May 2024

Taeyeon started banging on the door violently, screaming some threats. Jessica then pushed her aside to do the same. "Klaire, if you don't open this door right now I swear to God I'm going to destroy this ing room!" She continued banging and spurting more threats for a full minute before the people outside knocked back on the door to get their attention. 

"Can you two please calm down?" Sunny pleaded from the other side of the door. "You two need to talk-"

"I. don't. want. to. talk! Just open the ing door, Lee Soonkyu." Jessica said enunciating each word, no longer screaming as she tried her best to sound threatening and intimidating.

"Listen, it's been ten years. You need to talk! We'll give you time to talk privately. No one will be eavesdropping." Sunny said, the last sentence was directed more as a warning to the people on her side. "We'll be at the living room and we'll come back after.. twenty minutes or so. Okay?"

"No!" Jessica replied stubbornly.

"We're leaving. Please.. just talk to each other." Sunny said before knocking twice as a sign to end the conversation.

As she pressed her ear to the door, she could hear some whispering, shuffling and shushing on the other side; after a while, the sound of footsteps were heard, gradually lower and lower. They really left her there, locked in a stuffy storage room, with Kim Taeyeon. Kim ing Taeyeon.

Beep.

She turned her head to the other person in the room, who apparently found the air conditioner remote. Taeyeon exhaled and sat herself down on a big, sturdy box. Jessica started patting her pockets hoping for some luck that she managed to stuff her phone on one of them earlier, but there was nothing there. She swore if she had it, she would have called the police just to teach those s out there a lesson.

"Do you have your phone with you?" Jessica asked, impatiently. 'How the is she so calm?'

Taeyeon shook her head. She then asked a few seconds later, probably curious, "Why?"

Jessica shook her head back in reply. She went to find a comfortable wall to lean on, one that wasn't facing Taeyeon, and tried to calm the enraging fire burning inside her.

-

"I thought we're not eavesdropping?" Tiffany asked judgingly. She wasn't happy they went forward with this shenanigan without her approval, or at least including her in the discussion. They only filled her in after the whole chaos had happened earlier.

"Can you even hear anything? The door is pretty thick." Hyoyeon asked, inching closer to the phone Sunny was holding, there was a call on loudspeaker.

"This is just a precaution in case of.. a medical emergency or something." Sunny explained, turning the volume on the phone to the maximum, but getting nothing.

Before they left those two, Sunny had connected her phone through a call with Yuri's phone. Leaving the latter's one on the floor, pressing its microphone side to the few milimeters gap below the door. "And yes, I already heard Sica spoke once earlier, asking for a phone or something. They haven't said anything since then, though. Or maybe we just couldn't hear them. Anyway, the point is.. once they start speaking, I will turn the volume down. We're not going to listen to their conversation, we're just making sure that they're not hurting each other, or someone fainted and need help or something."

"You don't have knives or scissors lying around in there, do you?" Sooyoung asked the house owner, which she fortunately denied.

"Do any of them have claustrophobia?" Klaire asked. She herself was claustrophobic, and the thought of people being confined in a small room was making her kind of squeasy.

"And you're only asking this now?" Tiffany snapped.

"I don't think they're claustrophobic. Can all of you please calm down? Everything will be fine. They won't hurt each other.. physically.. will they?" Sunny said rather hesitantly while eyeing Tiffany for an answer, who in return rolled her eyes at her.

So they all sat themselves down, eyes looking at the wall where Klaire hung her clock. That was going to be a long twenty minutes. Although maybe not long enough to solve a ten plus year beef between the two older members of Girls' Generation.

It was a known secret that Taeyeon and Jessica had a complicated relationship. It started way before 2014 when the girls noticed they suddenly became distance with each other, which was strange because they used to be really close since their trainee days. When asked about it, they either denied or just gave vague answers. Up to a point when the problem seemed to be getting more serious and the girls decided not to pry. As curious and bothered as they were, they also didn't want to have to pick a side between those two. It put people in a difficult position when their two best friends fought. Also, 'ignorance is bliss', they were taught.

The other girls suspected that Tiffany might be the only person who knew the truth of what had happened in the past. Or at least, the Taeyeon's version of the truth. And they felt that Klaire might knew Jessica's version of the story since she was the only one who still kept in touch with her after she left, they figured Jessica must have spilled something or ranted about it to her.

Yoona once asked Klaire about it, but she admitted that she knew nothing. Of course, she was curious and had tried to find answers both from Taeyeon and Jessica, but the two older girls gave her nothing. She then decided she didn't want to know, scared that hearing a one-sided story might create a certain resentment to the other person. Therefore, she accepted the fact that they simply fought and that was it, end of story.

"They still haven't said anything." Sunny said, her left ear pressed to the speaker of the phone. The clock showed that they were entering the eleventh minute of their so called 'Operation: Make Taeyeon and Jessica Friends Again'.

"Do they seriously just sit there and do nothing? They're so weird." Yuri commented. "Unless they suspect that we might eavesdrop outside the storage so they are whispering."

"You can't angry whisper, though. That's scientifically impossible." Hyoyeon gave her two cents.

"Really, says who?" Yuri asked back.

"Einstein." Hyoyeon said convincingly before laughing. The rest followed, lowering the tension in the room for a little.

Nobody talked anymore as they were entering minute fifteen. They started to get worried as Yoona suggested that they should go check on them, some agreed with her, but Sunny was adamant on the twenty minutes promise she made to those two, although it was one-sided from her side and they never asked for it. By the nineteenth minute, they started discussing who should they send to open the lion's den. Klaire's storage key was thrown around from one person to the other, none of th