(picture credit)

gonna bite your feelings out
1,248w | jonghyun (shinee) + sinb (gfriend)

Sometimes Jonghyun sees her in clothes displays. Menus at coffee shops. Yeah, she would like the iced black coffee on a hot summer day - things like that. For a while, that becomes everything because she was his everything, once upon a time, before she proclaimed things are better this way with the kind of smile you give a stranger you accidently bumped into and did her best to gently pry her fingers out of his desperate hold to keep whatever was left of them together. She was always better at letting go. She was always better at letting go.

Also for a while: he doesn't do anything but work, make music. Soojung, who doesn't go out of her way to see anyone outside of her members at all these days, even shakes him awake one day from where he's fallen asleep in the recording room and tells him to get his ing act together.

When he asks her who's side she's on, she just says I'm ing Switzerland.

It gets better eventually, sometime after that. Promotions, solo work, the satisfaction of knowing that someone's listening to him when the crowd screams in response to his lines. It gets better, it really does - he doesn't drink until he can't feel anymore, that stopped a long time ago, and he doesn't think about doing that either. Sure, he's a little thinner, but he can order iced black coffee at the coffee shop now without thinking about her, and it's fine, it's fine, honestly -

And then he sees her again.

It was great at first, but Eunbi's a little over it now.

"I wish people would just see me as me, you know?" she tells Eunha probably every other day. Eunha's probably as tired of it as she is by now, by relation. But she can't go to anyone else - they either tell her it's a good thing (Yuna and Yerin) or hug her and tell her it doesn't matter (Yewon) or let her rest her head on their shoulder and promise her that she's herself regardless and no one can take that away from her (Sojung). Truthfully, Eunbi doesn't need reassurance, she just wants to stop gritting her teeth every time someone tells her that she looks like Jessica Jung.

It's an honor - it really is, but then there's that sour taste in because she's Hwang Eunbi, not some untouchable girl group member whose name is heard more often in whispers than roars nowadays.

So it doesn’t make sense to her when one day she’s walking down the corridor with Eunha to get to standby and her shoulder bumps against someone else’s, but they’re already a little late so all she can do is apologize through her hair and keep moving until someone taps her shoulder from behind, footsteps in a hurry, and she turns around to meet wide eyes, alarmed.

Eunha tugs her into a bow. He’s a sunbae, registers briefly in Eunbi’s mind, and he looks at her like he knows her, but he also looks at her like she’s not standing in front of him, shaking her hair out of her face.

“Oh,” he smiles, more to himself than at them. She can feel Eunha going starstruck beside her. “I’m sorry. I think I’ve mistaken you for someone else.”

Her face burns. Someone’s calling to them to get on deck and Sojung’s walking towards them, confusion on her face, and it’s all chaos, really, backstage is chaos, but all Eunbi remembers about the first time she meets him is the tenderness in his eyes - like he was in love with her a long time ago - and for once, she wishes she was the girl everyone wanted her to be.

She’s young. Too young, he thinks when he sees her the next week, and the week after that. When she greets him with her group in the waiting room, she looks like she’s trying to figure him out and that’s how he remembers.

When you’re young, you think you can figure people out. That there’s something to figure out in the f