more like you
Nov. 14th, 2021 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlrocktitle: more like you
fandom: weeekly
pairing: soojin/monday
rating: m
word count: 6.6k
don't worry about it
warnings forslight mentions of idol dieting/body image + god awful incorrigible whump
🏹
but please don't be so perfect right in front of me / i think of all the things that i will never be / tell me how, tell me how / to be more like you
🛡
If there's anything to be said for Soojin's leadership skills, it's that she doesn't run a tight ship.
Soojin swears she gave it a shot. Really, honest to god, she actually did. The problem is that it didn't take long to recognize that the members were only wont to listen to her because they were nice girls who liked her, who thought that she was cute in her own bumbling and hopeless sort of way. Soojin would never take that sort of loyalty for granted.
Except that now it's half past six on a dreary Thursday morning. They have a reality shoot to get to in an hour, the managers will be barging in here at any moment now, and someone has just stolen her favorite pants.
"Girls," Soojin calls out. She drags a hand down her face in abject disbelief. "Has anyone seen my pants?"
Four heads whip up and stare at her from the kitchen table. Soeun blinks slowly, as if working through a trick exam question. Her spoon clanks against the bowl of overflowing corn flakes sat out in front of her.
"You're wearing them right now," she informs her unhelpfully.
"Not these ones," Soojin stresses. "My distressed blue jeans, the ones that flare out at the bottom? I wear them all the time?"
"Ah." That's Jiyoon this time, looking mildly guilty as she downs a glass of water in poor avoidance of Soojin's burning stare.
"Jiyoon-ah."
"Unnie," Jiyoon tries, smiling unconvincingly. "Jimin—well, Jimin asked if she could borrow them!"
"My favorite pants?"
Jiyoon cringes slightly at her shrill tone. Soojin wills her hackles to settle. "You have five of them like that!" she defends. "How was I supposed to know!"
Before Soojin can say anything else, Jiyoon looks somewhere vaguely past her shoulder and instantly deflates. "Oh, there she is. Be mad at her instead!"
In that moment, Kim Jimin appears at the mouth of the hallway wearing a fitted white top, the neckline low enough to boast a silver necklace that bounces at her collarbone, and—of course—Soojin's favorite pants. Jaehee is still in her pajamas next to her, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Soojin assumes from the arm around her waist that Jimin has just undergone the trouble of shaking her awake, herding her into the kitchen like a disoriented sheepling.
"Kim Jimin," Soojin sighs out.
Jimin gives her a look like she has absolutely no idea what's going on. And, also, that she couldn't care less to find out. "What?"
Jihyo shifts around in her seat as Jaehee settles down beside her. Jimin is still standing there, looking way too stupid and model-esque for her own good, arms akimbo like a power statement.
"You know," Jihyo starts, dimple twinkling innocently. "They do look pretty good on her."
When Jimin fails to react: "The pants," Jiyoon supplies brightly.
The worst part, Soojin thinks, is that it's true.
"These ones?" Jimin taunts. Then, clearly just at Soojin's expense, clearly to fuck with her head even more, she spins around to show her legs off. They fit her perfectly. Fabric hugging every curve, sloping in all the right places. Worse, they taper off above the ankle in a way they never have on Soojin, who had to force herself to love the way they fell to the tops of her sneakers. She isn't even that short!
Soojin's mouth goes dry. Her hackles are back up, through the roof. She wishes she could tear her eyes away.
"Unnie, what's the big deal?" Hyewon laughs. Her booming voice cuts through any vestiges of tension. They sliver back to their dark, desperate crevices. "We've even shared toothbrushes before!"
"Shared isn't the word I'd use," Soojin retorts primly. Now she's remembering the time Soeun had cocked her head at her and gone, Oh, this was yours?, before tossing Soojin's toothbrush back into its cup like a communal utensil. "I'm still traumatized by that!"
Soeun laughs as Soojin flashes them her million-dollar pout. "You're too dramatic," she chides. "Unnie, haven't we been through enough at this point? Can't a girl share her toothbrush every now and then?"
"Please," Soojin whines. This isn't even what they were discussing, she realizes. Soojin still has to finish her elaborate morning routine and lather on a handful of sunscreen before their managers start banging at their front door. Jimin, to her grave despair, is still standing there doing ridiculous poses while Jaehee laughs and claps along. "My pants."
"Well, it's not my fault. Someone forgot to do the laundry," Jimin defends, shrugging.
Jaehee gasps in clear affront. "Hey, why am I being brought into this?"
"Now you know how it feels," Soojin tells her stubbornly. Add that to the profile: a leader always willing to lower herself to another's level. She didn't have an ounce of righteousness in her whole entire helpless body.
"Now I have to wear these stupid leggings," she adds sulkily.
Hyewon, bless her heart, starts to coo at her.
"Okay. Everyone stop making fun of our leader!" she announces authoritatively, as if she hadn't been the one facilitating the teasing three minutes ago. Hyewon could be entirely too sixteen sometimes. A moment later, Soojin is being enveloped by 170 centimeters-and-counting of overgrown girl, the press of her arms so strong the air nearly knocks out of her lungs.
"Please stop growing," she wheezes into the muscle of Hyewon's tightly flexed bicep. Hyewon makes a vaguely contrite noise and minutely loosens her grip. "I'm too young to die, and asphyxiation is not the way to go."
"Sorry, unnie!"
After they've rinsed out their bowls and washed up in the bathroom and distributed themselves across two manager vans headed out of town, Soojin leans back and lets her eyes slide shut. Jimin is in the seat next to her, loudly fiddling with her seatbelt. Jiyoon is in the backseat blasting indie songs through her headphones, so loud the words cut through unintelligibly between the lull of each red light.
"I'll wash them for you," Jimin tells her into the momentary quiet.
Soojin mumbles out a noncommittal noise. That's not the problem; Soojin wonders if Jimin realizes this. She doesn't even know what the problem is herself, really, why she's still thinking of Jimin with her hands on her hips, the way she'd spun around her so easily. Soojin's elbow digs against the inside of the car door, palm bent back and pressed up against her mouth. If she squeezes hard enough she can feel the flesh dig against ivory, the pressure so forceful it demands the entire scope of her focus. She must be smudging her lip tint like this.
Well, maybe she does know.
But that's not the point, is it?
The next week her pilfered jeans reappear folded on her bed with a yellow sticky note affixed to the top leg. It reads 미안 :) in what Soojin immediately recognizes to be Jimin's carefree script. She snorts and tosses it back into her drawer, stroking the soft denim one last time for good measure.
Soojin and Jiyoon's window faces into an open courtyard between their ring of apartment buildings. From the third floor she has a perfect shot of those who come and go, the ones who pace around for hours and hours, hands waving about as they argue with their parents on the phone. Sometimes Soojin sits by on her bed with the window cracked open, filling in the blanks wherever gusts carry away hushed conversational fragments like tempered secrets. No, mom, I'm not—tomorrow—money—I have—not looking for—job—Mom, really? Again? She imagines new lives for these unintended strangers, wondering what it is that plagues them. Bad grades at school, the medication for their pets that they can't afford? A family who asks when they plan on getting married, and when they'll bring a girlfriend home, and why are they still wasting time on that useless degree, anyway?
A dog barks and crunches an orange leaf between its teeth. Soojin watches two children play-fight under the shade of a sprawling city tree, its branches speckling spots and patches across their beaming faces.
Later that day, Jiyoon calls her down to the studio and plays her one of the demos she's been workshopping, vocals raw and amateurishly mixed.
"It sounds nice," Soojin tells her. Her fingers come up to brush back a lock of hair draped over Jiyoon's eyes, which are lasered to the screen, shoulders hunched over the keyboard.
"You're not just saying that?" Jiyoon asks. Soojin's fingers are still tangled in there, and she thinks of how this unspoken touch is Jimin's preferred display of affection. Soojin is too effusive to be so wordless, but she can occasionally glimpse merit in such mimicry; each quiet stroke by an ear, a shoulder. An evocation of discernment no simple phrase could adequately convey.
"Of course I'm not," Soojin defends. She lets her smile widen, warm and sweet. "It's my album too, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Jiyoon mumbles, worrying at her lip.
"But you're the composer here, so I trust your judgment."
Jiyoon rolls her eyes. With one swift shake of her head a piece of hair slips back out its tenuous hold by her ear and falls in front of her face, hovering above skin. She huffs and watches as it blows in place, the motion entirely futile. "That doesn't mean I can't trust your taste. You still have to sing it!"
"I'll sing anything you make," she insists simply. "Well, within my range."
"Don't sell yourself short," Jiyoon teases.
"It's true," Soojin quips, undeterred. "I'm not even half the singer you are, Jiyoon-ah."
Jiyoon side-eyes her, saying nothing. Her hair is still in her face when she hums and tries, "No one's perfect, unnie. That's the point.”
Soojin looks at her from her spinny studio chair, letting herself turn from side to side, eyes folding into little charmed crescent moons. "You sound exactly like my mother," she laughs, voice dripping with collateral fondness. "You've gotten so wise. Why do I have to be the kkondae?"
"I mean, someone needs to be the brains of the team," Jiyoon informs her matter-of-factly.
Soojin blinks. "That's why we have Jimin."
"Not you too!" Jiyoon huffs. She starts clicking around her audio program sulkily, Soojin blinking as she shuffles random beats back and forth. "Why does it always have to be Jimin?"
Hah.
Why, indeed.
Soojin realizes that her fingertips have begun to rest gently against the fabric of Jiyoon's t-shirt, oversized and worn-in, the mark of a dedicated producer.
She lets them fall away. Back into her lap. Fingers twisting together, wondering.
When they release Tag Me, Soojin feels like they've come out the gate running. That's the thing about being a trainee, really. Going on TV, doing showcases, learning how to write your own songs: none of these things prepare you for the ultimate routine, the mechanical repetition sunk into skin. No matter what they teach you it's never enough. Sure, the camera puts on five kilos, and sure, stage makeup looks natural under the biting lights. But no one tells you that when you heave through your chest and your mouth fills crimson, when the blood spills through your smiling teeth and you wait for someone—please, anyone—to just fucking call cut, the edges blur themselves out on screen. They take on the shape of a self-assured smirk. No one tells you that you're not a girl anymore, you're an agglomeration of endlessly strung-together images. You're shuttering through them at breakneck speed, and your teeth are clashing together, and the camera is still rolling.
Every night Soojin flosses so meticulously it cuts her raw. When she finally spits out she watches the red Rorschach its way down the sloping sink bowl, letting a piece of herself slip through the drain hole. The floss string wraps so tightly around her finger it turns the skin pink. She unwinds it and witnesses the color struggle back to life, valiantly filling in its own impression lines.
That's how it feels like, on the long nights of rehearsals and prerecordings. Like having the fight squeezed out of you. At Inkigayo, the lady who usually mans the snack bar takes a liking to her and starts to insist with increasing frequency that Soojin grab an ice cream bar as extra service whenever she stops by. "Look at you," she tuts evenly, every single time. "All skin and bones."
Nibbling into the freezer-frost corner of a thick fudge ice cream bar, Soojin can't help but wonder how many of them she says this to. How many of the idols who spill into the rest station looking so harried they threaten to melt right into the groovelines of the tile flooring, that is—Soojin knows the number wouldn't be modest. She finishes her fudge bar and tosses the stick out on her way to the door.
Then, two steps down the stairs, she sees her.
Rather, sees them. Jimin at the foot of the staircase with her back to Soojin, talking in hushed tones with a male idol Soojin vaguely recognizes from another rookie group. He's smiling at her, awkward and shy. He keeps looking down at something in his hands; Soojin realizes with a start that it must be his phone. That he's probably looking to exchange numbers, or IDs, hoping to get to know Jimin. Her Jimin. Her Jimin in this horribly lit broadcast stairwell that idols occasionally congregate at now that two lights have burned out, this place a rookie wouldn't be caught dead in if they knew what their careers meant to them.
Soojin is struck with it, suddenly. This ugly feeling. Rage and admonishment, she thinks. Or, no. Something greener. Something—something too large to dwell on.
"Did you take his number?" Soojin demands as she hurries her way down. The other idol has been called away. Soojin thinks she heard the tail end of an apology in there somewhere, as he finally pulled himself out of Jimin's orbit, footsteps carrying down a flight, and then another flight, stomping their way out of existence.
Soojin doesn't know why she suddenly sounds so accusatory. If Jimin were anyone else she might have startled at the steel in her voice. But Jimin isn't so easily perturbed, and instead she stares at Soojin with silent discernment, brow furrowed.
"Who were you talking to?" Soojin tries this time. She can be diplomatic. She can—she has to be. "What happened just now?"
"Unnie," Jimin begins simply. Her face wears judgment so easily; where Soojin pulls it on like a mask, Jimin's expressiveness is an extension of herself. She leans in slowly, breath fanning against her face. Asks, "Do you really think so little of me?"
Soojin doesn't know why she shivers then. She smiles back uncertainly, the one that makes her seem puppylike, the most guileless expression her face can muster. It pushes her eyebrows up just the slightest fraction.
"I don't—" she starts, but Jimin is already moving on.
"Nothing happened," she interjects. She turns around and starts walking, shrugging her stage jacket tighter. "Come on. We're going to be late."
"No, wait," Soojin tries, grabbing her arm before she can disappear around the corner. Jimin's eyes whip back and catch hers. Furious, dark. Soojin's mind is spinning.
"Just—don't do anything reckless," she whispers.
Jimin pauses. Finally, she nods, and then they're falling in line together. Step-by-step, Soojin's arm hanging loosely by her side. Hand grasping emptiness. Her fingers fell away from Jimin as they hurried down, feeling childish and uncertain, wondering why she'd held on in the first place.
They make their way back to the dressing room. There Jihyo stands to attention and graces them with a big, bright sigh, her pupils twinkling. Soojin and Jihyo are approximately the same, but Jihyo could be even more practiced than she was, almost impossibly so. That's why they made her the MC.
"There you are," she exclaims.
"Here we are," Soojin echoes back, grinning foolishly. If she smiles hard enough then maybe no one will sniff out the evidence in her palm, the mark Jimin had burned into her, lasered through her stare. "We were just grabbing a bite upstairs."
"Did you get free ice cream?" she asks. Her face cracks open, unguarded. Soojin's heart pangs in her chest.
"You know it," she says.
Then she's being called to the makeup chair.
Funnily enough, Jimin and Soojin can be easy with each other. Even though Jimin doesn't always make it seem that way, or—maybe the problem is Soojin, demanding too much. Jimin can be easy with Jaehee, and she makes the others laugh with her, not at her, in a way Soojin has never been able to fully achieve. Not Soojin, who'd convinced herself that steamrolling yourself into the punchline could be its own survival tactic. No, certainly not Soojin. Soojin who smiled like it might protect her from god knows what horrors, from a faceless scrutiny. Who feared the mirrored reflections of her own complexities.
In fewer words, Soojin is a coward. But Jimin could still be easy with her. Not in that stairwell by the Inkigayo rest station, of course, but—Jimin would always be someone who showed more than she said. Sometimes she holds Soojin like there's an entire world suspended between them, like if she makes any move to leave their connection will simply crumble to dust, particles slipping through the loose bisections of her fingers.
Soojin doesn't know what to do with that, most of the time. Doesn't know how much is hers to have. How much is hers to want.
Here's a secret:
Mix Nine doesn't even feel like the end of the world.
After everything that happens, after the company spins itself into disarray and Soojin has to field five texts a day asking her if she's okay, if things are going to work out, Soojin thinks that it could be. The end, that is. But the girls don't win anyway, and then the boys don't even get to debut. They all run headfirst and collide into the same brick wall, and a month later it's back to the start. Soojin tells herself that she's always been young.
The next year, it's still not time. The company changes face once again, the lineup peeled away and force-glued back together. Again. Again, again. Palms hitting floor, more covers to practice. Another showcase cobbled together. Haelin tells them she's off to university, that all roads collapse under their own weight eventually. Seeun messages her once, when she finally switches companies, that she thinks she might actually be debuting this time. Soojin tells her she's glad to hear it.
In 2017, Soojin is loved. She feels like the world finally makes sense, like nothing can tear her down from her perch on top. She's seventeen and it's enough.
Then 2018 hits. Soojin is propped up against a hospital bed when the trainee manager walks in and says, “We’re pulling you out of the show.”
Things happen, as they do. Not all tragedies warrant question. The thing about fame, Soojin realizes, is that its timeline is ephemeral. You spend so long being young that you don't realize the line has been crossed until the clock is already ticking. You forget that there's a fine line, in industries like this, between the too-young and the expected, forget it until you've lost your own good will. Until your image has depleted in obscurity, until you don't realize how much you've let go of before everyone around you is plucked away one by one and you're left standing, almost alone, suddenly the oldest.
It's 2017, and then 2018, and then 2019. Then—
In 2020, they debut.
To Soojin, this is the end of the world.
Something Soojin has never told anyone before is that after the accident, they made her see a therapist. Or, not a therapist. But a counselor. Someone to just talk to. We take the mental health of our artists extremely seriously, she recalls one of the higher-ups telling her, which had struck her as funny then because Soojin had only been a trainee with nothing but a handful of under-performing TV episodes to her name.
But, anyway. The counselor made her walk through these points in her life as if she were making a timeline for a middle school history project. She asked Soojin to sit with what had happened to her in December, and how she felt about losing the show. She wanted to teach Soojin how to reframe her ideas of loss and pain, what it meant to have something.
Even now, Soojin wonders. Her question would go a little something like this:
Do you win when you finally debut? Do you win when the smiling nurse sits you up and eases the IV out the tender encasing of your arm, the fold where your elbow bends? Do you win when a girl pushes you into a plush hotel bed the night before they hand you an ornate trophy and tightens a palm around your shoulder, kisses you like her life depends on it? Like she's read your mind, like she knows, she knows, she knows this is all you've ever wanted?
Soojin doesn't know.
Soojin doesn't even remember who it was, anymore. One of the girls who pulled her closer with a gossiping face and asked something along the lines of, Isn't Hyojin-oppa so handsome? Soojin-ah, what do you think of him? There had been an expectation of her affections, this need to dissect her desires. Soojin was on top, front-and-center, untouchable. Even the girls who ranked closely to her wore their jealousy openly at times, something strange and unnavigable. Jiyoon, down in the 40s, was of the few who knew to weather it with her.
Soojin is simple, they whispered to one another. Turning to her, You're so pretty. You know that, right?
Beneath it all, a voice rose in harmony. A voice that broke through and strung itself in thick, coiled rope between her ears. A voice that asked, Can't you be simple?
A voice that pushed at her, demanded, Can't you just be the girl you're supposed to be? The girl we want from you?
Soojin imagines it like an arithmetic question. A game of stone-cold logic, mere induction. Like:
Imagine that you're standing next to a girl. You're twenty years old and every time she is kind to you you are seized with a furious want, something that begs you to reach in and grab at her collar and kiss her senseless. There are five months between you, not that your age has ever meant anything, really, and the countless late-night dreams that shape your untenable fantasies have ballooned to the point of bursting, distended by impossibility. You dream of two girls. Of you and her in the dark, of, of, of...
Imagine that she is twice the person you'll ever be. That she is three times more confident and four times sharper. Five times meaner, six times more accommodating, seven times more driven. How many seconds are in a minute? An hour, a day?
How many days until you give in?
Soojin was never a good student. Turns out she's a horrible friend, too.
Turns out she could never be the girl they wanted her to be.
Put yourself in Soojin's shoes, one last time. Imagine that you're at the practice studio throwing yourself into a new piece of choreography, and imagine that every time you fall to the floor it caresses back. That its embrace is a bruising thing, scouring the skin off your frame. That it asks you, Is this what you wanted? Really, is it?
Imagine now that when you fall, your knees scrape red and raw and your open palms kiss the floor like a confession. Imagine that all you can tell yourself as you scramble back to your feet is, Not this time. Not now.
You stumble on your way up. But—not this time, you remind yourself. Again.
"You're too soft, Soojin-ah," your instructor is saying. She's always been sympathetic. You're one of the best dancers, just sore and unsure of yourself at times. She eyes you through the mirror, where your fractured self heaves on a breath. "Look at how Jimin does it."
Of course, Jimin's chest rises and snaps effortlessly to the beat. Her hair creates space around itself as it whips back, snarling into thin air. Sharp enough to cut. Fist against flesh, cracking the skin apart.
Again, you keep telling yourself. Because you have to. Because maybe if you lose yourself to the mantra it'll flood the waters around you, until you are eroded into a singular promise. Because maybe if you lose yourself to the promise it will shape you into a girl who doesn't need to look. Into a girl who doesn't need to want, or need, or desire.
Again. Again.
"Is that Jaehee?" Jimin asks when Soojin slips out the crack of her bedroom, gently clicking the door behind her, light spluttering out with the arcing motion. Jimin is sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of steaming tea. Jaehee has just cried herself to sleep, head in Soojin's arms, furiously homesick. The sticky core of her heart was sensitive to a fault.
"She misses her family," Soojin sighs, drawing up a seat at the table. "Came in trying not to cry, asked if she could talk."
Jimin hums as if this comes as no surprise to her. She pushes the cup toward Soojin, who cradles it between two hands and takes a tentative sip at its rim. Her tongue instantly scalds.
"Jaehee is still so soft," Soojin says.
"She is," Jimin agrees, easy and fond. Jaehee would always be Jimin's, before she was anyone else's. They both knew this.
"She can't shield herself at all," Soojin continues. Not the way Jihyo can, she doesn't say. Not the way I make myself. Not the way you've never needed to.
Jimin looks thoughtful, eyes cast down. One hand's finger begins to trace meandering shapes into its opposite palm before she looks back up, head cocked.
"That just means you've led us well, right?" she says. "That she can trust you with these things, and doesn't have to worry about them herself."
Soojin can't help it—the proposition makes her snort. Disbelieving and squirmish, prey to her own rancorous undercurrent, a poor man's attempt at self-effacement.
"Is that what I've been doing?" she whispers.
The thing is that they could have made any of them leader. It was a formality more than anything else, the allness of a singular name, but even then there had never been good reason to thrust it solely toward Soojin. At times she wondered why they'd pushed the badge onto her, why they'd thought this mere title could encompass the volume of her grief and struggle.
If you bleed for us enough, we'll put you at the helm. If you present enough of your scars, you can assume the armor once again.
Is that all Soojin had been destined for?
"You're better with her than I am," Soojin sighs. Some leader she was, petting Jaehee's hair fruitlessly, smiling and cooing at her. Laying bare her inadequacies.
"That's not true," Jimin allows, even though this is the most honest Soojin has ever been.
This time, Jimin looks at her like she's seeing her down to the marrow. That same laser focus from the stairwell. She's always had something of a shrewd glare, but it feels even more pointed when Soojin is around her, like one of those dreams she used to have as an unassuming child. Back when the worst nightmare she could fathom was showing up to school naked, everyone in their ironed dress shirts and pleated skirts pointing and laughing, seeing more of her than she could ever bear to imagine, more than she could bear to see herself.
Jimin could drag her through a lot of shit. But she'd never doubt her here.
"I'm glad it's you," she says.
All things start with momentary confessions. Lingering stares, minute embellishments. The ability to see through obscuring walls. To pull them aside, brick by brick, and know that what is forming between you is finally becoming something. Something instinctive, born of a stronger foundation, built into the roots themselves. A wall can be toppled down, shaken to the ground. This could only be severed.
Soojin is performed. That's how she was always taught to be. For sixteen of them, that was the Play M philosophy.
More than all, though, Soojin is desperate.
Kim Jimin kisses her for the first time between a string of rookie award nominations and year-end showbiz fanfare. The hotel rooms they're herded into this time are needlessly ostentatious, Soojin watching in bemusement as Soeun takes a minimum of six selfies wrapped up in the fucking shower curtains.
Technically, Soojin is put into a room with Jiyoon. This detail, however, quickly escapes them once they're given free rein of their evenings. Five minutes later Jiyoon has bolted out into the hallway, Soojin is curled up in bed looking through her school friends' photos on her secret Instagram account, and Jimin has begun knocking senselessly at the door, demanding to be let in. She's about to send the entire 5-star hotel crumbling down at this point, its frame shaking on its hinges.
"Jiyoon and Soeun have roped everyone into an apocalyptic game of Halli Galli," Jimin explains the moment Soojin lets her in, breezing past her to the bed. "Last I heard, Soeun was trying to convince Jaehee to bet half of her shopping allowance on one round. They'll be there a while."
"Okay?" Soojin says, taken aback. "Um, hi?"
"Unnie," Jimin says, pulling her forward.
A beat later, she's kissing her.
Like she said: the end of the world.
Like she said—like she said:
What Soojin meant when she said that her age has never really meant anything is that authoritativeness would always elude her. She's wondered at times how she might have shaped herself into someone like Jimin, her Jimin. The Jimin who exudes such simple confidence, who could scoff and unleash unapologetic attitude and bend toward other people's will and hold Soojin together and laugh at her pain in various strokes, the definition of a multitude.
Soojin should have known, when it came down to it, that Jimin would kiss her first. That Soojin would lean in and chase after her, mouth caught in some forlorn game of follow-the-leader. The script toppling over, flipping around, doing somersaults on the crown of her head.
"Right now?" Soojin finds herself asking, hushed. Bemused. She isn't sure this is real, but she's too afraid to challenge it.
"Do you not want to?" Jimin asks.
That, in the end, is all Soojin really needs to hear.
Somewhere into the third or maybe fourth kiss, Jimin rucks her tank top up and out of the way. Like this, her midriff exposes. Her spaghetti straps run loosely around her shoulders, bunched around the line of her collarbone. Jimin's hands trail up the expanse of her legs. Her thumbs press lightly into her inner thighs, rubbing slow circles into her trembling skin. Fingers dip into the space beneath her skirt and pause at the edge of her safety shorts, slowly sliding them down.
"Ah," Soojin punches out, shifting around minutely, watching Jimin move around through a half-shuttered gaze.
"Unnie," Jimin says, softly this time. You see: she can be soft when she wants to be. More than anyone Soojin knew, Jimin could convey all the affection in the world through a simple touch. A hand to a shoulder, four fingers carding sweetly through freshly blow-dried hair, arms pressed around her—or Jaehee, or Jiyoon, or anyone, really—in a vice-like embrace. Soojin tries to suppress a shiver, breathing laboriously through a wave of hot anticipation. Through the way those same hands prod and pull around her. Recontextualized, the skin burns. "Can’t you relax, for once?"
"I'm relaxed," she lies. She's never felt more on fire in her entire life. She squirms as her shorts go down, and then Jimin's fingers are back, pressing briefly into her through her underwear. Soojin can feel how the fabric has soaked through. The look on Jimin's face is unplaceable.
"You're already—" she starts.
"Shut up," Soojin whines, loudly tossing around. "Do you have to say it like that?!"
"It's not a bad thing," Jimin laughs.
"Well, you're embarrassing me."
Jimin makes a fond, dismissive noise. "There's no need to be embarrassed," she reminds her. As if shame weren't Soojin's default emotion, or pouting her primary expression of self. Then Jimin is worrying at her lip. Then she's learning forward again, pressing a kiss to Soojin's open mouth, licking into her hungrily.
"Unnie, you're..." she begins, trailing off. She sits up. There's a word bursting on the tip of her tongue, and Soojin doesn't know what she wants it to be. Beautiful? Cute? She's heard these ones time and time again. Hot? Something desperate wraps its tendrils around her, dragging unbidden thoughts to the forefront of her overactive imagination. Mine?
Jimin doesn't continue the thought, though. Instead she says, "I already told you. Just relax, okay?"
This time, she helps Jimin get her underwear off, although it isn't before forcing Jimin's shirt to join the steadily growing pile of sweat-soaked clothes. Soojin is sloppy with things like this, historically. One wrist scrambling for purchase on the sheets, the other one digging in desperately, lips torn between frenzied teeth trying to keep each agonizing breath in, face pressed down in all the wrong directions.
Jimin isn't like that, though. She brushes at Soojin's breasts in sure circles, watching Soojin writhe through quiet gasps. I've got you, she whispers, mouthing lovingly at the strained stretch of her neck, where Soojin is in flames, warm to the touch, pliable and at her mercy. Unnie. You can trust me, she says, and god does Soojin want to. The pressure setting her on fire with every stroke, each touch extinguishing the winding, encircling stream of her desires.
"Fuck," Soojin manages eventually. The word punches out of her brokenly, wrecked and raw.
"That's the spirit," Jimin says, gentle. And then Soojin is falling apart around her.
"Remember that idol from before?" Soojin whispers into the relative dark, some time later. A hotel lamp out by the futon-side table flickers on solitarily. She thinks she must have blacked out at some point because she can barely feel her legs. "The one who was trying to give you his number?"
"Hey. Why are you so convinced he was trying to give me his number?"
Soojin sits up at that. "He wasn't?"
"Well…" Jimin sighs. Finally, giggling, she allows, "Okay, sure. He was. But I told him no, so I didn't have to explain myself to you."
"I guess you didn't," Soojin concedes, fighting off the sensation that explodes in her chest. She tries to shutter-shade the firework display unfurling inside of her by rolling down and staring right into Jimin's eyes, fox-like and grounding. Sharp enough to draw blood.
"Fuck that guy anyway," she says.
"I'll pass," Jimin retorts.
Soojin flushes. "Shut up," she adds this time. "Please shut up." Several rounds of Halli Galli can only go on for so long, even amongst five girls with competitive streaks an ocean wide. They'll need to get up eventually and—oh god, Soojin thinks, mind wandering. The fancy shower? Her face heats immediately.
"What is it?" Jimin demands.
"Nothing," she squeaks. They'll—they'll have get up and face the music eventually, is what she was trying to get at. But for now Soojin just wants this, pulling Jimin into her own orbit, kissing her with wild abandon. Hers, even for just the rest of this hour. Jimin's lip gloss has long rubbed off, but she doesn't mind her spit-slick and sore like this, mouth hungry, wanting, tender.
The end of the world has never been so beautiful. For just five, ten, twenty more minutes, Soojin is at peace.
"You really don't have to come with me today."
By Soojin's third-floor window, a paltry sliver of light tumbles in through her hastily shuttered blinds. Soojin shrugs her shirt on. The fabric catches momentarily against the mouth of her bra, and Jimin hums as Soojin straightens the hem out and turns back around, leaning over to stuff odd belongings into her backpack.
"Maybe I want to," Jimin counters eventually. Her voice is languid and easy; she makes no move to exit Soojin's bed. This isn't even her room, Soojin doesn't bother telling her. "I'm a free woman."
Soojin rolls her eyes. Then, because she knows Jimin can't see her, she rolls them again. "Well," she bites out. "Sure."
Soojin's first day of filming has fallen on a Tuesday. Usually, Tuesdays mean that Jihyo is busy going over rehearsals and MC-ing in Sangamdong, but that the rest of them are blissfully exempt from group schedules. If she were here, Jiyoon would be spending her day in the studio going over a new composition with one of their in-house producers, maybe even roping Soojin into offering more useless feedback. Instead she's at home, so every so often she spams them screenshots of vaguely abstract paintings and absurdly targeted comic panels she's gotten into drawing over the past few months. Jaehee is probably getting up to no good in Hyewon and Soeun's room, if their raucous voices are any indication, Soojin's sweet-eyed girl forever victim to their horrible influences.
But, of course, Jimin is here. She's wearing one of Soojin's shirts, a faded-out pajama tee she usually wears to sleep. It's not her favorite, but it's still hers. When Soojin sits back on the bed to slip her necklace on, Jimin leans forward and kisses the back of her neck almost feverishly, lips pressed to parched, summer-heat skin.
"Stop that," Soojin giggles. Her skin runs warm and alive. When Jimin caresses her the touch doesn't threaten to slide her off the bone. She doesn't feel like she might just melt into a heap and burrow along the lines of the floor, the fight ripped out her frame.
"Mmm," Jimin mumbles. Her teeth tease at a bite. Soojin stands up and pulls her out of bed, eyes crinkling.
"You're just going to sit there and watch me film my stupid webdrama? All day?"
Jimin shrugs. "Sounds like fun. You'll be all cute and done-up."
Soojin gives her a little glare and pats herself on the cheeks. "So I'm not cute right now?"
Scoffing, Jimin sidesteps around her and eases her way out the door. "If you don't hurry up, I'm using your toothbrush."
"Wait, what? Jimin, get back here!"
Fuck, she's not even wearing pants yet. When the hell did Jimin find time to get dressed? With a quiet huff she turns toward her drawer and goes to pick a pair out. Her fingers pause as they fall toward light blue denim, palm stilling at the softness of each thread. Each leg topples down as she unfolds the jeans in front of her, smiling to herself. She pushes herself up and shrugs them on.
Later on, in the car, Jimin's pinky will trace along her overturned hand in silent circles. In the space that hangs between their seats, something will be preserved, or created. Something presented. Something privy to only their own eyes, Soojin's shoulders turned ever so slightly toward Jimin, each quiet note of disbelieving laughter boxed in by the liminal corners of this transitory space. A girl learning, finally, to uninterrupt herself.
Is this it? Soojin wonders briefly. The end, or the beginning, or something in between?
Doesn't matter now, she realizes.
🏹
sorry
fandom: weeekly
pairing: soojin/monday
rating: m
word count: 6.6k
don't worry about it
warnings for
If there's anything to be said for Soojin's leadership skills, it's that she doesn't run a tight ship.
Soojin swears she gave it a shot. Really, honest to god, she actually did. The problem is that it didn't take long to recognize that the members were only wont to listen to her because they were nice girls who liked her, who thought that she was cute in her own bumbling and hopeless sort of way. Soojin would never take that sort of loyalty for granted.
Except that now it's half past six on a dreary Thursday morning. They have a reality shoot to get to in an hour, the managers will be barging in here at any moment now, and someone has just stolen her favorite pants.
"Girls," Soojin calls out. She drags a hand down her face in abject disbelief. "Has anyone seen my pants?"
Four heads whip up and stare at her from the kitchen table. Soeun blinks slowly, as if working through a trick exam question. Her spoon clanks against the bowl of overflowing corn flakes sat out in front of her.
"You're wearing them right now," she informs her unhelpfully.
"Not these ones," Soojin stresses. "My distressed blue jeans, the ones that flare out at the bottom? I wear them all the time?"
"Ah." That's Jiyoon this time, looking mildly guilty as she downs a glass of water in poor avoidance of Soojin's burning stare.
"Jiyoon-ah."
"Unnie," Jiyoon tries, smiling unconvincingly. "Jimin—well, Jimin asked if she could borrow them!"
"My favorite pants?"
Jiyoon cringes slightly at her shrill tone. Soojin wills her hackles to settle. "You have five of them like that!" she defends. "How was I supposed to know!"
Before Soojin can say anything else, Jiyoon looks somewhere vaguely past her shoulder and instantly deflates. "Oh, there she is. Be mad at her instead!"
In that moment, Kim Jimin appears at the mouth of the hallway wearing a fitted white top, the neckline low enough to boast a silver necklace that bounces at her collarbone, and—of course—Soojin's favorite pants. Jaehee is still in her pajamas next to her, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Soojin assumes from the arm around her waist that Jimin has just undergone the trouble of shaking her awake, herding her into the kitchen like a disoriented sheepling.
"Kim Jimin," Soojin sighs out.
Jimin gives her a look like she has absolutely no idea what's going on. And, also, that she couldn't care less to find out. "What?"
Jihyo shifts around in her seat as Jaehee settles down beside her. Jimin is still standing there, looking way too stupid and model-esque for her own good, arms akimbo like a power statement.
"You know," Jihyo starts, dimple twinkling innocently. "They do look pretty good on her."
When Jimin fails to react: "The pants," Jiyoon supplies brightly.
The worst part, Soojin thinks, is that it's true.
"These ones?" Jimin taunts. Then, clearly just at Soojin's expense, clearly to fuck with her head even more, she spins around to show her legs off. They fit her perfectly. Fabric hugging every curve, sloping in all the right places. Worse, they taper off above the ankle in a way they never have on Soojin, who had to force herself to love the way they fell to the tops of her sneakers. She isn't even that short!
Soojin's mouth goes dry. Her hackles are back up, through the roof. She wishes she could tear her eyes away.
"Unnie, what's the big deal?" Hyewon laughs. Her booming voice cuts through any vestiges of tension. They sliver back to their dark, desperate crevices. "We've even shared toothbrushes before!"
"Shared isn't the word I'd use," Soojin retorts primly. Now she's remembering the time Soeun had cocked her head at her and gone, Oh, this was yours?, before tossing Soojin's toothbrush back into its cup like a communal utensil. "I'm still traumatized by that!"
Soeun laughs as Soojin flashes them her million-dollar pout. "You're too dramatic," she chides. "Unnie, haven't we been through enough at this point? Can't a girl share her toothbrush every now and then?"
"Please," Soojin whines. This isn't even what they were discussing, she realizes. Soojin still has to finish her elaborate morning routine and lather on a handful of sunscreen before their managers start banging at their front door. Jimin, to her grave despair, is still standing there doing ridiculous poses while Jaehee laughs and claps along. "My pants."
"Well, it's not my fault. Someone forgot to do the laundry," Jimin defends, shrugging.
Jaehee gasps in clear affront. "Hey, why am I being brought into this?"
"Now you know how it feels," Soojin tells her stubbornly. Add that to the profile: a leader always willing to lower herself to another's level. She didn't have an ounce of righteousness in her whole entire helpless body.
"Now I have to wear these stupid leggings," she adds sulkily.
Hyewon, bless her heart, starts to coo at her.
"Okay. Everyone stop making fun of our leader!" she announces authoritatively, as if she hadn't been the one facilitating the teasing three minutes ago. Hyewon could be entirely too sixteen sometimes. A moment later, Soojin is being enveloped by 170 centimeters-and-counting of overgrown girl, the press of her arms so strong the air nearly knocks out of her lungs.
"Please stop growing," she wheezes into the muscle of Hyewon's tightly flexed bicep. Hyewon makes a vaguely contrite noise and minutely loosens her grip. "I'm too young to die, and asphyxiation is not the way to go."
"Sorry, unnie!"
After they've rinsed out their bowls and washed up in the bathroom and distributed themselves across two manager vans headed out of town, Soojin leans back and lets her eyes slide shut. Jimin is in the seat next to her, loudly fiddling with her seatbelt. Jiyoon is in the backseat blasting indie songs through her headphones, so loud the words cut through unintelligibly between the lull of each red light.
"I'll wash them for you," Jimin tells her into the momentary quiet.
Soojin mumbles out a noncommittal noise. That's not the problem; Soojin wonders if Jimin realizes this. She doesn't even know what the problem is herself, really, why she's still thinking of Jimin with her hands on her hips, the way she'd spun around her so easily. Soojin's elbow digs against the inside of the car door, palm bent back and pressed up against her mouth. If she squeezes hard enough she can feel the flesh dig against ivory, the pressure so forceful it demands the entire scope of her focus. She must be smudging her lip tint like this.
Well, maybe she does know.
But that's not the point, is it?
The next week her pilfered jeans reappear folded on her bed with a yellow sticky note affixed to the top leg. It reads 미안 :) in what Soojin immediately recognizes to be Jimin's carefree script. She snorts and tosses it back into her drawer, stroking the soft denim one last time for good measure.
Soojin and Jiyoon's window faces into an open courtyard between their ring of apartment buildings. From the third floor she has a perfect shot of those who come and go, the ones who pace around for hours and hours, hands waving about as they argue with their parents on the phone. Sometimes Soojin sits by on her bed with the window cracked open, filling in the blanks wherever gusts carry away hushed conversational fragments like tempered secrets. No, mom, I'm not—tomorrow—money—I have—not looking for—job—Mom, really? Again? She imagines new lives for these unintended strangers, wondering what it is that plagues them. Bad grades at school, the medication for their pets that they can't afford? A family who asks when they plan on getting married, and when they'll bring a girlfriend home, and why are they still wasting time on that useless degree, anyway?
A dog barks and crunches an orange leaf between its teeth. Soojin watches two children play-fight under the shade of a sprawling city tree, its branches speckling spots and patches across their beaming faces.
Later that day, Jiyoon calls her down to the studio and plays her one of the demos she's been workshopping, vocals raw and amateurishly mixed.
"It sounds nice," Soojin tells her. Her fingers come up to brush back a lock of hair draped over Jiyoon's eyes, which are lasered to the screen, shoulders hunched over the keyboard.
"You're not just saying that?" Jiyoon asks. Soojin's fingers are still tangled in there, and she thinks of how this unspoken touch is Jimin's preferred display of affection. Soojin is too effusive to be so wordless, but she can occasionally glimpse merit in such mimicry; each quiet stroke by an ear, a shoulder. An evocation of discernment no simple phrase could adequately convey.
"Of course I'm not," Soojin defends. She lets her smile widen, warm and sweet. "It's my album too, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Jiyoon mumbles, worrying at her lip.
"But you're the composer here, so I trust your judgment."
Jiyoon rolls her eyes. With one swift shake of her head a piece of hair slips back out its tenuous hold by her ear and falls in front of her face, hovering above skin. She huffs and watches as it blows in place, the motion entirely futile. "That doesn't mean I can't trust your taste. You still have to sing it!"
"I'll sing anything you make," she insists simply. "Well, within my range."
"Don't sell yourself short," Jiyoon teases.
"It's true," Soojin quips, undeterred. "I'm not even half the singer you are, Jiyoon-ah."
Jiyoon side-eyes her, saying nothing. Her hair is still in her face when she hums and tries, "No one's perfect, unnie. That's the point.”
Soojin looks at her from her spinny studio chair, letting herself turn from side to side, eyes folding into little charmed crescent moons. "You sound exactly like my mother," she laughs, voice dripping with collateral fondness. "You've gotten so wise. Why do I have to be the kkondae?"
"I mean, someone needs to be the brains of the team," Jiyoon informs her matter-of-factly.
Soojin blinks. "That's why we have Jimin."
"Not you too!" Jiyoon huffs. She starts clicking around her audio program sulkily, Soojin blinking as she shuffles random beats back and forth. "Why does it always have to be Jimin?"
Hah.
Why, indeed.
Soojin realizes that her fingertips have begun to rest gently against the fabric of Jiyoon's t-shirt, oversized and worn-in, the mark of a dedicated producer.
She lets them fall away. Back into her lap. Fingers twisting together, wondering.
When they release Tag Me, Soojin feels like they've come out the gate running. That's the thing about being a trainee, really. Going on TV, doing showcases, learning how to write your own songs: none of these things prepare you for the ultimate routine, the mechanical repetition sunk into skin. No matter what they teach you it's never enough. Sure, the camera puts on five kilos, and sure, stage makeup looks natural under the biting lights. But no one tells you that when you heave through your chest and your mouth fills crimson, when the blood spills through your smiling teeth and you wait for someone—please, anyone—to just fucking call cut, the edges blur themselves out on screen. They take on the shape of a self-assured smirk. No one tells you that you're not a girl anymore, you're an agglomeration of endlessly strung-together images. You're shuttering through them at breakneck speed, and your teeth are clashing together, and the camera is still rolling.
Every night Soojin flosses so meticulously it cuts her raw. When she finally spits out she watches the red Rorschach its way down the sloping sink bowl, letting a piece of herself slip through the drain hole. The floss string wraps so tightly around her finger it turns the skin pink. She unwinds it and witnesses the color struggle back to life, valiantly filling in its own impression lines.
That's how it feels like, on the long nights of rehearsals and prerecordings. Like having the fight squeezed out of you. At Inkigayo, the lady who usually mans the snack bar takes a liking to her and starts to insist with increasing frequency that Soojin grab an ice cream bar as extra service whenever she stops by. "Look at you," she tuts evenly, every single time. "All skin and bones."
Nibbling into the freezer-frost corner of a thick fudge ice cream bar, Soojin can't help but wonder how many of them she says this to. How many of the idols who spill into the rest station looking so harried they threaten to melt right into the groovelines of the tile flooring, that is—Soojin knows the number wouldn't be modest. She finishes her fudge bar and tosses the stick out on her way to the door.
Then, two steps down the stairs, she sees her.
Rather, sees them. Jimin at the foot of the staircase with her back to Soojin, talking in hushed tones with a male idol Soojin vaguely recognizes from another rookie group. He's smiling at her, awkward and shy. He keeps looking down at something in his hands; Soojin realizes with a start that it must be his phone. That he's probably looking to exchange numbers, or IDs, hoping to get to know Jimin. Her Jimin. Her Jimin in this horribly lit broadcast stairwell that idols occasionally congregate at now that two lights have burned out, this place a rookie wouldn't be caught dead in if they knew what their careers meant to them.
Soojin is struck with it, suddenly. This ugly feeling. Rage and admonishment, she thinks. Or, no. Something greener. Something—something too large to dwell on.
"Did you take his number?" Soojin demands as she hurries her way down. The other idol has been called away. Soojin thinks she heard the tail end of an apology in there somewhere, as he finally pulled himself out of Jimin's orbit, footsteps carrying down a flight, and then another flight, stomping their way out of existence.
Soojin doesn't know why she suddenly sounds so accusatory. If Jimin were anyone else she might have startled at the steel in her voice. But Jimin isn't so easily perturbed, and instead she stares at Soojin with silent discernment, brow furrowed.
"Who were you talking to?" Soojin tries this time. She can be diplomatic. She can—she has to be. "What happened just now?"
"Unnie," Jimin begins simply. Her face wears judgment so easily; where Soojin pulls it on like a mask, Jimin's expressiveness is an extension of herself. She leans in slowly, breath fanning against her face. Asks, "Do you really think so little of me?"
Soojin doesn't know why she shivers then. She smiles back uncertainly, the one that makes her seem puppylike, the most guileless expression her face can muster. It pushes her eyebrows up just the slightest fraction.
"I don't—" she starts, but Jimin is already moving on.
"Nothing happened," she interjects. She turns around and starts walking, shrugging her stage jacket tighter. "Come on. We're going to be late."
"No, wait," Soojin tries, grabbing her arm before she can disappear around the corner. Jimin's eyes whip back and catch hers. Furious, dark. Soojin's mind is spinning.
"Just—don't do anything reckless," she whispers.
Jimin pauses. Finally, she nods, and then they're falling in line together. Step-by-step, Soojin's arm hanging loosely by her side. Hand grasping emptiness. Her fingers fell away from Jimin as they hurried down, feeling childish and uncertain, wondering why she'd held on in the first place.
They make their way back to the dressing room. There Jihyo stands to attention and graces them with a big, bright sigh, her pupils twinkling. Soojin and Jihyo are approximately the same, but Jihyo could be even more practiced than she was, almost impossibly so. That's why they made her the MC.
"There you are," she exclaims.
"Here we are," Soojin echoes back, grinning foolishly. If she smiles hard enough then maybe no one will sniff out the evidence in her palm, the mark Jimin had burned into her, lasered through her stare. "We were just grabbing a bite upstairs."
"Did you get free ice cream?" she asks. Her face cracks open, unguarded. Soojin's heart pangs in her chest.
"You know it," she says.
Then she's being called to the makeup chair.
Funnily enough, Jimin and Soojin can be easy with each other. Even though Jimin doesn't always make it seem that way, or—maybe the problem is Soojin, demanding too much. Jimin can be easy with Jaehee, and she makes the others laugh with her, not at her, in a way Soojin has never been able to fully achieve. Not Soojin, who'd convinced herself that steamrolling yourself into the punchline could be its own survival tactic. No, certainly not Soojin. Soojin who smiled like it might protect her from god knows what horrors, from a faceless scrutiny. Who feared the mirrored reflections of her own complexities.
In fewer words, Soojin is a coward. But Jimin could still be easy with her. Not in that stairwell by the Inkigayo rest station, of course, but—Jimin would always be someone who showed more than she said. Sometimes she holds Soojin like there's an entire world suspended between them, like if she makes any move to leave their connection will simply crumble to dust, particles slipping through the loose bisections of her fingers.
Soojin doesn't know what to do with that, most of the time. Doesn't know how much is hers to have. How much is hers to want.
Here's a secret:
Mix Nine doesn't even feel like the end of the world.
After everything that happens, after the company spins itself into disarray and Soojin has to field five texts a day asking her if she's okay, if things are going to work out, Soojin thinks that it could be. The end, that is. But the girls don't win anyway, and then the boys don't even get to debut. They all run headfirst and collide into the same brick wall, and a month later it's back to the start. Soojin tells herself that she's always been young.
The next year, it's still not time. The company changes face once again, the lineup peeled away and force-glued back together. Again. Again, again. Palms hitting floor, more covers to practice. Another showcase cobbled together. Haelin tells them she's off to university, that all roads collapse under their own weight eventually. Seeun messages her once, when she finally switches companies, that she thinks she might actually be debuting this time. Soojin tells her she's glad to hear it.
In 2017, Soojin is loved. She feels like the world finally makes sense, like nothing can tear her down from her perch on top. She's seventeen and it's enough.
Then 2018 hits. Soojin is propped up against a hospital bed when the trainee manager walks in and says, “We’re pulling you out of the show.”
Things happen, as they do. Not all tragedies warrant question. The thing about fame, Soojin realizes, is that its timeline is ephemeral. You spend so long being young that you don't realize the line has been crossed until the clock is already ticking. You forget that there's a fine line, in industries like this, between the too-young and the expected, forget it until you've lost your own good will. Until your image has depleted in obscurity, until you don't realize how much you've let go of before everyone around you is plucked away one by one and you're left standing, almost alone, suddenly the oldest.
It's 2017, and then 2018, and then 2019. Then—
In 2020, they debut.
To Soojin, this is the end of the world.
Something Soojin has never told anyone before is that after the accident, they made her see a therapist. Or, not a therapist. But a counselor. Someone to just talk to. We take the mental health of our artists extremely seriously, she recalls one of the higher-ups telling her, which had struck her as funny then because Soojin had only been a trainee with nothing but a handful of under-performing TV episodes to her name.
But, anyway. The counselor made her walk through these points in her life as if she were making a timeline for a middle school history project. She asked Soojin to sit with what had happened to her in December, and how she felt about losing the show. She wanted to teach Soojin how to reframe her ideas of loss and pain, what it meant to have something.
Even now, Soojin wonders. Her question would go a little something like this:
Do you win when you finally debut? Do you win when the smiling nurse sits you up and eases the IV out the tender encasing of your arm, the fold where your elbow bends? Do you win when a girl pushes you into a plush hotel bed the night before they hand you an ornate trophy and tightens a palm around your shoulder, kisses you like her life depends on it? Like she's read your mind, like she knows, she knows, she knows this is all you've ever wanted?
Soojin doesn't know.
Soojin doesn't even remember who it was, anymore. One of the girls who pulled her closer with a gossiping face and asked something along the lines of, Isn't Hyojin-oppa so handsome? Soojin-ah, what do you think of him? There had been an expectation of her affections, this need to dissect her desires. Soojin was on top, front-and-center, untouchable. Even the girls who ranked closely to her wore their jealousy openly at times, something strange and unnavigable. Jiyoon, down in the 40s, was of the few who knew to weather it with her.
Soojin is simple, they whispered to one another. Turning to her, You're so pretty. You know that, right?
Beneath it all, a voice rose in harmony. A voice that broke through and strung itself in thick, coiled rope between her ears. A voice that asked, Can't you be simple?
A voice that pushed at her, demanded, Can't you just be the girl you're supposed to be? The girl we want from you?
Soojin imagines it like an arithmetic question. A game of stone-cold logic, mere induction. Like:
Imagine that you're standing next to a girl. You're twenty years old and every time she is kind to you you are seized with a furious want, something that begs you to reach in and grab at her collar and kiss her senseless. There are five months between you, not that your age has ever meant anything, really, and the countless late-night dreams that shape your untenable fantasies have ballooned to the point of bursting, distended by impossibility. You dream of two girls. Of you and her in the dark, of, of, of...
Imagine that she is twice the person you'll ever be. That she is three times more confident and four times sharper. Five times meaner, six times more accommodating, seven times more driven. How many seconds are in a minute? An hour, a day?
How many days until you give in?
Soojin was never a good student. Turns out she's a horrible friend, too.
Turns out she could never be the girl they wanted her to be.
Put yourself in Soojin's shoes, one last time. Imagine that you're at the practice studio throwing yourself into a new piece of choreography, and imagine that every time you fall to the floor it caresses back. That its embrace is a bruising thing, scouring the skin off your frame. That it asks you, Is this what you wanted? Really, is it?
Imagine now that when you fall, your knees scrape red and raw and your open palms kiss the floor like a confession. Imagine that all you can tell yourself as you scramble back to your feet is, Not this time. Not now.
You stumble on your way up. But—not this time, you remind yourself. Again.
"You're too soft, Soojin-ah," your instructor is saying. She's always been sympathetic. You're one of the best dancers, just sore and unsure of yourself at times. She eyes you through the mirror, where your fractured self heaves on a breath. "Look at how Jimin does it."
Of course, Jimin's chest rises and snaps effortlessly to the beat. Her hair creates space around itself as it whips back, snarling into thin air. Sharp enough to cut. Fist against flesh, cracking the skin apart.
Again, you keep telling yourself. Because you have to. Because maybe if you lose yourself to the mantra it'll flood the waters around you, until you are eroded into a singular promise. Because maybe if you lose yourself to the promise it will shape you into a girl who doesn't need to look. Into a girl who doesn't need to want, or need, or desire.
Again. Again.
"Is that Jaehee?" Jimin asks when Soojin slips out the crack of her bedroom, gently clicking the door behind her, light spluttering out with the arcing motion. Jimin is sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of steaming tea. Jaehee has just cried herself to sleep, head in Soojin's arms, furiously homesick. The sticky core of her heart was sensitive to a fault.
"She misses her family," Soojin sighs, drawing up a seat at the table. "Came in trying not to cry, asked if she could talk."
Jimin hums as if this comes as no surprise to her. She pushes the cup toward Soojin, who cradles it between two hands and takes a tentative sip at its rim. Her tongue instantly scalds.
"Jaehee is still so soft," Soojin says.
"She is," Jimin agrees, easy and fond. Jaehee would always be Jimin's, before she was anyone else's. They both knew this.
"She can't shield herself at all," Soojin continues. Not the way Jihyo can, she doesn't say. Not the way I make myself. Not the way you've never needed to.
Jimin looks thoughtful, eyes cast down. One hand's finger begins to trace meandering shapes into its opposite palm before she looks back up, head cocked.
"That just means you've led us well, right?" she says. "That she can trust you with these things, and doesn't have to worry about them herself."
Soojin can't help it—the proposition makes her snort. Disbelieving and squirmish, prey to her own rancorous undercurrent, a poor man's attempt at self-effacement.
"Is that what I've been doing?" she whispers.
The thing is that they could have made any of them leader. It was a formality more than anything else, the allness of a singular name, but even then there had never been good reason to thrust it solely toward Soojin. At times she wondered why they'd pushed the badge onto her, why they'd thought this mere title could encompass the volume of her grief and struggle.
If you bleed for us enough, we'll put you at the helm. If you present enough of your scars, you can assume the armor once again.
Is that all Soojin had been destined for?
"You're better with her than I am," Soojin sighs. Some leader she was, petting Jaehee's hair fruitlessly, smiling and cooing at her. Laying bare her inadequacies.
"That's not true," Jimin allows, even though this is the most honest Soojin has ever been.
This time, Jimin looks at her like she's seeing her down to the marrow. That same laser focus from the stairwell. She's always had something of a shrewd glare, but it feels even more pointed when Soojin is around her, like one of those dreams she used to have as an unassuming child. Back when the worst nightmare she could fathom was showing up to school naked, everyone in their ironed dress shirts and pleated skirts pointing and laughing, seeing more of her than she could ever bear to imagine, more than she could bear to see herself.
Jimin could drag her through a lot of shit. But she'd never doubt her here.
"I'm glad it's you," she says.
All things start with momentary confessions. Lingering stares, minute embellishments. The ability to see through obscuring walls. To pull them aside, brick by brick, and know that what is forming between you is finally becoming something. Something instinctive, born of a stronger foundation, built into the roots themselves. A wall can be toppled down, shaken to the ground. This could only be severed.
Soojin is performed. That's how she was always taught to be. For sixteen of them, that was the Play M philosophy.
More than all, though, Soojin is desperate.
Kim Jimin kisses her for the first time between a string of rookie award nominations and year-end showbiz fanfare. The hotel rooms they're herded into this time are needlessly ostentatious, Soojin watching in bemusement as Soeun takes a minimum of six selfies wrapped up in the fucking shower curtains.
Technically, Soojin is put into a room with Jiyoon. This detail, however, quickly escapes them once they're given free rein of their evenings. Five minutes later Jiyoon has bolted out into the hallway, Soojin is curled up in bed looking through her school friends' photos on her secret Instagram account, and Jimin has begun knocking senselessly at the door, demanding to be let in. She's about to send the entire 5-star hotel crumbling down at this point, its frame shaking on its hinges.
"Jiyoon and Soeun have roped everyone into an apocalyptic game of Halli Galli," Jimin explains the moment Soojin lets her in, breezing past her to the bed. "Last I heard, Soeun was trying to convince Jaehee to bet half of her shopping allowance on one round. They'll be there a while."
"Okay?" Soojin says, taken aback. "Um, hi?"
"Unnie," Jimin says, pulling her forward.
A beat later, she's kissing her.
Like she said: the end of the world.
Like she said—like she said:
What Soojin meant when she said that her age has never really meant anything is that authoritativeness would always elude her. She's wondered at times how she might have shaped herself into someone like Jimin, her Jimin. The Jimin who exudes such simple confidence, who could scoff and unleash unapologetic attitude and bend toward other people's will and hold Soojin together and laugh at her pain in various strokes, the definition of a multitude.
Soojin should have known, when it came down to it, that Jimin would kiss her first. That Soojin would lean in and chase after her, mouth caught in some forlorn game of follow-the-leader. The script toppling over, flipping around, doing somersaults on the crown of her head.
"Right now?" Soojin finds herself asking, hushed. Bemused. She isn't sure this is real, but she's too afraid to challenge it.
"Do you not want to?" Jimin asks.
That, in the end, is all Soojin really needs to hear.
Somewhere into the third or maybe fourth kiss, Jimin rucks her tank top up and out of the way. Like this, her midriff exposes. Her spaghetti straps run loosely around her shoulders, bunched around the line of her collarbone. Jimin's hands trail up the expanse of her legs. Her thumbs press lightly into her inner thighs, rubbing slow circles into her trembling skin. Fingers dip into the space beneath her skirt and pause at the edge of her safety shorts, slowly sliding them down.
"Ah," Soojin punches out, shifting around minutely, watching Jimin move around through a half-shuttered gaze.
"Unnie," Jimin says, softly this time. You see: she can be soft when she wants to be. More than anyone Soojin knew, Jimin could convey all the affection in the world through a simple touch. A hand to a shoulder, four fingers carding sweetly through freshly blow-dried hair, arms pressed around her—or Jaehee, or Jiyoon, or anyone, really—in a vice-like embrace. Soojin tries to suppress a shiver, breathing laboriously through a wave of hot anticipation. Through the way those same hands prod and pull around her. Recontextualized, the skin burns. "Can’t you relax, for once?"
"I'm relaxed," she lies. She's never felt more on fire in her entire life. She squirms as her shorts go down, and then Jimin's fingers are back, pressing briefly into her through her underwear. Soojin can feel how the fabric has soaked through. The look on Jimin's face is unplaceable.
"You're already—" she starts.
"Shut up," Soojin whines, loudly tossing around. "Do you have to say it like that?!"
"It's not a bad thing," Jimin laughs.
"Well, you're embarrassing me."
Jimin makes a fond, dismissive noise. "There's no need to be embarrassed," she reminds her. As if shame weren't Soojin's default emotion, or pouting her primary expression of self. Then Jimin is worrying at her lip. Then she's learning forward again, pressing a kiss to Soojin's open mouth, licking into her hungrily.
"Unnie, you're..." she begins, trailing off. She sits up. There's a word bursting on the tip of her tongue, and Soojin doesn't know what she wants it to be. Beautiful? Cute? She's heard these ones time and time again. Hot? Something desperate wraps its tendrils around her, dragging unbidden thoughts to the forefront of her overactive imagination. Mine?
Jimin doesn't continue the thought, though. Instead she says, "I already told you. Just relax, okay?"
This time, she helps Jimin get her underwear off, although it isn't before forcing Jimin's shirt to join the steadily growing pile of sweat-soaked clothes. Soojin is sloppy with things like this, historically. One wrist scrambling for purchase on the sheets, the other one digging in desperately, lips torn between frenzied teeth trying to keep each agonizing breath in, face pressed down in all the wrong directions.
Jimin isn't like that, though. She brushes at Soojin's breasts in sure circles, watching Soojin writhe through quiet gasps. I've got you, she whispers, mouthing lovingly at the strained stretch of her neck, where Soojin is in flames, warm to the touch, pliable and at her mercy. Unnie. You can trust me, she says, and god does Soojin want to. The pressure setting her on fire with every stroke, each touch extinguishing the winding, encircling stream of her desires.
"Fuck," Soojin manages eventually. The word punches out of her brokenly, wrecked and raw.
"That's the spirit," Jimin says, gentle. And then Soojin is falling apart around her.
"Remember that idol from before?" Soojin whispers into the relative dark, some time later. A hotel lamp out by the futon-side table flickers on solitarily. She thinks she must have blacked out at some point because she can barely feel her legs. "The one who was trying to give you his number?"
"Hey. Why are you so convinced he was trying to give me his number?"
Soojin sits up at that. "He wasn't?"
"Well…" Jimin sighs. Finally, giggling, she allows, "Okay, sure. He was. But I told him no, so I didn't have to explain myself to you."
"I guess you didn't," Soojin concedes, fighting off the sensation that explodes in her chest. She tries to shutter-shade the firework display unfurling inside of her by rolling down and staring right into Jimin's eyes, fox-like and grounding. Sharp enough to draw blood.
"Fuck that guy anyway," she says.
"I'll pass," Jimin retorts.
Soojin flushes. "Shut up," she adds this time. "Please shut up." Several rounds of Halli Galli can only go on for so long, even amongst five girls with competitive streaks an ocean wide. They'll need to get up eventually and—oh god, Soojin thinks, mind wandering. The fancy shower? Her face heats immediately.
"What is it?" Jimin demands.
"Nothing," she squeaks. They'll—they'll have get up and face the music eventually, is what she was trying to get at. But for now Soojin just wants this, pulling Jimin into her own orbit, kissing her with wild abandon. Hers, even for just the rest of this hour. Jimin's lip gloss has long rubbed off, but she doesn't mind her spit-slick and sore like this, mouth hungry, wanting, tender.
The end of the world has never been so beautiful. For just five, ten, twenty more minutes, Soojin is at peace.
"You really don't have to come with me today."
By Soojin's third-floor window, a paltry sliver of light tumbles in through her hastily shuttered blinds. Soojin shrugs her shirt on. The fabric catches momentarily against the mouth of her bra, and Jimin hums as Soojin straightens the hem out and turns back around, leaning over to stuff odd belongings into her backpack.
"Maybe I want to," Jimin counters eventually. Her voice is languid and easy; she makes no move to exit Soojin's bed. This isn't even her room, Soojin doesn't bother telling her. "I'm a free woman."
Soojin rolls her eyes. Then, because she knows Jimin can't see her, she rolls them again. "Well," she bites out. "Sure."
Soojin's first day of filming has fallen on a Tuesday. Usually, Tuesdays mean that Jihyo is busy going over rehearsals and MC-ing in Sangamdong, but that the rest of them are blissfully exempt from group schedules. If she were here, Jiyoon would be spending her day in the studio going over a new composition with one of their in-house producers, maybe even roping Soojin into offering more useless feedback. Instead she's at home, so every so often she spams them screenshots of vaguely abstract paintings and absurdly targeted comic panels she's gotten into drawing over the past few months. Jaehee is probably getting up to no good in Hyewon and Soeun's room, if their raucous voices are any indication, Soojin's sweet-eyed girl forever victim to their horrible influences.
But, of course, Jimin is here. She's wearing one of Soojin's shirts, a faded-out pajama tee she usually wears to sleep. It's not her favorite, but it's still hers. When Soojin sits back on the bed to slip her necklace on, Jimin leans forward and kisses the back of her neck almost feverishly, lips pressed to parched, summer-heat skin.
"Stop that," Soojin giggles. Her skin runs warm and alive. When Jimin caresses her the touch doesn't threaten to slide her off the bone. She doesn't feel like she might just melt into a heap and burrow along the lines of the floor, the fight ripped out her frame.
"Mmm," Jimin mumbles. Her teeth tease at a bite. Soojin stands up and pulls her out of bed, eyes crinkling.
"You're just going to sit there and watch me film my stupid webdrama? All day?"
Jimin shrugs. "Sounds like fun. You'll be all cute and done-up."
Soojin gives her a little glare and pats herself on the cheeks. "So I'm not cute right now?"
Scoffing, Jimin sidesteps around her and eases her way out the door. "If you don't hurry up, I'm using your toothbrush."
"Wait, what? Jimin, get back here!"
Fuck, she's not even wearing pants yet. When the hell did Jimin find time to get dressed? With a quiet huff she turns toward her drawer and goes to pick a pair out. Her fingers pause as they fall toward light blue denim, palm stilling at the softness of each thread. Each leg topples down as she unfolds the jeans in front of her, smiling to herself. She pushes herself up and shrugs them on.
Later on, in the car, Jimin's pinky will trace along her overturned hand in silent circles. In the space that hangs between their seats, something will be preserved, or created. Something presented. Something privy to only their own eyes, Soojin's shoulders turned ever so slightly toward Jimin, each quiet note of disbelieving laughter boxed in by the liminal corners of this transitory space. A girl learning, finally, to uninterrupt herself.
Is this it? Soojin wonders briefly. The end, or the beginning, or something in between?
Doesn't matter now, she realizes.
sorry
no subject
Date: 2021-11-15 08:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-15 09:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-16 09:24 pm (UTC)also i realized this comment barely says anything about sooday but it's also like. this fic read more as a soojin character study to me even if it's about sooday. monday hottest girl alive tho, so glad soojin and me can agree on this one
no subject
Date: 2021-11-21 12:58 am (UTC)ALSO IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO WATCH MORE WEEEKLY CONTENT!! lmk if u ever want to metastream TT this week has been so bad but i’d love to watch random k-pop stuff with u 😔❤️ and PLEASE ”(ah yes back at it again with the age-related prose??)” LET ME LIVEE!!! but yeah T___T i’ve been on the internet for wayyy too long like how did we go from dweeby kids lying about our age online to being relative hags… well Ur not but i am HSDFLKH. crazy that ur almost at ur 20s tho!! also agree fuck jake :/ i’m kind of fond of the hyunsuk headcanon tori gave me tho i’ll just leave it up to reader interpretation ^^
ok anywayyy... thanks again for reading this and Basically getting it even if ur not that into weeekly!! I APPRECIATE IT A LOT TT and yes it’s def more soojin character study as is my curse ;; but glad it made u like her a bit more!!
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Date: 2021-11-15 01:09 pm (UTC)Re: ⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️
Date: 2021-11-17 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-16 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-17 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-16 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-17 09:43 pm (UTC)incoherency incoming
Date: 2021-11-16 04:45 am (UTC)ok let me start with the whole opening with the pants and how perfectly it sets up the dynamic…. like soojin unable to NOT look at jimin super intently, that whole descriptor paragraph, also the metaphor of how jimin “wears the pants” as the (sometimes) de facto leader. also how jimin wears the pants better than her. the physical pants AND the leadership. obviously its also about monday_hot and seeing someone else in ur clothes but i feel like thats SECONDARY!! idk like i was reading this at 2am and felt like i was galaxybraining with the layers.
indeed…. i just think u set up soojins fixation so well.
by the way while i was reading this dionne by “jhousie” came on and i was thinking abt my favorite lyric in that song: wishing that someone would film the way i’m looking at you right now / i want to watch it back / and then kill myself AND LIKEEEEE is that not the sooday you’ve written here!!!!!!! so freaking good
and yes i already saw the workings of the next section that starts w “when they release tag me” but i still gasped again at how perfectly u portrayed idolverse_whump in those few paragraphs and ur language is so especially beautiful there too. ALSO NOW THAT I KNOW UR IDEA FOR WHO IS ASKING JIMIN OUT….. ummm idk who was promoting during tag me. im going to say cix hyunsuk just for shits
also random but: Soojin and Jihyo are approximately the same, but Jihyo could be even more practiced than she was, almost impossibly so. That's why they made her the MC. i think i rmr talking abt this LOL still true…
Soojin doesn't know what to do with that, most of the time. Doesn't know how much is hers to have. How much is hers to want.
T_____T
i think these were probably my favorite sections btw they just hit soooooo hard and i feel like there is so something so serious especially in f/f about seeing yourself but a better version of yourself in the person u like…. also kind of lemtang-esque if u ask me
and then the way it moves forward and culminates with A beat later, she's kissing her. Like she said: the end of the world. UGGGHHHHHHH i literally love it so much why are ur emotional beats always so perfect T___T
NOT THE WAY I MAKE MYSELF…. kind of felix-esque if you ask me…… ok i’ll really stop
AND THEN THIS ENTIRE SCENEEEEEEE ill be normal but this was so much. man AND THEN JIMIN WEARING HER CLOTHES AGAIN TT but this time it's IN AN ENTIRELY NEW CONTEXT!!!! why are you so good i love THEMES.
ending was seriously perfect too. learning finally to uninterrupt herself….. such a good phrase to end her particular arc here. soojin is personal and this is personal and just THANK U FOR WRITING!!!!!!!!!!<33333
Re: incoherency incoming
Date: 2021-11-20 10:13 pm (UTC)also that jhousie song is insane but LITERALLY THAT’S SOOJIN!!! in this fic. sorry irl leesoojin you don’t deserve this. also i just wanted to say that when i looked up dates i was like ok it can be cix or enha LKHSDFLHD so hyunsuk is a perfectly acceptable alternative too <3 and they’d actually have a good height difference <3 rip to those enhypen losers imo.
the soeun/jimin to soojin/jihyo conceal don’t feel sliding scale... it’s so serious....
"kind of lemtang-esque if u ask me" YOU!!! i love u tho never change. so true
> ALTHOUGH WHY IS SEONGMIN SO RIDICULOUS THESE DAYS 😭 if these two don’t stopp
ok i’ll stop reacting to YOUR reaction line by line but thank you again seriously TT i’m glad you like my emotional beats i’m never sure if my pacing actually works lolol. AND UR EVIL FOR FELIXING SOOJIN LMFAO!!!! felix does deserve to be manhandled by sylvain though. ok I’LL stop this time.
THANK YOU FOR READING!! THANK YOU FOR GETTING IT T___T ur the only person ever!!
no subject
Date: 2021-11-18 06:43 am (UTC)also this: Imagine that she is twice the person you'll ever be. That she is three times more confident and four times sharper. Five times meaner, six times more accommodating, seven times more driven. >> i simply think u r a genius
really enjoyed this <3
no subject
Date: 2021-11-20 10:04 pm (UTC)