When Momo turns twenty, her ribcage burns. The pain is nothing like the movies described it - there was nothing romantic about the searing tendrils of fire carving a name into her side, bringing her to her knees. She runs to the bathroom, rivulets of sweat pouring down her face as she waits for the bath to fill, before submerging herself fully into ice cold water. She doesn’t get to see the process of her soul mates name slowly etching itself into her skin, for at some point she blacks out from the pain.

  She wakes up an hour later to see Mina standing in the doorway with a hand over , eyes glistening with what could have been worry, or fear. She’s pulled from the freezing tub, frantically rubbed down with a towel and bundled in as many blankets as Mina could find. She doesn’t miss the way that Mina’s eyes earnestly avoid looking at the fresh black marks on her side, and when she stands in front of the mirror to see her familiar, bubbly lettering in her native tongue branded on her skin, she understands why Mina didn’t say a word.

  When the other girls ask, Mina tells them that Momo has come down with a temperature and isn’t to be disturbed at all, effectively banishing all of them (including Jeongyeon) from Momo and Jeongyeon’s shared room. The sound of concerned voices from the hallway drowns out as the night stretches on, and Momo spends her twentieth birthday tracing the on her side with trembling fingers, wondering how she’s going to tell her best friend that the fates had marked her down as her soulmate.

   She doesn’t, in the end. She decides that she’ll wait until Sana’s own mark appears, an inner voice telling her that she should be absolutely certain they are marked as each others. Sana will turn twenty in a little over two months anyway, and Momo was in no rush to force the course of the rest of her life right now. So she waited. She performed, and she smiled, and she sat on creaky old park swings at 3am with the love of her life, swinging higher and higher until “ I can almost touch the stars Momo !” and her ribcage burned at the proximity - and she almost confessed, right there under the stars with Sana’s smile making her heart do frantic somersaults in her chest, and the mark on her side urging her to reach out and say something . But she smiled and held her tongue, marvelling at the way Sana’s laughter produced crisp white clouds of breath on an early November morning where the sun had yet to rise and they had to be awake for a schedule in little under three hours. She bookmarked the way that Sana’s smile made her feel, tucking it away with all of the other little bits of information marked as ‘love’ in her chest, and the way Sana’s hand felt in her own when they snuck back into the dorm at 5am - only to be caught out by a scowling Park Jihyo who scolded them in harsh whispers and quick pinches to their cold skin, exasperated curses following them as they tiptoed towards their bedrooms. She relished the ache in her side when Sana tugged on her hand, pulling her into her room and her bed until they were tumbling over each other and unmade sheets, giggling softly until someone (Nayeon, she thinks) groggily launches one of Mina’s stuffed toys at their heads with a mumbled “ shut the up ”. She falls asleep in Sana’s arms, if only for an hour or two, and for the first time in two weeks she feels like everything is going to be alright.

  She ignores the concerned glances Mina throws her way, fixating herself on the way Sana’s eyes softened when they landed on her.

  If she looked a little harder, she might have noticed how they softened when she looked at Mina too. And Tzuyu, and Jihyo, and-

  Decembers comes around and it’s arguably their busiest time of the year, hectic schedules and last minute choreo change ups and Momo found herself thrown into a number of collaboration stages.

  She almost finds herself forgetting about her soul mark. That is, if she didn’t have to wake up early every morning to apply concealer, knowing that the stylists would shove her into whatever stomach-baring crop top they could find. She had panicked the first time she had changed into an outfit she had been given, looking into the mirror and seeing the way that the first letter of her tattoo peeked out from the barely there shirt. She felt slender hands pulling her away from the others, pulling her shirt up slightly when nobody else could see them and applying concealer in hurried but careful . Gratitude poured out of in waves and Mina stayed silent, giving Momo a warm smile in return and a quick tap on her waist to say that she was done, tugging the hem of Momo’s shirt down a little further than before. Mina said nothing as they returned to seven other girls, and perhaps Momo’s first mistake was not noting how deafening the silence was.

  Sana turns twenty and Momo is ecstatic, waiting the entire day to have a piece of Sana to herself and talk to her and maybe finally confess to her that she had been branded as hers by some unknown deity. She stares at the soul mark peeking out from Jeongyeon’s sleeve, elegant cursive lettering that stretched down her arm, drawing attention to the hand that was always loosely linked with another. Nayeon’s fingers shifted, showing a brief glimpse of the tiny, neat letters tattooed on the inside of her pinky, before curling tightly around Jeongyeon’s, a silent promise of love and affection and everything Momo yearned for. It’s rare for them to have their marks on display, so often covered up by heavy make-up and hidden expertly from the cameras that seemed constant in their lives. Momo hoped that Sana’s would be somewhere hidden too, hand subconsciously reaching up to her own side.

  The burning in her ribs had subsided to a slow smoulder as of late, glowing embers flickering inconsistently between her ribs, and she wished that the feeling stayed like this for a while because the warmth was familiar and comforting and reminded her of home. She caught a hold of eyes dripping with kerosene and the fire in her chest roared.

  She waited until the party began to wind down and her members trickled out to their beds in slow waves, watching Jeongyeon and Nayeon giggle as they stumbled down the hallway still hand in hand, taking note that she probably definitely shouldn’t go back to her own room for a while if she knew what was good for her. She watched Mina drag Jihyo away to their room, telling her that the dishes and the cleanup could wait til the morning and she should get some rest and really Momo was so thankful for everything that Mina had done for her til this point, thanking her with her eyes when she gave her a supportive nod from across the room. The three younger ones had retired to their rooms earlier in the night, citing homework and sleep as excuses, and so that left Momo and Sana on the couch together with the remnants of the chocolatiest birthday cake they could find. As soon as the door closed behind Mina and Jihyo, Momo felt a hand on her thigh and looked up into glittering eyes.

  “Hey, do you wanna go to the park?”

   Momo found herself drunk on emotions (and perhaps a little bit of soju) in the same park with Sana at 2am, sat on the same creaky old swings as their shoes scuffed the gravel beneath their feet and their heads tilted up to wonder at the stars. The air had grown colder since the last time they came but the alcohol in their bodies kept them warm as they laughed and played like little kids, scrambling over climbing frames and whining at the biting cold of the metal under their hands. They fall into each other, all clumsy feet and inebriated smiles, before crashing to the ground. Even in her intoxicated state, Momo made sure to place herself beneath Sana, taking the brunt of the impact as soft bodies hit hard ground. They lay there for a while, giggling at their misfortune and burrowing themselves deeper into each other's arms and just existed for a while.

  “I wish we could stay like this.”

  Momo hummed in agreement, cold-numbed fingers Sana’s hair as she lay on her chest, ignoring how the tattoo on her ribs burned in vicious triumph when Sana snuggled closer into her.

  “It’s nice. Just being here, and not really thinking.” Momo replied softly, feeling Sana nod lazily against her. “Like you can forget about everything.” Sana moved further up, pressing her cold nose to the exposed skin of Momo’s neck, warm breath contrasting as Momo felt her eyelashes flutter against her with every blink. She daren’t move for fear of disrupting the moment, in fear of losing how right this felt.

  “That’d be nice.” Sana’s voice was smaller than she could ever remember, Sana was smaller than she could ever remember, curling herself further and further into Momo like she could disappear if she tried hard enough. “I don’t like to think about the future.”

  “Why not?” Momo asked. The ache in her side began to grow.

  “I don’t know, I guess. I just like to live for now, and decide what I can do and where to go and who to see and,“ Sana paused, uncertainty lacing her tone. “My future doesn’t really have that.”

  Momo swallowed the ball of emotion that had begun to rise in .

  “You mean like soul mates?” Momo didn’t know how she kept her voice stable when it felt like everything was about to break apart.

  “Yeah.” Sana said. “Like soul mates.”

  Momo couldn’t reply, not when scorching flames were rapidly setting her insides alight. She ignored them.

  “So you don’t believe in soul mates?”

  Sana smiled.

  “Not at all.”

  Jihyo jolts awake at 5am. There are faint noises outside her door, so she throws back the sheets and slips out of bed with as much care as she could muster so as not to disturb the three other girls in the room, and ventures down the hallway on practiced tip toes. The sounds grow louder, and she realises that it’s broken sobbing coming from the bathroom, and the doors open as she peeks in and -

  The shower is running, and Momo is crumpled at the bottom of the stall fully clothed, drenched from the relentless, freezing water falling around her. Her shirts hiked up and she’s scrubbing desperately at her side, rubbed raw from the force of her actions and oh.

  Jihyo sees it, the bubbly kanji tattooed on Momo’s ribs, glaring stubbornly at them both on angry, irritated skin. She knows enough of the language to read the achingly familiar name, and Momo hasn’t taken notice of her yet as her cries grow increasingly desolate, the frantic scratching at her side ceasing as her hands shakingly move to cover her face. She collapses further into herself, breathing ragged as she fought back the sobs choking in .

  Jihyo doesn’t stop to think before she throws herself under ice cold water, arms wrapping tightly around the shuddering body beneath her in an attempt to alleviate some of the pain.

  She knows it doesn’t.

  The ache in her side for the next few days was nothing compared to the ache in her chest when melodious laughter trickled from the other side of the room, or the shame in her stomach when she looked up and saw two pairs of eyes riddled with concern staring back at her. She lost herself in practice, hoping that the pounding heartbeat and rushing blood in her ears could drown out the roar of the flames.

  It takes a while for Momo to adjust, to accept that Sana probably wasn’t her soulmate given the lack of her name tattooed on her body, and that Momo was one of the unlucky ones. One of the people whose soulmate wasn’t their own, and that she’d have to live with seeing her soulmate find happiness with someone else, if she even wanted to. Momo was a romantic, growing up on cheesy films and reading all the books and witnessing the beautiful, glowing bond her parents shared. So she fully expected to find her soulmate, and fall in love, and that would be that. She knew that some people refuted fate, ignoring destiny and choosing their own path in love. She hadn’t expected Sana to be one of those people, and she wondered if the charred chasm inside of her would ever close.

  The despairing embers in her chest that sparked up every time she called her name made her think maybe not.

  She tries not to think about it every morning when she stands in front of the mirror, diligently rubbing concealer into her side through closed eyes. It was easy when she knew the precise and shapes, fingers having traced handwriting that wasn’t her own enough times as she tried to sleep despite the sea of flames devouring her whole. If Jeongyeon noticed the dried tear tracks on her face every morning, she didn’t say a word.

  She pulls her shirt back down and smooths out the creases, as if there was nothing underneath. She exhales heavily, wearing a practiced expression on her face as she steps out of the bathroom in front of eight sets of eyes, grinning easily as she sits down at the table and ignores the coiling flames in the pit of her stomach when she sees the way Nayeon looks at Jeongyeon. She’s getting better at not feeding the fire, despite throwing herself on the pyre long ago. Her eyes meet Mina’s across the table, and then Jihyo’s, and she smiles a knowing, sad smile, not sure if she was reassuring them or herself. She laughs at a joke Dahyun said, barely flinching at the tinkling laughter two seats away as it wrapped around her ribcage suffocatingly.

 She knows that Jihyo and Mina talk about her. She had stumbled out of her room one night when the heat became too much to bare, only to see the two standing in the kitchen talking in hushed whispers over steaming mugs of hot chocolate. They didn’t notice her, barely audible as they shifted closer to each other, and Momo filed away this revelation in the space left in her chest. Well this is new, Momo thought, noting the tender smile on Mina’s face as she listened to Jihyo’s soft words with rapt attention, and the way the fingers curled around Jihyo’s mug frequently stretched out to brush against Mina’s.

  Momo rapped on the doorframe to announce herself, shuffling into the kitchen to make herself a mug of hot chocolate before sitting at the table, not saying a word. Silent conversation stretched between Jihyo and Mina before they sat on either side of her, Jihyo’s arm wrapping around her waist as she rested her head on her shoulder, and Mina’s hand rubbing soothing patterns on her thigh. She took a sip of her drink and closed her eyes, a genuine grin stretching on her face as she drank in the the familiar scent of the two girls beside her, letting her head fall on top of Jihyo’s.

  “I’m okay.” She whispered into the mug, Mina’s hand still moving on her thigh reassuringly. And she would be, she thinks. She could feel the love emanating off of her friends in waves, and she realised that maybe there was more to life than the brand on her skin.

  “I’m gonna be okay.”

  Jihyo woke up early on their day off, eyes heavy with sleep as she stumbled to the bathroom at 6am, betrayed by her bladder as she absently makes a mental reminder to not drink so much before bed again. She bursts through the door, too distracted to pay attention to the light shining out from under the door and stops and stares at the unexpected body sat on the edge of the tub, head whipping up rapidly at the sudden entrance. It takes her a moment to take it all in, and then her eyes widen, all traces of sleep disappearing in an instance.

  Sana, perched on the rim of the bathtub with a tub of concealer in one hand and slowly fading black marks on her wrist. The lines were worn, as if they settled into her skin years before now, and Jihyo wonders how long she had been hiding this from them. Her Japanese wasn’t perfect, but she understood enough to recognise the childlike kanji scrawled on the inside of Sana’s wrist. Why wouldn’t she, when she had seen the exact handwriting right next to her own countless times before.

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