers. “We’re going to take off in a few minutes,” the other flight attendant says.

“Oh!” She looks almost sorry to go, but he’s probably just imagining it. “I hope things work out with your family.” She sits up, and then resumes her post at the back of the plane.

For some reason, he comes out of the conversation smiling, and that smile stays on his face all the way through takeoff until they’re floating in the air. She’s refreshingly authentic, he thinks. Or maybe it just seems that way because he’s been surrounded by people with cold, calculating smiles and ulterior motives for the past forty-eight hours.

Either way, she sticks with him.

The flight goes by faster than he’d anticipated it would.

To be fair, he spends most of it sleeping. That’s usually the way flights like this go. Besides, it’s an easy way to kill time, and he doesn’t have a book to keep him busy like he usually does. He’d thought about picking up one at the airport, but he’d gotten distracted on his way to the store.

It’s not that he saw her, really, just someone who he thought was her, out of the corner of his eye. She’d had the same way about her, the same walk, or something. All Eric knows is that one moment he’d been walking to pick up a book and the next he’d been standing completely still, almost unable to breathe.

Two months. Two months since they ended everything and he still can’t quite get her out of his head. He’s always been this way though, always the last one to let go, always the one still thinking about it. Fourteen hours is a long time to spend thinking about it.

There’s a point, during the flight, where he wakes up with his mind on her, on how her face was so unreadable that he couldn’t tell the end was coming until she hit him with the words, and he can’t fall back asleep.

Normally he would people-watch, but everyone else on the plane seems to be asleep too. Everyone else except for him and the crew, who honestly also seem on the verge of exhaustion. The one exception to this being the woman he’d talked to earlier, Kim Yongsun, whose head is buried deep in her book of theory and whose hand is buried deep in a bag of pretzels.

She catches him watching her and gives him a smile.

“I can’t sleep,” he mouths, as if she’ll be able to do anything about that, as if it’s any explanation for why he’s kind of fascinated by how she moves. Then he moves his voice to a whisper just loud enough that she’ll be able to hear it. “How’s the book?”

Yongsun gives him a look that says I’m working, but answers anyway. “Long.”

“Looks like you’re almost done.”

She examines the progress she made while he was sleeping. Quite a bit of it is dog-eared and highlighted now. “I had time,” she tells him. “You’re a very low-maintenance flight.”

She stands up then, as if she’s just made a decision, glancing around to check that her co-workers are all in the other sections of the plane. Eric makes it a little easier for her by pressing the call button above him.

She takes the seat next to him without him asking, which makes him think she wants to talk to him again as much as he wants to talk to her. Once she’s there, though, he’s not even quite sure what to say to her.

“Jae Eun is going to kill me,” she mutters, turning towards him. “It’s not like she doesn’t do this all the time, though. She just always likes to point out when I do things wrong.”

“You two are friends?” he asks, suddenly curious about the relationship between the two flight attendants.

Yongsun scrunches her nose a little bit. “Kind of. Not really. We work well together, though, since we’re always trying to outdo each other.”

“Ah, I feel bad then,” Eric responds, feeling the gears inside his head begin to turn. “I’ve forced you to have drinks with her.”

“What?”

“Um, the bet, about whether or not I was a foreigner, remember? You said she owes you a drink…”

“Oh, right!” she exclaims, then seems to remember that everyone’s sleeping and lowers her voice. “Well, I don’t mind. She’s an okay person to drink with. Besides, now I have an excuse to go out into the city tonight. I’ve always wanted to visit a New York bar…”

Something about her wish catches him off guard. “Really?” he asks, amused. “You’ve never been?”

She sighs, looking at her hands. His eyes follow, and finds himself staring at her nails, covered in light pink polish and black polka-dots. It’s surprisingly endearing. “Nope. I always end up on the shift for the next flight back.”

“Not today, though?”

The look she gives him feels almost confidential. “Not today,” Yongsun affirms. “I made sure of it. I’ll be here for two days.”

Eric traces the cup indentation in his tray table with his finger, suddenly feeling shy, despite not totally knowing where he’s going with this. “You know, you really should see the city with someone who knows it. I’ve heard you can get better deals that way.”

She raises an eyebrow cautiously, but he swears he sees something else flickering behind her dark eyes, something that he can’t quite pinpoint, except for knowing that he’s seen it before in his own. “Are you offering?”

*.*.*

Yongsun doesn’t really know why she does it, to be honest.

The holidays are still a sore spot for her. When the leaves start falling off of the trees it’s kind of like her heart gets broken all over again, even though it’s been a while now since it actually happened. Running into him in May didn’t help, either, since he ran away again as soon as it started raining.

That’s the reason why she’d booked the nights in the New York hotel, though, and signed up for this shift, so she supposes it could be why she said yes when Eric Nam halfway asked her out for a drink.

It’s not a date - she’s smart enough to know that. They both had just toasted to being heartbroken over other people earlier in the day, after all, so it’s not like this is really anything beyond her being shown around the city by someone who knows it a little better than her.

He’s funny, too, which is a good sign. Funny guys normally aren’t the type to come at her with propositions while she’s working. Especially funny guys in rumpled sweats and messy hair who are flying in to visit family. If he really wanted to take advantage of her he shouldn’t have brought up his family - she learned that much from her last relationship.

So, she figures she’s safe. She’s felt safe, being with him, the whole way from the airport to this bar near the Hudson River. Her English is good, practiced from her three years at this job, but it still feels more comforting to talk to someone in Korean when she’s in a new place. He doesn’t seem to mind, either, unlike Jae Eun, who always seems to want to compete with her over who can do the most native-sounding accent.

“Isn’t your family going to wonder where you are?” she asks him, after she’s taken her first sip of mojito.

Eric points at the clock on the other side of the bar, brightly lit by the neon signs advertising drinks around it. “It’s midnight; they’re probably asleep. Besides, I told them I was running late, and we’re all staying on the same floor of the hotel, so they don’t have to worry about me.”

It’s the little details that are the most comforting to her. There’s something precious, it seems, about having a family all fly to one city to be together, about getting rooms on the same floor so they have to be apart as little as possible.

“Lucky,” she mumbles, playing with her straw. “I wish my family would do something like that. They’re all off in the UK right now visiting my sister.”

He looks at her with a steady gaze from across the table they’re sitting at towards the back of the bar. His eyes are warm, she decides. They radiate with the same kind of feeling as a summer’s night. Or maybe that’s just the alcohol.

“Are you spending Christmas alone, then?” he asks, and the question sounds sincere.

Something about that makes her close up a little bit. “Don't worry about me,” she says, and she finds herself hitting him on the arm. “I like being alone.”

Eric laughs at her touch. “Wow, alcohol works fast on you.”

She smiles in return. “Now you know why Jae Eun likes drinking with me.”

He looks good under the neon lights.

To be fair, Yongsun’s judgement is currently out the window because she’s about a minute or two from falling asleep, but, objectively speaking, it’s true. She supposes it’s because of the combination of magenta and cyan and his dark hair. It’s the color combination of artists, of idols, the color combination she sees in music video after music video and now in her own life.

“At least she didn’t do it over text,” she mumbles, mostly into the table, head resting on her arm like a pillow.

Eric’s frowning, like he’s been since one of them brought up the subject of their exes. She can’t remember who it was now, only that it felt like she was getting the opportunity to take all of her pain (made fresh again since the summer) and display it like mannequins in a shop window. It’s a clumsy sort of arranging of her sadness. She hasn't really done it with the utmost of grace. It’s okay, though; she’s never really been a graceful person.

He drains the last drop of his beer, head tilting back, silhouetted by the fuzzy neon lights. “Ooh, you got it over text?”

She sighs, like maybe she can just breathe out the memories if she tries hard enough. “The second time, yeah. Not a fan of cold weather, angel, he said, like that meant anything.” Yongsun sits up, staring him deeply in the face. “Does that mean anything?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’ve never been good with Korean sayings. You tell me. Either way, you deserved better.”

“Hmm.”

She’s trying her best to keep her eyes open, she really is, but it’s hard. The alcohol’s in her bloodstream now, circulating around and making everything all warm and fuzzy. She feels about to fall into something large, or off of something large, something like that. It’s a little bit better feeling that way around him than around Jae Eun, though.

When she gets like this with Jae Eun she always feels like someone’s about to steal her wallet.

Eric snaps a finger next to her head and she jolts awake. “I’m keeping my promise,” he tells her. “You’re not falling asleep until I’ve dropped you off at your hotel.”

“I can walk.” Yongsun waves his hand away with hers.

“Oh, really?” he asks, sounding amused. “Which way’s the door, then?”

In her defense, she meant to shrug her shoulders, not point upwards, but either way proved his point. She’s just not used to people wanting to take care of her.

Eric laughs, and the sound echoes all around her head, ringing softly like bronze bells. “Which hotel are you staying at, by the way?”

“Royalton Time Square,” she answers, the English words feeling clunky in her mouth. “Tiiimes Squaaaare.”

She moves to take another sip of her drink, but he pushes it out of the way. “I think that’s quite enough for you for now,” he explains, and then gives her a kind of amazed smile. “We’re staying at the same hotel.”

“Guess there was a deal,” Yongsun mumbles. “You’re calling a cab, right?”

“I did that two minutes ago, remember?”

“Oh. Right.”

She does not remember. She also can’t seem to remember when they dropped the formalities.

*.*.*

Kim Yongsun falls asleep on the taxi ride to the hotel, cheeks pressed against the glass of the car window. Eric tries really really hard not to watch her sleep.

Their situation right now is weird enough as it is. He was surprised enough that she said yes to his offer of drinks; he doesn’t need to make it weirder by watching her while she sleeps.

To be fair, though, it’s either that or make conversation with the cab driver, and he’s now tried that a few times to no real avail. He’s already heard a few too many comments about Gangnam style than he’s willing to put up with today.

He also doesn’t know why all of this is happening. Or why he even asked her. Well, that’s not totally true; he’s still grieving and he felt like maybe she’d understand that. She did, more than he was prepared for, and they’re not exactly doing things the way two brokenhearted lonely people who go have drinks together during the holidays normally do things, but he supposes it’s better this way.

Neither of them seem to be looking for something short-term right now, anyways.

That had been the problem, he’d figured out, when he was about halfway through his beer. He’d brought up getting married one too many times. Or it could’ve been him getting into that unwarranted argument with her boss on her behalf. Or the way he’d pulled away afterwards, terrified to mess things up further. That was probably it. Now that he really thinks about it, there were a lot of things that could have messed them up.

Still, he thinks, it wasn’t that bad. They could’ve fixed it. He could’ve fixed it if she’d just let him…

The taxi takes a sharp turn and Yongsun goes flying into him. He quickly grabs her, thinking about what she’d said about her back starting to break down under the stress of the long work hours. Her eyelids blink open, and it’s cuter than he’d like to admit.

“Are we there yet?” she asks, voice quiet and gruff at the same time.

“No,” he chuckles, looking down at her, hands planted firmly on her shoulders. “Just a bad turn. I’ll let you go now.”

She nods, closing her eyes again, and falls back into her dream. He smiles at the sight of it, and finds himself wondering why.

Getting her up to her floor proves to be a challenge in itself.

Realizing they are not only in the same hotel, but on the same floor, proves to be even greater of a challenge, due to the sympathetic looks everyone keeps giving him as he checks in.

She’d checked in earlier, she’d told him, before meeting him outside of the airport’s Starbucks. He’d needed caffeine and she’d needed to change out of her uniform. Still, he kind of wishes she hadn’t so he could make it as clear as possible to everyone in the room that they are not sleeping together, because he is here for his family and she is here for work and-

She nuzzles his shoulder a little with her head. Her sleepy sigh is soft and quiet and he's reminded of all the things he messed up to get him to this point.

“You're a good guy, Eric Nam,” Yongsun murmurs after he walks her to her hotel room. “One of the best.”

It's a title he barely feels he’s earned.

She pulls away then, and Eric’s not sure why the space where she used to be seems so empty. His hands shake a little, and he tells himself it's a mixture of the cold and the alcohol and supporting her weight all the way from the taxi, nothing else.

“Goodbye, Kim Yongsun,” he says, and he means it too.

She gives him one last sleepy smile. “Goodbye.” She even does a little wave.

He’ll swear, later, that he walks away with the intention to leave, to part ways with her and never see her again. But that’s not what happens. What happens is his feet change their mind before his brain does (or maybe his heart’s what changes first) and he turns around halfway down the hallway.

“Hey,” Eric calls. His voice feels like sandpaper. She turns around quickly, and he almost forgets his words. “What are you doing on the twenty sixth? I know you have your Christmas plans, but…”

He fumbles with his phone before handing it to her. “If you want to hang out or, I don’t know, do something together, give me a call. I know from experience that it’s not very fun to be lonely in a big city.”

Later, he’ll fall asleep staring at her contact.

to: starry night

from: yonggari

the weather looks bad here so i might not be back for another week

stay safe and warm!! merry christmas!!

The guy on the radio is talking about the dinosaurs.

Byul would turn it off, but things like this always seem so much more interesting at times like this, when the moon is out and she's supposed to be looking for speeding cars, but she's honestly halfway falling asleep. Also, her roommate’s weird taste in entertainment might be rubbing off on her.

Basically, it's nothing new; the dinosaurs were there and then a comet came and everything that the world was before disintegrated. She just likes the way he’s saying it. He talks about it like poetry, like everything has to burn before it could rise anew again, like nothing of the old world remained in the new one.

If only her poetry was as good as this stuff.

The program is nearing the end of this segment when her own comet comes in the form of a faded white compact car, zooming way over the speed limit. Byul sighs, turns the radio off and her sirens on, and gives chase.

The car slows quickly, guiltily, like maybe it's not being driven by some dumb kid after all. She keeps the sirens on as she gets out, because the street is dark and the loud noise is just another way to stay awake.

“License and registration?”

The woman in the car has big eyes, that's the first thing she notices. They're big and dark and seem familiar in a faraway kind of way, like maybe she met her once before in a dream.

The second thing she notices is her hair. When she bends over to rifle through her purse, long wavy locks of blonde fall around her face. It’s a good look on her, Byul thinks, and then reminds herself that that's not the kind of detail that should matter right now. It shouldn't but it does.

Subconsciously, her hands run through her own light hair. She'd dyed it on impulse back in February, itching for a change in her life that she knew she wasn't going to get handed to her. She’d actually wanted to dye it silver, but the station’s dress code regulations don't allow for things like that.

“Sorry,” the other woman begins, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “I must've just spaced out for a second. You're not going to like… arrest me, are you?” She eyes the cuffs peeking out of Byul’s jacket suspiciously.

“What?” she asks, reeling back, confused, as she scans her license numbers through the system, not paying too much attention to the rest. “Uh, no. You don't get arrested for speeding. This is your first offense, right?”

The other woman nods. When she looks down at her lap, Byul’s eyes can't help but follow. “My manager is going to kill me.”

Ah, so she's an idol. Maybe that's why her face looks familiar. It explains the hair, though, and the treble clef hanging from the ceiling of the vehicle.

Byul attempts to give her a smile, which probably ends up looking more like a grimace. “Won't be the biggest scandal of the week,” she tries.

“What?” When she laughs it's awkward in a cute sort of way. “Oh, no, we haven't debuted yet, although I'm kind of flattered you thought I was… whoever you thought I was. I just… I don't want this to make the other girls stay in the basement even longer. They really should just kick me off the team. I don't know why they haven't done it already. Do I get a phone call, Officer…”

It takes Byul a second to realize she's asking for her name. She has her badge on, but it's dark and the font is small, and most people don't believe Moon Byulyi is a real name. “You can call whoever you want,” she sighs, “but, like I said, I'm not arresting you, just writing you a ticket.”

“What's your name?” she asks again, and curiosity beams from her.

“It's just what it says on the uniform. Officer Moon Byulyi, miss…” when she reads the name on the driver’s license she stops breathing. Jung Wheein stares back at her in black lettering.

They realize it at the same time. Byul shifts her hat back to look at her and watches her eyes grow wide with recognition. It's been years, but she still looks at her the same.

She looks good, though. Older. Maybe it's because she lost the bangs, or that she grew out her hair and dyed it blonde and now looks a little less like the barely legal kid she knew from her quick and fruitless stint in the music industry and a little more like sheepish Malibu Barbie.

“Byul?” Wheein asks, voice soft like she can't believe it, and the name sounds weird in her voice, like something out of a past life.

The guy on the radio was right; some comets are destructive in the absolute.

She buys her ramyeon, because it's the only thing she can think of to do.

They hunch over a table in a nearby convenience store, on suspiciously sticky plastic chairs. Byul watches her eat and pretends she isn’t. Wheein smiles at her over her noodles and that part looks the same. There’s still something coy in the curves of her mouth.

“My shift technically is about to end,” she tells her, not because she asked, but because the silence is suffocating and she feels like she needs to fill it or else every memory from all those years ago will come rushing back in like the tide.

“Look at you,” Wheein teases, and that feels the same too. “Still breaking the rules for me.”

She can barely look at her, because every glance feels stolen. She’s not hers to look at, never has been, especially not now. Byul gave up that world a long time ago - the music and the glitter and the girls (god, the girls) - walked out the door and didn’t look back. It chews people up, she knows that. Chews them up and spits them out and in the end they’re not quite human anymore. She lives in the world of humans now. There’s no room there for looking at robot girls.

Except, the thing is, that metaphor breaks every time she looks at Wheein. There’s nothing robotic about the other woman. There never has been. She’s alive in all the ways that Byul isn’t, hasn’t been since she left that supposed world of robots, and that’s the real reason she’s so hard to look at tonight.

When she shakes her head, the golden waves look an awful lot like the noodles in her ramyeon. “Who ever would’ve thought you’d end up a cop?”

She should say something, she knows that. Something witty about people and the streets and all the ways she learned to get to know the real nature of the world after she left the agency. Instead, Byul just shrugs. “It was the original plan.”

It’s not quite the truth but it’ll do for now.

“You’re still there, though.” she points out, and maybe it’s a little insensitive, but she remembers what it was like when their half-baked idea of a group fell apart, how Wheein had been the youngest member of that shitstorm, how she was the one that should’ve been hurt the most.

She looks up from her noodles, and her dark eyes have something fierce behind them. “Where else would I be?”

Byul remembers that part of getting to know her. She’d thought back then it was just some leftover childhood innocence. She was young, talented, hadn’t seemed to have been rejected all that much. When they’d gone around the circle to do that stupid team bonding exercise someone - she can’t remember her name now - had suggested and told everyone what they would do if they weren’t idols, she’d given the same answer.

“Music is in my blood,” she had said. “And I won’t ever let go of it.”

Now she’s a little older, a little less soft around the edges, but it still seems to ring true.

“And, besides,” Wheein continues, “I like writing love songs. Even if they’re not always accepted.” She goes back to eating her ramen like she didn’t just wipe away all the niceties and forgetting that Byul’s been trying to cover the ugly truth with.

She’s good at writing love songs, she remembers that much. Not the theory part of it so much as the words. The words read like confessions, like those little personal things that play on the radio when it’s cold outside and all the lonely people of the world want to feel wanted. She’d once traced the words, written on a torn out piece of notebook paper, for a full night, unable to sleep because they were like that, and then, in the morning, she’d dragged her into a closet and broken her heart, because that’s what a good leader does.

Part of the reason, thinking back on it, that their group hadn’t worked out was because she’s never been good at words when they’re not on paper and working groups need working leaders. At least, that’s what she’d told herself in the months after she’d left. Sure, the industry had been part of the problem, but she had been as well. Some people just aren’t meant to be the leader of a girl group.

Byul pushes her food away, her appetite suddenly gone.

“What was I supposed to do?” she asks honestly, because she’s thought about this during too many late nights, both then and now, when she’s going through all the parts of her life that lead her to where she was. “You were nineteen and I was your leader and it’s like I told you; the world-”

“The world is the world.” When Wheein cuts her off she forgets her train of thought. Her voice isn’t resentful or bitter or any of the things she thought it would be, but it still cuts through the silence of the night with a harsh kind of light. “Everything is what you make of it, Byulie.”

Everything’s quiet for a while, then. She doesn’t eat, just stares out the window, watching cars pass and thinking about how everything’s still pretty much the same as it was when she was in her cruiser, except now the worst thing in the world doesn’t quite so much feel like it’s that guy who beat his girlfriend nearly to death the other week. It feels like it’s the pit in her stomach filled with all the things she’s been trying to shove down for years now.

“What are you doing for New Year’s?” she asks, figuring awkward smalltalk is better than silence.

Wheein frowns at her. “New Year’s is in two hours. You know that, right?”

“Right, uh. Sorry. I forgot. I’ve been taking the night shifts a lot lately. My roommate’s usually the one who keeps track of things like this and she’s been out of town since Christmas.”

The roommate was a plan that happened after the academy. She put up an ad online and ended up choosing the candidate who seemed to have just as much of a work life as she did. Neither of them are home much, if she can really call their mostly-empty apartment a home. Of the two of them, she’s the one who cooks. Her roommate is the one who put up a master schedule on their empty wall and declared that the two of them were too forgetful to live without it.

It’s a little bit unconditional. Like they could become family if either of them were ever around enough to bond. And it works, mostly. Except for when she’s gone and then she goes back to being kind of a mess.

“We’re going to my apartment then,” Wheein declares, holding up her keys like she didn’t just give her a ticket for speeding. “And we’re going to eat chocolate and play Monopoly or something and you’re going to tell me if my love songs have gotten any better.”

Byul thinks of her own book of poems, shoved under her bed. A kind of coping mechanism for the side effects that come with her job. A kind of coping mechanism for not really being a music person anymore.

“Okay,” she says, and then they go.

Wheein has a chocolate fountain, because of course she does.

“I've never actually used it though,” she confesses as she digs through her closet for the box it came in.

Byul watches her go, trying not to hover awkwardly behind her and also trying not to think about closets and irony and the last time she was in a space this small with her. “Why not?” Her voice sounds a little hoarse.

Wheein shrugs, throwing an old pair of gym shorts - one Byul unfortunately recognizes - over her shoulder. “I didn't have an occasion to.”

“And I'm the occasion?”

She turns then, and her playful glare feels like sitting on the hill, watching the sun come up at the end of a night shift. “Maybe,” Wheein says. “Maybe I just think chocolate and New Year’s go well together… Aha!” The box is red, with white lettering. “Ugh, I think we need a hard spatula. Do you know what that is?”

Byul’s never regretted her lack of baking knowledge more. She shakes her head.

“It's okay,” she tells her, but she's still frowning at the box. “I think I know where I can find one.”

Apparently her neighbor (who she's house sitting for, so this isn't a felony, thank you very much Miss Officer) is some sort of sad guy who got really good at cooking after his girlfriend dumped him two months ago. He probably has a hard spatula, according to Wheein, who claims to have tasted his phenomenal cooking. Byul doesn't ask if that's another way to say that they hooked up. Her stomach feels weird enough about this whole situation as is.

It's a sad apartment, though - grey and kind of empty, like he'd expected to share it with someone. It reminds her of her own a little bit, from the time before the master calendar and the neon sticky notes and their originator had arrived in her life.

Wheein points out a dying basil plant in the corner by the windowsill. “I'm supposed to keep it alive. That's why I have the key.”

Byul looks at its wilting leaves, at how it just kind of sits there, emanating it's future deceasedness, and feels a level of kinship with the poor thing. “That seems like a lost cause,” she says.

Wheein winks at her. “There’s no such thing as a lost cause in my book, Officer Frowny Face. Besides, I don't know if he'd be able to handle it if he lost the plant too. Everyone needs a little something to hold onto, I think.”

It takes a full minute for Byul to process all of that, and by the time she does the winker in question has moved her way into his kitchen and is sifting through drawers for the hard spatula.

The response she finally manages is “Officer… Frowny Face?”

“Yes,” she points the finally-found spatula at her as she responds, “because you're being awfully pessimistic tonight. You used to be a lot more hopeful, you know.”

“I used to be a lot of things.”

She used to be a dancer. Or a rapper or a singer or one of those things, whatever. She used to think the world owed her something for her love of music. Now all she is is someone who knows the truth about the world: it doesn't owe anyone anything.

It should owe someone something, though, Byul thinks, looking at Wheein. Someone with as much hope left as her deserves a real chance. And, besides, she can sing better than any other idol-to-be that she knows. Not that she surrounds herself with them.

Before she knows it, one of Wheein’s hands is cupping her face. She smells like candy. “You're still a lot of things, Byulie,” she says, and she forgets how to breathe. “Now come on, let's get some chocolate covered strawberries in you.”

*.*.*

Wheein changes while the chocolate melts. Leaves Byul by the stove with a simple “I trust you” and goes to her room to put on pajamas and tie her hair up and just process.

She didn't expect it, really. Some part of her had always thought that she’d just dissolved and become one of the stars or something. It's weird that she's out there, living a relatively normal life with like a roommate and a job.

For a while in her mind she was always just the older girl who moved like magic and took her aside and nobly shattered her heart. She seemed like she had all the answers back then, and maybe she still does (although a life without music hardly seems like an answer to her). She’d thought she was invincible.

The woman in blue in her kitchen might not be invincible, but she seems real, and that's enough for now. A little sad maybe, but not made of stardust.

She comes out to the sight of Byul leaning over the pot of melting chocolate, frowning a little bit. She almost laughs, because, under all that broodiness and those words about the world, she’s still soft and gooey on the inside. Chocolate seems appropriate.

Wheein sneaks up behind her, and thinks about wrapping her arms around her but doesn't because everything still feels a little shaky between them. “How’s the chocolate?” she asks, and Byul jumps.

“It’s uh…” her eyes are on her for a little too long. “Melting.”

“Good.”

It melts. She stands at her stove and stirs with the stolen spatula and tries not to think about all the things she used to think about when both of them had darker hair. It’s hard not to, when Byul is right next to her, chopping strawberries in half, hands a little shaky on the knife. Thinking about anything other than the past is hard with her in the vicinity.

So, instead, she asks her about the present.

Byul has short answers, vague. She doesn’t reveal too much, and yet her words don’t seem to be practiced either, since she stumbles over them a little.

“What’s your roommate like?” Wheein asks, wondering about things she has no right to be jealous over.

She puts down the knife, like she has to think about it. “She’s neat,” she says after a few second of silence. “She cleans a lot when she’s nervous. She keeps me sane, a little. I think.”

It’s not like it’s a declaration, or anything. Not like she’s saying she loves her and can’t live without her, but it feels kind of like that. Thinking about it makes Wheein feel like she’s intruding, like she’s back looking into a practice room, watching her dance, pretending like she’s not there. And, honestly, she knows that keeping someone sane isn’t the kind of thing relationships necessarily are built on, but it still feels like something she’s lost, in their time apart.

“That’s good,” she says, instead of all the other thoughts swirling around her head. “Why is she in New York?”

“She likes being alone, I guess. Or something like that.” Byul goes back to cutting the strawberries, but picks up her train of thought only a second later, like Wheein’s poked a corner of her mind she had forgotten existed. “She explained it to me once, but I didn’t really understand it. She went to Thailand by herself last year too. To see the elephants. That’s the kind of thing she does.”

“Elephants?”

“Yeah,” she says, but shakes her head. Wheein’s glad she’s not the only one confused by the enigma that seems to be her roommate. “She says she wants to adopt one or something. I don’t know if our apartment could handle it, though.”

It gets silent, then, and she goes back to stirring the chocolate. She can’t be serious. She can’t be and yet she seems to be. Okay, Wheein thinks, so she loves this girl enough to get kicked out of her apartment for housing an elephant, of all things. Okay.

Then she spies the corners of Byul’s mouth turn up out of the corner of her eye. She elbows her for that. So, she’s not all frowns and broodiness, after all. That’s good.

They lie on the couch with the fountain plugged into the same outlet as the television (because Wheein’s a little too tired to bother with figuring out something else) and dip strawberries into the melted chocolate.

Truth be told, she’s forgotten how to play Monopoly, so they just set up all the pieces and move things around without any real idea of the rules. It’s messy and weird and she’s letting her win, but every time she hands over a hefty sum of pastel paper money Byul’s eyes kind of light up like she might actually be six years old, and it feels like such a rare occurrence that she keeps it going. She feels like she’s loading up a list of songs on a run-down juke box, like she’s lining up things to remember before they have to part ways again.

She’ll remember this, though. The way a drop of chocolate hangs off her lip and how she sweeps her ponytail to the side when it gets close to the fountain and her laugh when she wins. She’ll write this song on pastel paper and title it Girl, Not Stardust and then not play it for anyone, ever, because this feels like a secret she just wants to be hers.

Not to mention, her words in the closet were the truth; no one wants to hear her songs about girls and long hair and soft kisses. She could sell them to one of the male idols, she knows that, but they wouldn’t sound the same. No, she’ll have to keep this and sing it to herself when the nights are quiet and cold.

Yoondo might listen to it, too.

That’s how this whole thing with her neighbor started, anyway. She got locked out of her apartment one day and he heard her singing in the hallway and let her eat his food and sleep on his couch until their landlord came to unlock the door for her the next day. He cooked pasta. It tasted like heartbreak. She told him this and he said she should be a writer.

That’s when she brought out her list of songs. He didn’t say anything about what (or more accurately, who) they were about, just nodded and smiled and told her he used to write songs too, once upon a time. He said she shouldn’t stop, no matter what happened.

Now she’s taking care of his dying plant. It’s funny, the way things work out that way.

“Are you still writing music?” she asks her, over the strawberries.

Byul looks up, and her eyes radiate guilt. As if it’s something to be ashamed of. “I write poetry,” she says. “So lyrics, I guess.”

“Read me something.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t have any of them memorized. Or with me. They’re not the kind of things I typically share.”

Wheein pokes her cheek. “You’re a soft-hearted cop.”

The look she gives her tastes like the chocolate. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“I wrote songs about you, you know. After you left. Even though you told me to stop.”

Byul rolls her eyes, but her ears look red. She’s never been good at hiding her feelings, despite the occasional blunt words and vague statements. Even the mighty Officer Frowny Face falls before the power of a good love song. Not that hers are any good. Just okay. Just enough.

“You shouldn’t have.”

“I know,” Wheein winks, and hopes she doesn’t see her shaky hands. “But I did anyway. Do you want to hear one?”

That’s the real question, isn’t it? Does she still care enough to know what she put her through? Does she know that they can’t just start again without knowing all of the ways she grieved her and her loss of music.

She closes her eyes, and when she leans back against the couch it doesn’t really look like a defeat. It feels like a win, though. “If you want me to.”

Wheein wrote precisely twenty two songs about her ex-leader. They were a lot more concentrated at the beginning, and became sort of scattered afterwards. She’d forget about her, for a few months, and then would hear a certain song or see one of those dumb snapbacks she used to wear and just fall into her feelings all over again.

That’s the way it felt - like she was falling. And not in the romantic way, but in the trip and fall and scrape your knee kind of way. Like she kept trying to run away from it all but the ground below her feet just wouldn’t stay still. Her resolve wasn’t strong enough to forget her completely - it was jello-y. The kind with chunks of fruit in the middle.

The one she chooses, however, isn’t one of the sad ones.

She doesn’t sing it, either, just passes over her notebook and lets her read it. Like it’s a love letter. Like it’s a confession. And maybe it is, a little bit.

Byul is quiet as she reads, and it scares her a lot, because she can’t read her thoughts from the pitch of her voice when her voice is nowhere to be found. Watching her study her lyrics makes her nervous, so she stops watching. Wheein weaves little braids into her own hair with practiced, anxious fingers. She untangles them. And then she starts again.

By the time she finishes reading, she’s gone through the cycle about four times.

“Don’t do it for me,” Byul announces to the room, and it takes Wheein too long to realize she’s reading her lyrics. “Do it for you, if you have to do it for anyone. The night is still young and your star is still bright. Your flight will still be here tomorrow.”

There was a period of time where she talked about her leaving like they’d said goodbye at an airport. It was easier than thinking of the real one, of watching helplessly as she told them the news, bowed, and walked out. It was easier than remembering how she didn’t even try to stop her.

She turns a page and her stomach turns inside out.

“Are all your songs about stars?”

Wheein looks away. “All the ones about you are.”

Something flickers outside of her window. It might be a shooting star, she doesn’t know. Or maybe it’s a comet.

to: yoondumbo

from: wheepup

borrowed your hard spatula

don’t worry! it was for a good cause!!

btw your plant is still dying and i am not a doctor so a funeral will be held for it when you return

seriously just get a kitten or something dude

Yongsun doesn’t call him.

Not on Christmas, at least. She resolves to let the day be hers, to go on with her original plans that involved dinner and a show and a ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty.

Her resolve almost, breaks, though, when she’s standing in front of the green statue, surrounded by harsh wind and screaming children. There are families everywhere. Weird little groups of people in red and green wearing sneakers and big coats. A little girl falls suddenly, tripping on the concrete path, and her parents immediately run towards her, repeating mantras of assurance. Someone behind Yongsun screams that they want a candy cane. She doesn’t turn around to see if they get one.

Lonely. That’s what he’d implied she’d be. She hates that he’s right. Something about this city makes her feel that way, or maybe she’s always felt this way and she just noticed now. She’s not five anymore, she knows that, but she can’t help but feel envy for the way all the little kids around her seem to have someone.

It’s not that she doesn’t have her family - she does - but everything shifted with them a few years ago. She lost whatever thing it is that makes parents run to comfort their children. When she reached a crossroads, she stayed where she was, fearful that if she fell they wouldn’t be there to pick her up. It sounds cold, but it really wasn’t. It was just a thing.

Just as much of a thing as the snow past the gate. She kicks a little bit of it. It’s not quite as satisfying as she thought it would be.

“Winter’s a little hard,” she’d told him, at some point, the night before. Probably when they’d stepped out of the bar to get into the cab and she’d nearly slipped on black ice.

Eric had laughed, and the sound had bounced around her head for hours afterwards. “Are you not a fan of snow?” he’d asked.

It wasn’t that. She likes snow well enough. It’s soft, and pretty enough when the sunlight hits it right. She’s never liked the way trees look without their leaves, though. Or the wind. It’s the wind that’s the worst part. The wind whips her hair around into her eyes and caresses her cheeks with bitter kisses and moves so quickly she can’t do anything about it. Winter would be so much better without the wind.

Yongsun shoves down the desire to call him. His invitation was not made for Christmas, but for whatever is after. Besides, she can take the city on her own. She doesn’t need him to do that. Need has never been a part of the equation.

It’s the weather that forces her to think about staying a little longer.

She wakes up on the twenty sixth to a call from work and learns that she actually doesn’t need to come in for the flight that night because of the storm. The winds are rough and terrible, the television says, when she turns it on. She blinks at the screen, pays for a few more days of the room, and then tries to go back to sleep.

She can’t, though. She tosses and turns for about half an hour. The room feels too hot and her blankets are heavy. Yongsun takes a breath and shuts her eyes tight but all she can think about is the weight of being alone in a big city, and how it wasn’t so bad at first, but now…

Now she misses home. Her apartment. Her roommate. The comforting noises of Seoul. New York’s a different breed of city, she decides. It’s a little meaner, a little colder. A little lonelier.

Yongsun really really hates that Eric was right.

She doesn’t call him just then, though, because there’s a documentary on the TV that she wants to watch about elephants. And she doesn’t call him later, either, because she sees his brothers in the lobby and is hit with a sudden burst of guilt for even thinking about pulling him away from his family. The thought sits there, though, pulling at her mind like it’s made of taffy.

It’s not until she’s eating lunch at this restaurant near Central Park, thinking about how Korean food just tastes better than everything else, that she finally pulls up his contact. Not to make him eat with her - because that would be rude and weird and maybe a little too much like a date - but just to ask if he knows any places that serve tteokbokki.

She really misses tteokbokki.

Eric picks up on the second ring, and Yongsun’s not sure how she feels about that. “Hey!” he says, and she immediately regrets it because he sounds busy.

“Hi, um.” She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Everything about this feels weird. “Sorry to bother you, I just. Do you know any places that serve tteokbokki? I don’t have any dinner plans because I was supposed to be working but, you know, the weather, and I just…”

She can hear his smile over the phone. “Red Egg,” Eric answers. “On Centre street. No worries, I get where you’re coming from. I didn’t know you liked tteokbokki, though!”

“I love it,” she corrects. It’s easier, somehow, now that they’re talking about food. “It’s the best thing in the world.”

He really does laugh, then. He seems to laugh a lot around her. She laughs too, before she knows what’s happening, because this is just so easy. Food is easy and talking is easy and everything about this just feels so simple compared to how it was in her head.

“I might have to come with you,” Eric says, and she can’t tell if he’s joking or not. “Now you’ve got me craving.”

It’s a nice thought, Yongsun thinks. The two of them talking about tteokbokki while eating tteokbokki, seated across from each other next to a window with the stars outside. And the snow. The snow that just won’t stop falling. “Okay,” she says, surprised by her own bravery. “Come then.”

“Dinner, right?” he asks, and it still sounds like he’s smiling. “How about 6?”

“Okay,” Yongsun says again, because she’s forgotten all the other words she knows.

“Sounds like a date.”

It takes her two whole minutes to remember her lunch after he hangs up. She just kind of sits there, staring at the air in front of her and wondering how she got to where she was.

Someone opens and closes the door of the restaurant. A bitter cold breeze swirls through the room. It’s only for a second, but it’s enough to remind her. Oh right, she thinks, the weather. The weather that just won’t quit.

*.*.*

It’s not a date, Eric tells himself, as he gets ready for it, ignoring the fact that him putting in any effort means he’s already obviously decided that it is, indeed, a date.

That’s what he’d called it over the phone, after all. A date. He’d hung up then. Too quickly. Like he was scared of what it meant. And he is, in a way, because the last time he went on a date he left with a cold cup of coffee and the remains of his mangled heart and a rejected apartment key. So, he’s trying his best not to get his expectations up.

Besides, he knows she’s in the same boat as him. The year has grabbed the two of them by the collars and chewed them up and spit them out. It’s not like he’s over it, either. He just feels ready to be. Ready to start the long process of getting back out there and going on dates and maybe getting a cat like his neighbor keeps suggesting.

That actually seems like a decent idea. A dog might be a better one, though.

It’s not a date, though, because if he admits to himself that it is that means he’s already in too deep. There’s no testing the water after you’re already caught on someone. Not that being caught on Kim Yongsun would be a bad thing (it actually feels like it might end up being a really good thing); he just knows he should lower his expectations.

“It’s not a date,” he says, maybe out loud.

“If you’re saying that it means it’s a date.” Eddie’s always been the blunter one out of the three of them. Unfortunately, that means putting up with his meddling. Meddling that means they’re now also going to a movie afterwards (because “she mentioned she loves movies, dude! That means she wants you to take her to one!”) and he might’ve gotten flowers too. Still, he doesn’t need his opinion.

Eric throws a pillow at him. He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve it.

Eddie throws his hands up in mock surrender. “Don’t hate just because I’m right.”

She likes the flowers. Or, at least, she seems to. She’s quiet in the taxi ride there from their hotel, eyes focused on the snowstorm raging outside the window. He nudges her with his shoulder.

“What are you thinking about?”

Yongsun turns faster than he thought she would, long hair almost whipping him in the face. “Did I pull you away from your family?” she asks, and he senses a genuine level of worry in her voice.

Eric smiles at her question, thinking of how his father couldn’t shove him out the door of his parents’ room fast enough when he’d gone in there to tell them he’d be missing dinner because he was going out with her. Eddie shouting “IT’S A DATE!” might have helped.

“Nah,” he assures her, and something flutters in his stomach when she smiles. “Our dinner plans were falling apart anyways. Brian’s old friend from college is in town and my parents wanted to go see a show or something. Besides, I wanted to see you again.”

He’s always been one to let truths slip out too fast. Always the first one to say “I love you” and always the last one to stop. He’s never been any good at keeping things from people, even when he knows he should. Yongsun doesn’t seem to mind, though; she laughs at his small confession, her eyes lit up and happy.

“Me too,” she says, not quite looking up at him, and it all sounds kind of vulnerable.

That’s how this feels; like they’re both not totally healed yet. Like he let her see all his wounds and she let him see hers and yet they’re still doing whatever this is because they know they’re both going to be careful.

The taxi stops then, and he slides out quickly, trying to get to her side and open the door before she can get out. He’s trying to do this properly, he really is, even though it isn’t a date, because he gets the sense she hasn’t had someone do this for her for a while.

Eric offers her his arm, too, as they go into the restaurant, even though they’re both in jeans and sweaters and big puffy coats. It’s not like this is anything fancy. He’s never needed fancy, though, just something simple. Something real. And, he thinks, as she laughs at something behind them, this feels real. Real and maybe kind of right.

The lights inside the restaurant are red. It’s a familiar shade. It reminds him of when he and his friends used to take the train up here on special weekends when they were in college. He’d always meant to take someone here on a date, just never seemed to have the time to. Yongsun seems like a good person to share firsts with, though.

She looks up at them. “Whoa,” she says, sounding kind of breathless, and Eric can’t help but smile. He seems to be smiling a lot today.

Eric smiles at her over over the tteokbokki, too, when she tells him about meeting elephants in Thailand. And then again when she brings up music. That’s another thing that seems to keep happening. It’s gravitational, like they’re planets orbiting around some sort of sun made of sound.

“You know,” Yongsun starts, when they’ve finished their meal, leaning back against the white bench they’re sitting on. “I almost was a singer.”

It’s a familiar story she tells. Of an unexpected chance and an option to lead a different life. Of unsupportive parents and the possibility of letting them down weighing so much she felt like she was about to break. “In the end, I couldn’t do it,” she says, and that’s painful in its own way.

He tells her his story too, and it goes about the same way. Yongsun nods solemnly as he talks, and the mood is still light, but he knows the look in her eyes.

“Do you write music, too?” Eric asks, when he’s done with his story. He swirls around what’s left of his drink.

She smiles. “I’m trying.”

That’s how he feels most of the time. Writing is hard and weird and feels a lot like when he tried to write a diary in college but just couldn’t keep up with it. He has a lot of songs, though. A lot of covers uploaded to YouTube, too. Music is as much of a hobby as it can be without making a career out of it. “Me too.”

For now, it’s all they can do.

to: yonggari

from: starry night

you too. stay safe. don’t go too many places alone. nyc can be dangerous.

we’re out of laundry detergent so i made a run.

also that piano you ordered arrived and idk how to put it together so it’s just sitting in the living room for when you get back.

Byul doesn’t have the courage to ask if she’s staying the night.

Wheein kind of just sat the two of them down with the chocolate and turned on a movie. They’re nearing the end of it, and she seems to be eyeing another one. Between then and now, though, there’s midnight to deal with.

Midnight. New Year’s Eve. That song she read an hour ago about satellites and airplanes. They all feel like they’re ingredients of something that’s been brewing ever since she pulled her over. The answer feels a little obvious, which makes her think that it’s not - can’t be - the real one, because they probably still need all sorts of time to make it to where that could be possible.

When she looks up at her from where she’s leaning against her chest, though, it feels like it almost might be.

She smells a little like cotton candy. Or maybe that’s just the apartment. She remembers her eating a lot of sweet things, though. Little ones. Back then it had been something endearing. Now it’s a little disorienting. She doesn’t know how they got here.

Wheein pokes her in the head. “Stop brooding.”

Byul laughs, she can’t help it. “I’m not brooding. I’m just-” smelling your hair.

“If you don’t want to watch the movie we don’t have to. I just put it on because it felt like you weren’t in the mood for talking.”

It wasn’t that she wasn’t in the mood. It was that she didn’t - and still doesn’t - know what to say to her. The song made everything real. Her feelings. Wheein’s feelings. The fact that maybe she might’ve had more of a choice in the matter than she’d initially thought. The bridge was the worst, though. The night is still young and your star is still bright. It doesn’t feel true. It feels like she got old too fast, like her twenties stopped being her twenties a long time ago.

“We can talk,” Byul says, and she makes herself meet Wheein’s eyes. There’s so much hope there. “If you want.”

“Even it’s heavy?” she asks, like neither of them know that that’s all it has to be. At least at the beginning.

She swallows, bracing herself for whatever else she has to dump on her. Whatever other mistakes she needs to own up for. “Even then.”

Wheein grips her arm, and her hands feel like they might be shaking. “I just have one question. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, I just feel like I need to know before… before anything else.” She shuts her eyes tight for a moment, and then opens them forcefully, finally. Her question comes tumbling out like maybe it was pushed. “Did you ever miss me?”

The easy answer is yes. It’s the answer she knows she wants, but Byul also knows she wants the truth. And the truth, like most truths, is messy. “At first I did,” she admits. “You were a light in my life that I’d lost. But after a while… It was easier not to miss you, I think. Does that make any sense?”

Wheein nods, but it looks like she’s biting something back. Byul isn’t sure if it’s tears or something else. “What about now?” she asks, and there’s a pain in her chest at the words. “Would you miss me now?”

Her answer is out of her mouth before she can really think about it. “I don’t think I could forget you again.”

*.*.*

Wheein does something dumb at midnight.

She knows what the result will be, remembers it more clearly than most things. Still, she does it anyway because she still wants it, as much as she wanted it the first time, and because she’s not sure when she’ll get another chance. This one still feels like an accident. Or fate. One of the two, she’s not sure.

The movie’s long over. She let it play out while they talked, and was a little too distracted by silver hair and a hand on her shoulder to put in another one. Right now the title screen is just playing again and again. She might have memorized it by now.

The last time Wheein did this, though, it was all impulse, and she didn’t know how dumb it was. Now she knows. She’s reminded every time she looks at her. She still does it, though.

“It’s almost midnight,” Byul says, right before, and her words are more like breaths. She looks too good in the dark. Girl, Wheein thinks, not stardust.

“I know,” she responds.

Then she kisses her, because it’s New Year’s Eve and that’s what people do. There are no crowds to cheer them on, or even a countdown, really. For all she knows it might not even be exactly midnight yet, but she needs this. It feels like maybe it’ll be closure.

Byul tastes like chocolate, and her silver hair feels soft in her hands. She isn’t expecting her to kiss her back but when she does everything goes a little hazy for a second. It’s bitter, under all the sweetness of the chocolate. Her chest aches at the contact.

When she moves forward she grabs Wheein by the neck to pull her closer, and it seems like maybe she’s saying goodbye.

“What are you doing?” Byul asks, when she pulls away, her breathing heavy. It’s the same thing she said last time.

This time, however, Wheein already knows the answer. “Something stupid,” she whispers, and then she moves to kiss her again.

Byul gets there first though. She hovers right near her mouth but doesn’t move. Then she speaks. “If you’re stupid I’m stupid,” she whispers.

“Deal.”

The second kiss is softer than the first one.

to: wheepup

from: yoondumbo

what about a dog?

someone i know says they’re pretty great

The theater is dark by the time they get there.

Eric grabs her hand, on instinct, once they hit the darkness. It’s just so they stick together, he tells himself, ignoring the way electricity shoots up his arm every time she moves. Yongsun brings her giant thing of popcorn up on her lap when they sit, and he smiles, thinking of how fascinated she’d been by the gargantuan sizing.

She looks younger when she’s happy, he decides. It might be the way she laughs, head thrown back and smile wide like she could care less who’s watching. She makes him feel younger, too, sneaking into the back of the theater like this. It’s like they’re in high school. Or college. Or something.

Either way, Kim Yongsun is kind of an enigma. A happy, bouncy, kind of bruised enigma.

Halfway through the movie, she leans her head on his shoulder. They fit together kind of perfectly. Like puzzle pieces maybe. The snowflakes that had dotted her light curls when they’d entered the theater have melted now, and, when he leans into her, her hair still feels kind of damp.

“Hey,” Eric asks, trying to keep his voice a whisper. The woman on the screen opens a door. Yongsun grabs the sleeve of his sweater in preemptive panic for what might happen to her. “Is this a date?”

The serial killer jumps out. She screams, burying her face in the crook of his neck. It takes a moment for the fear to pass, then she looks up at him and asks “What?” Despite the previous exclamation of fear, she’s smiling.

He fights the urge to ruffle her hair. “Are we on a date? I’m just asking because I never really clarified. But it feels like one. And if it isn’t, that’s okay, because I really like hanging out with you and-”

She scrunches her face at him, still smiling. “I don’t know,” she says, “it’s whatever you want it to be,” and then she screams again as the killer slashes his sword into a wall especially loudly.

Eric jumps too. And then he laughs, because this is fun. He likes the way her arms fit around his waist, and how she halfway hides in his jacket, but still comes away smiling. He likes her smile, too, how it kind of consumes her face with joy, like she can’t contain it. He always seems to find himself smiling along with her. To be honest, he hasn’t been focusing on the movie since she first started this, but it’s okay - she was the one who suggested the slasher film. He’ll just be happy going wherever with her.

It’s oh no. It’s fast, the falling. It grips him by the collar and drags him down like the riptide with an undercurrent of you are so screwed, man that sounds kind of like Eddie. He didn’t mean to let Yongsun overtake him this fast, but it just sort of happened. Somewhere in between the airplane and the hotel and the theater something inside of him clicked.

“What do you want it to be?” he asks, again, because he needs to know if everything he’s feeling right now is all in his head.

Yongsun sits up then, like she has to think about it. When she seems to reach her answer, she laughs, and they get a few nasty looks from the people in front of them. They both immediately apologize, but her eyes still echo the sounds. “I’d like that,” she whispers. “If it was.”

And then it is. Because it’s simple like that.

*.*.*

Two days later they go ice skating.

His family comes along too. Eddie and Brian and his parents. Yongsun usually doesn’t meet the family so soon into a relationship, but she figures why not, since they’re there already and she’s never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

She doesn’t want to rush into things, call it fate or permanent or anything like that, but she does like the way they accept her so easily. His mother hugs her, his father grins at the two of them like they’re the real Christmas present, and his brothers… Well, his brothers are slightly lovably insufferable. Kind of the way Byul gets when she’s in a good mood. They’re wonderful people, all of them. And she slightly feels like she’s intruding but they just won’t hear of it.

Eric’s wonderful too. He grabs her by the hand and pulls her along the ice with all the energy of a little kid, like he’s almost trying to run away with her. She likes the freedom she feels. The wind doesn’t seem quite so chilling when she’s got him there beside her. Her hair doesn’t whip around and hurt her eyes when she’s skating fast and laughing loud.

Before she knows it, they’re spinning, somewhere in the center of the rink. There’s snow in his hair. It’s so so cold outside but she doesn’t really feel it. All she feels is exhilaration and joy and there’s this rush in her stomach that moves up her spine to her shoulders and… oh. So that’s what this is.

Yongsun hasn’t felt this specific feeling in a while. For the past few years love has been a word that’s a little painful, a little sticky, like a wound that hasn’t quite healed yet. This feels different than that, though. It’s fluffy and gentle and really kind of similar to the snow that just won’t stop falling. It doesn’t happen all at once, just flake by flake, until suddenly the roads are blocked and the winds are too harsh for airplanes to take off. Until she’s spinning, dizzy, in the center of the rink, looking in his warm eyes and realizing that the word love is beginning to mean something different now.

They slow, and her head clears a little bit.

“What are you thinking about?” Eric asks, and she’s not sure if she can answer him because her mind feels all over the place.

“Snow,” Yongsun answers, because it’s the easy answer.

“There is a lot of it,” he says, teasing. “Care to elaborate?”

One of his brothers yells something in English. She can’t quite hear it over the noise of the crowd, but Eric rolls his eyes. His cheeks are red. She can’t remember if they were like that before, if it’s because of the cold or something else.

Yongsun takes his distraction as an opportunity to reach down, grab a little bit of the snow that’s gathered on the ice, and throw it at him. Eric blinks, startled, and then bursts out laughing. She moves to dust the snow off his head, but he pulls on her arm and suddenly they’re spinning again, sliding on the ice. She holds onto his arms, liking the way they drape over her shoulders. It feels fun and easy and safe.

She’s never really had something like this before. It’s nice. She wonders how long it will last.

(Later they’ll be curled up on the balcony of her room with blankets and cider and she’ll look at him - at how his jawline looks when he’s smiling, at his kind eyes - and she’ll ask him if he’d turn back time, if he had the chance.

“Like, if you could make a different decision. Be making music. Would you do it?”

He’ll look down at his mug of cider, then. When he speaks, it’ll sound a little bit like a song she heard once before in a dream. “I don’t know,” he’ll say. “I prefer not to think about the past too much like that. Would you?”

Yongsun will pull her blanket a little closer to her, because the thought will feel a little cold. “Maybe,” she’ll answer, finally. “If I could make myself a little stronger, I would.”

“We probably wouldn’t have met each other then,” Eric will point out, like that’s the most important thing on his mind, and it’ll make her blush.

“Ah,” she’ll push him softly. “Don’t say things like that.” He’ll laugh and the sound will echo on the wind and she’ll remember that the snow is supposed to stop soon and she’ll have to go home.)

(Later she’ll be sleepy and cold and say “Come back to Korea with me” when he’s about to leave her room and he’ll laugh and say “Okay,” and Yongsun will realize she’s forgotten all the sad songs that were stuck in her head).

(Later he’ll move to kiss her forehead and she’ll pull on the collar of his sweater and he’ll find her lips instead and she’ll smile against them, breathless, because that’s what he does to her, and then he’ll cradle her head with his hand and she’ll feel like she’s falling.)

(But that’s later.)

to: yonggari

from: starry night

staying the night at a friend’s house. there are leftovers in the fridge for when you get home from your flight.

hope you had fun in nyc.

Byul wakes up to the sound of Wheein grumbling.

She’s pulling a sweater over her head, quickly slipping her jeans back on. “Shit,” she says, like that explains why she’s getting dressed at five in the morning. “He didn’t tell me he’d be back so early.”

“Wha-” she rubs her eyes, trying to remember why she’s at her place and why everything tastes like chocolate and why she had weird dreams about getting on an airplane. “Who?”

Wheein freezes, and shoots her a sympathetic smile. “Go back to sleep,” she commands, like that’s happening anytime soon. She ties her blonde waves up in a ponytail. “I’ve been eating his leftovers for like a week,” she explains. “I thought I’d have time to like, restock his fridge or something before he got back. I’m the worst, right?”

She pouts. Byul thinks there’s no way she could ever be the worst, even if her opinion isn’t that objective anymore. “Let me come.”

This time, Wheein’s the one to say “What?”

She rolls out of bed and comes up behind her, swaying back and forth as she drapes her arms over her shoulders. Byul shrugs. “I wanna come. I don’t want to spend more time without you than I have to.”

Wheein groans. “You’re so cheesy,” she whines, as if she’s not the one who ordered pizza at two in the morning using aegyo. She still lets her come, through, with what they have left of the pizza and the strawberries. It takes them a little too long to get out the door, but Byul figures he’s already noticed the state of his fridge, so it won’t really matter when they show up with apology food.

They have to knock twice before they get an answer, and even then he doesn’t open it, just calls “In a minute!”

“See,” she whispers. “I told you, no need to worry. He’s probably sleeping off the flight.”

When her neighbor opens the door, it’s smiling and breathless, and his hair seems kind of messed up. The top buttons of his shirt are unbuttoned. While Wheein offers the food and gives a kind of rambling apology about eating everything, Byul looks him up and down. They didn’t sleep together, she thinks. Probably. He doesn’t seem to be her type.

Besides, she thinks she hears someone else, a woman probably, laughing from inside his apartment. He turns back at the sound and the door opens a little and-

Oh. So that’s what she was doing in New York.

Wheein’s neighbor sticks out his hand, like he’s just noticed Byul. “Hi,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve met before. Nam Yoondo.”

She’s still staring behind him, at her roommate, who’s sitting on his kitchen counters, their luggage near her feet, like they’d come here straight from the airport. “Moon Byulyi,” she says. “I’m Yongsun’s roommate.”

His face goes bright red, and Yongsun must hear her because she starts laughing. It’s a happy sound, one she hasn’t heard from her in a while.

It takes Wheein a second to understand what’s happening. By the time she does, Byul’s already given this Yoondo guy an “I’m watching you” gesture, mentioned she’s a cop, and started pulling her away from the door.

“We’ll leave you two be, then,” she says.

Wheein frowns. “Wait, are they?”

“Yes.”

“And we-”

“Uh huh.”

Her laugh is just as contagious as Yongsun’s, and Byul finds herself laughing along because the whole thing is ridiculous and kind of sweet and honestly she feels lighter than she has for a long time.

When Wheein finishes, she turns to her. “I gave him all my food,” she says, like she just noticed. “Should we go get some more?”

Byul wraps an arm around her shoulder. “Maybe groceries this time?” she asks. “Believe it or not I actually know how to cook some things. I can’t live off of Yongsun’s ketchup rice forever.”

“Ketchup rice?”

“It’s a long story.”

They get groceries. They race the shopping carts up and down the aisles of the mostly closed convenience store to the dismay of the poor kid running the cash register. Wheein buys a lot of candy. Byul’s the one who gets the real food.

It feels like making up for lost time.