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RECKLESS KIDS, TRYING TO FIND AN ISLAND IN THE FLOOD
BEAUTIFUL FEELING
597w; pg (jinyoung/suzy)
jinyoung finds suzy prettiest like this.
Some people find Suzy prettiest in front of a flood of hundreds of camera flashes, posing for her next news headline with a perfectly practiced smile. It goes like this: she walks down that red carpet in some flowing designer dress that hides the fact that her heels aren't all that tall, stops to wave at the press, and then she continues on her way, and that way is moving further and further away from Jinyoung and further and further into space, where the brightest stars glitter against the night sky.
But Jinyoung, Jinyoung finds Suzy prettiest like this:
She'll hold his hand sometimes, on the sometimes when she texts him hey, come over? and on the sometimes that he doesn't mark the message as read and slip his phone back into his pocket like nothing happened. It's a lonely place to be, in front of the cameras all the time. You lose yourself somewhere there – and this is when she furrows her eyebrows in thought, tiny wrinkles carving against her forehead, the same forehead that Jinyoung sees plastered on billboards for skin care ads – do you know what I mean? And that's when she reaches for his hand. He lets her have it.
It's always been hard for him to deny Suzy of anything. "Sure," he'll say. Ever since they were trainees, and he'd be down to his last tupperware-full of a homecooked meal, and Suzy'd been on a diet. It's weird to think of the nation's coveted first love like this, but Suzy reminds him of his mom's doenjang jjigae.
"Are you listening to me?" she'll laugh. Her new apartment's got these motion sensor lights everywhere. And on those sometimes Jinyoung's over and Suzy starts talking about how she's having a past-due teenage identity crisis from seeing versions of herself on all sorts of screens and she's holding his hand, they'll be sitting on her couch still for so long that they turn off.
There's this myth that idols like them stop aging once they debut. Physically, of course the years of constant sleep deprivation and crazy crash dieting take their toll, but mentally, it's like they're suspended in this highly viscous vacuum between adolescence and adult. And Jinyoung likes to think he's managed to dodge that fate, but then he's sitting next to Suzy in the dark, the city lights coming through the large windows of her high-rise flat scintillating in her eyes, and he's seventeen and in love with her all over again.
So, Jinyoung supposes it comes down to this: there's just some feelings you'll never learn to outgrow, some people you'll be sitting next to and then suddenly you're who you thought you left behind five years ago with a brave smile. And, in the same way, it's not the loneliness or occasional misery that makes the Suzy of these moments prettiest to him. It's the reminder of her looking up at him with a huge smile and a spot of doenjang jjigae on her face, of the time Wonpil told him “word on the street is that Suzy has a crush on you” as they walked back to the dorm one night, and of the him that, after practicing together until late at night, reached for her hand as they left the building, thinking that he'd always have a chance with this girl.
"Mmhmm," he'll hum with a small smile tugging at his mouth. Suzy'll smile back, the not-so-practiced variation, and in the dark, it looks exactly like it did back when they were trainees.
And it's beautiful.
SHARK
1,201w; pg-13 (chaeryeong/hyunjin, jyp millennials ensemble)
there'd been signs. big, neon, fully-capitalized WARNING!! kind of signs.
Chaeryeong's fiddling with the window switch in the backseat when Changbin says so nonchalantly that it's almost suspicious: "Hey, I heard that Hyunjin's back in town."
"Oh," she manages. There's not many ways things can get more awkward than ending up at the same uni as your older sister's boyfriend, and having him act as your no-pay Uber driver ("That's Chaeyeon unnie's seat," Chaeryeong frowned the first time Changbin pulled up to the curb in front of her dorm and he told her to ride shotgun. They all used to be neighbors, and Chaeryeong had to deal with an entire year of hearing Chaeyeon giggle flirtatiously in the passenger seat on the way home as Changbin recounted something Jisung did to get him into detention in homeroom. "Is this your version of the shovel talk?" Changbin sighed, starting the engine back up when he realized Chaeryeong wasn't going to budge. She chose not to respond to that), but Chaeryeong guesses you learn something new everyday. "That's..." The wind coming through the window keeps slapping her in the face. She closes it. "Great."
Changbin snorts before stopping in front of the grocery store and unlocking the car doors. "Sound a little more soulless, will you?" Chaeryeong presses her lips together, grimacing. "Don't say I didn't warn you, alright? I'll be back in thirty!" Only after his shiny new Corolla is halfway down the street, Chaeryeong realizes she should've told him thanks.
There'd been signs, Chaeryeong thinks as she grabs a basket and heads straight to the refrigerated beverages aisle. Big, neon, fully-capitalized WARNING!! kind of signs. Something that sucks about having such a tight-knit group of friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends-of-friends is that everyone gossips. "You know what Jisu told me?" her roommate, Ryujin, had brought up a couple weeks ago, as Chaeryeong was brushing her teeth. "That Yeji told her," (Chaeryeong already wanted to crawl under her bed and hide forever at this point. She and Yeji had dated for a month during first semester, and while it had ended amicably, Chaeryeong was still slightly traumatized by Yeji's kind hey, I think we should go back to being just friends rejection), "that Hyunjin's coming back next week from that study abroad program or whatever." Ryujin pulled the lollipop she'd been talking over out of her mouth. "Wanna hang out with all of them?"
Chaeryeong reaches for two coffee cans and plunks them down loudly enough to drown out the memory of her own squeaked-out, "Sure." She still hadn't looked at the Facebook event invite. Or given Ryujin a plausible-sounding excuse to get out of it. Okay, yeah, so Chaeryeong was still thinking of the excuse. But that didn't mean –
"Chaeryeong?" Someone's standing beside where she's kneeling with an arm halfway into the refrigerated shelf, and that someone is wearing these all-too-familiar Stan Smiths, well-worn and turning gray at the tops. Well. Chaeryeong winces. There'd been signs.
Amendment: there's no way anything can be more awkward than running into your ex's twin brother who you maybe kind of sort of accidentally made out with once before he went to a different country for some mobile health clinic trip. Or twice. Chaeryeong feels her face burning behind the curtain of her hair. "God," is all that she can manage to say.
Hyunjin laughs a little at that. "Nope, just me," he teases. Chaeryeong wonders if he'll go away if she stays very, very still. Hyunjin chooses that moment to crouch down beside her. "You need some help?"
Chaeryeong jumps up when his knee inadvertently touches hers. "How many more do you want?" he asks as if nothing happened, and as if Chaeryeong's heart isn't going beat out of her chest and cause a huge bloody mess on aisle five.
"Ten," she says. Hyunjin hums and starts picking them up three at a time. Chaeryeong could really run away now. Should run away now.
"I didn't know you drank this much coffee," Hyunjin starts. And Chaeryeong's missed her getaway chance. She shrugs, and then he looks up at her, his eyes sparkling in that obnoxiously attractive way that they do, and the mole under his left eye disappears as he smiles. "It's not good for you."
Chaeryeong doesn't know what to say – her cheeks still feel like they're on fire and her heart's pounding faster than she thinks it ever should – so she shrugs again. Hyunjin stands back up, Chaeryeong's basket filled with canned coffee in between them, and continues. "Hey, are you acting this way because I told you I like you?"
That had started as a rumor too. "You know," Ryujin told her, not long after Chaeryeong and Yeji had broken up, "Seungmin told me that it wasn't only like, 'Yeji wanted to break up with you.' Apparently, she and Hyunjin had this whole fight about being honest about their feelings and blah blah blah. He thinks they were arguing about you, or something."
Chaeryeong didn't really think about it again until Hyunjin, who barely showed up to their Chem lecture and usually fell asleep after turning in their weekly homework on the days he did, started asking her to study with him. And then when they'd ended up at that one party, waiting for Felix to finish throwing up in the bushes, and Hyunjin leaned down to look at her through the dark and kissed her when she leaned in too.
"No," she blurts. Chaeryeong wants the linoleum supermarket floor to swallow her whole. (The thing is: the entire time, Chaeryeong never expected all the gossip to actually be right, and then the tips of Hyunjin's ears were red as he said I think I really like you, I know it's weird because you dated Yeji and we're twins but and You don't have to say anything, I'm going abroad for three months, don't worry too much about it, just wanted you to know all in one nervous breath. See: Chaeryeong's love life is an actual hot mess.) "I don't know."
"Okay," says Hyunjin. He fiddles with one of his earrings. "Because it's still true. The whole 'I like you' thing."
Another amendment: there's no way anything can actually be more awkward than running into your ex's twin brother who you maybe kind of sort of accidentally made out with once before he went to a different country for some mobile health clinic trip, and now after running away from your problems for three months, they're back and staring you right in the face. "Oh," she chokes. The tips of Hyunjin's ears are as red as the first time he told her. "I," she tries, ducking behind her hair. "I, uh." That's as far as Chaeryeong can get.
Hyunjin hefts up her basket with all the coffee, and holds his own on his other arm. "You're going to pay now, right?" he asks, sounding just as flustered. "Let's go together."
Chaeryeong feels mortified. Chaeryeong also feels a giddiness swelling in her chest from Hyunjin's awkward second confession and the beginning of a smile tugging at her lips. "Okay," she manages.
And when Hyunjin grins down at her at that, she lets her own show.
597w; pg (jinyoung/suzy)
jinyoung finds suzy prettiest like this.
Some people find Suzy prettiest in front of a flood of hundreds of camera flashes, posing for her next news headline with a perfectly practiced smile. It goes like this: she walks down that red carpet in some flowing designer dress that hides the fact that her heels aren't all that tall, stops to wave at the press, and then she continues on her way, and that way is moving further and further away from Jinyoung and further and further into space, where the brightest stars glitter against the night sky.
But Jinyoung, Jinyoung finds Suzy prettiest like this:
She'll hold his hand sometimes, on the sometimes when she texts him hey, come over? and on the sometimes that he doesn't mark the message as read and slip his phone back into his pocket like nothing happened. It's a lonely place to be, in front of the cameras all the time. You lose yourself somewhere there – and this is when she furrows her eyebrows in thought, tiny wrinkles carving against her forehead, the same forehead that Jinyoung sees plastered on billboards for skin care ads – do you know what I mean? And that's when she reaches for his hand. He lets her have it.
It's always been hard for him to deny Suzy of anything. "Sure," he'll say. Ever since they were trainees, and he'd be down to his last tupperware-full of a homecooked meal, and Suzy'd been on a diet. It's weird to think of the nation's coveted first love like this, but Suzy reminds him of his mom's doenjang jjigae.
"Are you listening to me?" she'll laugh. Her new apartment's got these motion sensor lights everywhere. And on those sometimes Jinyoung's over and Suzy starts talking about how she's having a past-due teenage identity crisis from seeing versions of herself on all sorts of screens and she's holding his hand, they'll be sitting on her couch still for so long that they turn off.
There's this myth that idols like them stop aging once they debut. Physically, of course the years of constant sleep deprivation and crazy crash dieting take their toll, but mentally, it's like they're suspended in this highly viscous vacuum between adolescence and adult. And Jinyoung likes to think he's managed to dodge that fate, but then he's sitting next to Suzy in the dark, the city lights coming through the large windows of her high-rise flat scintillating in her eyes, and he's seventeen and in love with her all over again.
So, Jinyoung supposes it comes down to this: there's just some feelings you'll never learn to outgrow, some people you'll be sitting next to and then suddenly you're who you thought you left behind five years ago with a brave smile. And, in the same way, it's not the loneliness or occasional misery that makes the Suzy of these moments prettiest to him. It's the reminder of her looking up at him with a huge smile and a spot of doenjang jjigae on her face, of the time Wonpil told him “word on the street is that Suzy has a crush on you” as they walked back to the dorm one night, and of the him that, after practicing together until late at night, reached for her hand as they left the building, thinking that he'd always have a chance with this girl.
"Mmhmm," he'll hum with a small smile tugging at his mouth. Suzy'll smile back, the not-so-practiced variation, and in the dark, it looks exactly like it did back when they were trainees.
And it's beautiful.
SHARK
1,201w; pg-13 (chaeryeong/hyunjin, jyp millennials ensemble)
there'd been signs. big, neon, fully-capitalized WARNING!! kind of signs.
Chaeryeong's fiddling with the window switch in the backseat when Changbin says so nonchalantly that it's almost suspicious: "Hey, I heard that Hyunjin's back in town."
"Oh," she manages. There's not many ways things can get more awkward than ending up at the same uni as your older sister's boyfriend, and having him act as your no-pay Uber driver ("That's Chaeyeon unnie's seat," Chaeryeong frowned the first time Changbin pulled up to the curb in front of her dorm and he told her to ride shotgun. They all used to be neighbors, and Chaeryeong had to deal with an entire year of hearing Chaeyeon giggle flirtatiously in the passenger seat on the way home as Changbin recounted something Jisung did to get him into detention in homeroom. "Is this your version of the shovel talk?" Changbin sighed, starting the engine back up when he realized Chaeryeong wasn't going to budge. She chose not to respond to that), but Chaeryeong guesses you learn something new everyday. "That's..." The wind coming through the window keeps slapping her in the face. She closes it. "Great."
Changbin snorts before stopping in front of the grocery store and unlocking the car doors. "Sound a little more soulless, will you?" Chaeryeong presses her lips together, grimacing. "Don't say I didn't warn you, alright? I'll be back in thirty!" Only after his shiny new Corolla is halfway down the street, Chaeryeong realizes she should've told him thanks.
There'd been signs, Chaeryeong thinks as she grabs a basket and heads straight to the refrigerated beverages aisle. Big, neon, fully-capitalized WARNING!! kind of signs. Something that sucks about having such a tight-knit group of friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends-of-friends is that everyone gossips. "You know what Jisu told me?" her roommate, Ryujin, had brought up a couple weeks ago, as Chaeryeong was brushing her teeth. "That Yeji told her," (Chaeryeong already wanted to crawl under her bed and hide forever at this point. She and Yeji had dated for a month during first semester, and while it had ended amicably, Chaeryeong was still slightly traumatized by Yeji's kind hey, I think we should go back to being just friends rejection), "that Hyunjin's coming back next week from that study abroad program or whatever." Ryujin pulled the lollipop she'd been talking over out of her mouth. "Wanna hang out with all of them?"
Chaeryeong reaches for two coffee cans and plunks them down loudly enough to drown out the memory of her own squeaked-out, "Sure." She still hadn't looked at the Facebook event invite. Or given Ryujin a plausible-sounding excuse to get out of it. Okay, yeah, so Chaeryeong was still thinking of the excuse. But that didn't mean –
"Chaeryeong?" Someone's standing beside where she's kneeling with an arm halfway into the refrigerated shelf, and that someone is wearing these all-too-familiar Stan Smiths, well-worn and turning gray at the tops. Well. Chaeryeong winces. There'd been signs.
Amendment: there's no way anything can be more awkward than running into your ex's twin brother who you maybe kind of sort of accidentally made out with once before he went to a different country for some mobile health clinic trip. Or twice. Chaeryeong feels her face burning behind the curtain of her hair. "God," is all that she can manage to say.
Hyunjin laughs a little at that. "Nope, just me," he teases. Chaeryeong wonders if he'll go away if she stays very, very still. Hyunjin chooses that moment to crouch down beside her. "You need some help?"
Chaeryeong jumps up when his knee inadvertently touches hers. "How many more do you want?" he asks as if nothing happened, and as if Chaeryeong's heart isn't going beat out of her chest and cause a huge bloody mess on aisle five.
"Ten," she says. Hyunjin hums and starts picking them up three at a time. Chaeryeong could really run away now. Should run away now.
"I didn't know you drank this much coffee," Hyunjin starts. And Chaeryeong's missed her getaway chance. She shrugs, and then he looks up at her, his eyes sparkling in that obnoxiously attractive way that they do, and the mole under his left eye disappears as he smiles. "It's not good for you."
Chaeryeong doesn't know what to say – her cheeks still feel like they're on fire and her heart's pounding faster than she thinks it ever should – so she shrugs again. Hyunjin stands back up, Chaeryeong's basket filled with canned coffee in between them, and continues. "Hey, are you acting this way because I told you I like you?"
That had started as a rumor too. "You know," Ryujin told her, not long after Chaeryeong and Yeji had broken up, "Seungmin told me that it wasn't only like, 'Yeji wanted to break up with you.' Apparently, she and Hyunjin had this whole fight about being honest about their feelings and blah blah blah. He thinks they were arguing about you, or something."
Chaeryeong didn't really think about it again until Hyunjin, who barely showed up to their Chem lecture and usually fell asleep after turning in their weekly homework on the days he did, started asking her to study with him. And then when they'd ended up at that one party, waiting for Felix to finish throwing up in the bushes, and Hyunjin leaned down to look at her through the dark and kissed her when she leaned in too.
"No," she blurts. Chaeryeong wants the linoleum supermarket floor to swallow her whole. (The thing is: the entire time, Chaeryeong never expected all the gossip to actually be right, and then the tips of Hyunjin's ears were red as he said I think I really like you, I know it's weird because you dated Yeji and we're twins but and You don't have to say anything, I'm going abroad for three months, don't worry too much about it, just wanted you to know all in one nervous breath. See: Chaeryeong's love life is an actual hot mess.) "I don't know."
"Okay," says Hyunjin. He fiddles with one of his earrings. "Because it's still true. The whole 'I like you' thing."
Another amendment: there's no way anything can actually be more awkward than running into your ex's twin brother who you maybe kind of sort of accidentally made out with once before he went to a different country for some mobile health clinic trip, and now after running away from your problems for three months, they're back and staring you right in the face. "Oh," she chokes. The tips of Hyunjin's ears are as red as the first time he told her. "I," she tries, ducking behind her hair. "I, uh." That's as far as Chaeryeong can get.
Hyunjin hefts up her basket with all the coffee, and holds his own on his other arm. "You're going to pay now, right?" he asks, sounding just as flustered. "Let's go together."
Chaeryeong feels mortified. Chaeryeong also feels a giddiness swelling in her chest from Hyunjin's awkward second confession and the beginning of a smile tugging at her lips. "Okay," she manages.
And when Hyunjin grins down at her at that, she lets her own show.
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