Wasn’t there a saying that the eyes were the windows to the soul? She mused as she wisped the pencil up slightly to trace the thin eyebrow in softly. If so, then it was apparent to Taeyeon that whoever had coined that phrase had never drawn eyes before, because even a small movement like a slight jerk of her hand could distort the intricateness of the iris. Even an unconscious quiver between her fingers could mess up the perfect shadow of emotion in the pupils. Something that was a reflection of the freaking soul couldn’t be so vulnerable to change – could it? Taeyeon didn't want to believe that it would be.

But still, she was on her seventh set of eyes now. The other six sat abandoned but not forgotten on traces of the note pad scattered over her desk and she avoided their accusing glare sheepishly.

See, she didn’t know exactly what kind of eyes she wanted to draw but she knew that they just weren’t right.

Lost in thought, she swirled her glass of red wine a little too forcefully and watched in wonder as it trickled down the back of her hand and down her wrist, contrasting beautifully against her pale white skin.

Well, well. Would you look at that. She had always been bleeding and now she finally could look the part.

Had someone said something along the lines of pain being merely evidence that you’re still alive?      

Unlike the one who had spouted all that about eyes (and she was really hating all these talk about eyes right now, for no particular reason), Taeyeon thought that this one had at least gotten it right. Nevertheless, she reckoned that the omission of a crucial fact – that the pain could also be the reason you didn’t want to be alive – meant it could also be relegated into the league of half-truths.

Hearing the pages crisp and crumple as she pushed them to the edge of the table, she pulled herself off the chair and trailed a finger along the silent hallway, enjoying the way it made a scrapping noise against the wall.

It was eerily quiet. With most of them moving out with their families it was almost like no one stayed here anymore.

Argh.

Frankly, she knew she needed to stop behaving like this. She was like – she was like a god damned soiled rug, ridden with holes, dripping depression all over her and tarnishing the carpeted floor with sticky residues that clung onto the wool like leeches.

She hated herself like this. Why - she, Kim Taeyeon, was born a fighter. (Well they all were, in some sense. To make it long as a celebrity, you either had to be one, or pretend to be one long enough that you start believing you were one.) And to be honest, it wasn’t like she never had to fight for what she loved. It wasn’t like she never felt like she wanted to give up on what she loved.

The first time she had felt like giving up on love was when she saw how the little cute squabbles of sibling rivalry that they had when she was tottering around with Jiwoong drew out into long gaps of silence when the menacing comparisons made by nosy relatives and neighbors between him and his over-achieving sister’s ability to bring home the bacon had severed the last chord on his ever-tolerant temperament.

The second time was when she saw how her parents – the same ones who would send parcels and parcels of home-made kimchi and the red-bean paste that she so loved would hover around her awkwardly when they came to Seoul to visit – as if they were not quite sure how to place their hands and not quite sure how to position themselves in front of their daughter whom they now had to share with the nation – no – actually; the world. 

And, oh. That time after the explosion of fame through Gee, when Hayeon had stomped into her room the moment Taeyeon had stepped across the threshold of their 4-room flat in JeonJu.

All those times she had made it and crawled back into the hearts of those she loved by showing them that their daughter and their sister remained essentially the very same girl who would greet the newspaper deliveryman with a bow and the very same who would get her uniform ripped from climbing over the fence with her brother and his friends to flee after pulling faces at the grumpy old care-taker in school.

And Hayeon would realize that no matter how many times she vented her temper at the latter for casting her in her eternal shadow (for it seemed that she was destined to be known only as Taeyeon’s sister) and no matter how many times she pretended to still be sleeping when Taeyeon would bend over to brush the hair off her face and kiss her forehead gently before leaving quietly at the crack of dawn - Hayeon would still find those troublesome assignments from her compulsory art module already completed and lying on the desk.

Taeyeon knew she had to be strong for those she loved. This was the way it was. This was the only way she knew of.

In fact, she still had the letter her siblings had wrote to her after their teary confrontation where she had dusted away the skeletons in the closet. It was tucked neatly away in the first drawer in her desk where she kept her family album, and one sentence was particularly poignant:

I know you will do well – because you are our sister.

It held her up through the toughest times that she didn’t tell them of.

She did not change, and she would not change who she was. This industry would not change her, being in Girls’ Generation would not change her, and so nor would Tiffany.

She was a fighter, and she had walked into the arena to protect those she loved with her back straight, her nose in the air, a smirk twisting her lips – all that. She had done all that right from the start and no matter how life had tried to pull her left-right-center-down she had grinded her heels into the dirt and held her ground. 

Her moral compass still pointed the true north.

But with Tiffany, she just didn’t know what to do. When it started it was simple: Tiffany needed her protection – Tiffany needed her friendship, her affection and her bug-buster. But Tiffany didn’t need her protection now. Their relationship didn’t need her protection. They needed something else from her that she was afraid she wasn’t ready to give.

This was too heavy a topic to be thinking about in the morning.

She needed some happy, brainless form of entertainment, she thought, as she flopped herself onto the sofa and flipped through the list of on-demand movies available through the cable television set in the dormitory.

The Incredibles.

She snorted.

A cartoon? Well, yes. That would probably do.

The odd assortment of fat, thin and weird characters in skinny red suits gave her good cheer, but the one short and stumpy little bratty nerd – what was her name again? Ah - E they called her. Edna Mode.

Small yes, but large than life. This Edna Mode was a fighter too.

*

“This is a hobo suit darling, you can’t be seen in it, I won’t allow it!” E casually flicked the suit into the bin.

Mr. Incredible scrambled to retrieve the turquoise spandex – muttering a silence thanks to the heavens that it wasn’t one of E’s incinerator-bins.

“W-what do you mean? You designed it!” He sputtered, holding out the suit before her as if in an attempt to jolt her memory.

“I never look back darling, it distracts from the now.”

*

Yes. Taeyeon liked her.

She caught herself smiling lightly at E’s slap-stick humour before she could help it. Really now, had she relegated to the state of having to be entertained by poorly dubbed cartoon? And – she snuck a glance at the door to check that truly none of her members were in – she would never be able survive the teasing from the prankster trio should she get caught watching a cartoon at the grand age of twenty-four. When they had their go with Keroro, Seohyun could not stand within five feet of them without hearing a distorted version of the Keroro OST – usually completed with erted lyrics courtesy of their in-house budding song lyric writer Choi Sooyoung.

Because apart from E, the movie was bleh – the plot was meh and this – what was her name again? - ElastiGirl was ridiculous. She had worked herself up into a mad frenzy and was sobbing in E’s kitchen because she had suspected that her husband, Mr. Incredible, was having an affair.  

And Taeyeon wanted to throw something at that stupid woman, because hey, do people usually think that it was easy to have affairs when you were in love? And hey, do people usually have so little faith in the people they were supposed to love? Couldn’t you simply look beyond the circumstantial evidence and listen to your heart? Did you always have to know like – know; couldn’t you just feel? Couldn’t you just believe? Couldn’t you just trust? Because she – urgh never mind.

She picked up the remote.

But then E appeared.

“What are you talking about? You are ElastiGirl! My God." 

"Pull - Yourself - Together!" E had jumped onto the porcelain white tables and was puffing herself up in front of the grieving ElastiGirl.

Taeyeon flinched as the last three words were interspersed by the heavy collision of rolled-up newspaper and head. She would have felt sorry for ElastiGirl had she not been such a huge of a loser, but right now, she found herself sitting on the edge of the sofa, simultaneously cheering E on and hanging on to her every word.

“What will you do? This is a question?! You will show him that you remember that he is Mr. Incredible and you will remind him – who YOU are!”

Taeyeon felt like E could have been talking to her through the flat screen.

“You know where he is. Go: confront the problem. Fight. Win!” E threw her hands out as if to support her claim.

The bubbly feelings built up into a burst of pearly laughter as Taeyeon threw her head back. She couldn’t remember feeling so light in a while.

There was her answer.

There was the answer that had eluded and tormented her for what seemed like a century, condensed into a 30 seconds speech, yelled across the dining table by a four-foot tall superhero costume designer nerd in over-sized thick-rimmed glasses to a superhero wife whose greatest worry was that her superhero husband was having an affair when said person was currently held captive by a character who was essentially a sasaeng-fan-turned-evil-megalomaniac.    

It really placed her dilemma into perspective.

She laughed.

She laughed and laughed until she was breathing only through raspy, punctuated snorts in the way her mother always did when the late night gag shows came on.

And she thought that maybe people were alike in that way. Maybe the types of problems we faced were essentially the same – whether you were a superhero or a superstar. Maybe there were issues that were so integral to our existence that they were the threads that bound us to each other and there were common laws of being that applied whether you had super-human strength or whether you were one part of an extensive global marketing plan.

And so maybe the solution was the same as well.

Go: confront the problem. Fight. Win!

That was precisely what she needed to do and exactly what she intended to do.

Oh man. This Edna Mode was her hero.

Filling with a vigor that was pushing her to action she felt not unlike a long-serving in-mate that was taking his first steps of freedom outside his penitentiary. She grabbed her purse, her handphone, and rushed to her room. Locating the item she wanted, she shoved it into her backpack and made a quick call to Haeyoung oppa to confirm her destination.

Grabbed her car keys off the dressing table she combed through her disheveled hair impatiently and had half a foot outside the door when a reasonably loud explosion from the home theatre speakers informed her that the television was still airing - the men and women in their spandex tights were hustling around the badass-ery of a mechanical spider that was spitting out fire-balls that looked as if they might be painful – but she was way beyond that now.

Now she had her own battlefield to go to.

“That right. Taeyeon’s gonna set things right, darling.” Curling her tongue to mimick E’s half-German, half-Japanese lingo she picked up the remote thinking of shutting off the television but decided against it as she shut the door behind her without another backward glance.

It was rude to shove people out of their battles mid-way, and even if she wasn’t there to see it, she would like them to win.

Because she knew they would win. See, because even if it took them a while, the good guys would always win.

---------------------------------------------------------------

“YAH.”

She pricked her ears and a frown creased her forehead. She felt the hands that were adoring her hair with intricate ornaments still in their motion.

That voice…

“YAH. HWANG MI-YOUNG.”

Oh.

She spun around quick enough to see Taeyeon splutter to a stop, one hand clutching her sides and the other the doorframe as the shorter gasped for breath, leaving everyone watching the midget in stunned silence.

Had she ran the whole way here?

In those tattered ivory Converse high-tops she had no idea why Taeyeon wouldn’t throw, a stumpy black haversack and a long black t-shirt that had a rather grotesque-looking eyeball with strains of blood vessels printed smack-right in the middle of the shirt, Tiffany thought that the only redeeming factor in Taeyeon’s outfit was that pants were pink.

Well. She bought that for Taeyeon.

And she pursued her lips. Maybe another talk about Taeyeon’s dismal fashion sense was in order. These… things. Being as gorgeous as she was didn’t, in Tiffany’s mind, mean that Taeyeon could run around with these rags. The t-shirt, Tiffany could turn a blind eye to if she really had to - maybe, but those shoes – oh those shoes had to go! They were old and worn out because Taeyeon wore them like she didn’t have at least three pairs of the same cutting in different colors sitting in their joined shoe cabinet. And there was a obnoxiously huge spot of dirt on the heel of the left shoe where Hyoyeon had stomped on Taeyeon after the latter had pushed her into the sea during their All About Girls’ Generation filming. They couldn’t afford to have news out on the horrid fashion of their kid leader and – oh - well – uh.

Then again, maybe she didn’t actually have the moral high ground to be talking about what news coverage they shouldn’t be getting right now.  

She shuffled her feet together and looked down at her hands, only to look back up when Taeyeon spoke.

“Y-you,” Taeyeon waved a hand in the general direction of the staff and make-up crew in between gasps of breath that were winding down in intensity, “all of you.”

“A moment of privacy please?”

They filed out obediently without further questions. They had worked with the group long enough to know that it was always better to leave those two to their own antics.

“What is it Taeyeon?” 

They stared at each other for an awkward two seconds before Taeyeon started digging vicariously into her backpack in search for something – failing to which she simply flipped the whole backpack over in frustration.

A couple of items fell out.

Packs of snacks she recognized from their waiting room in various broadcasting companies.

Sets of plastic chopsticks and spoons.

A hot-water tumbler. Taeyeon picked it up and set it on the dressing table.

“Bellflower pear juice.” Taeyeon muttered by way of explanation. “For your throat.”

And then finally - a rusty-looking object that looked suspiciously like…

“Taeyeon…I…” Tiffany started.

“You don’t have to explain.”

“But I want to…” Tiffany knew she had to. “Listen to me.” She took a deep breath. 

"I love you. I love you."

She tried to project her sincerity with her eyes. Could Taeyeon read them?

“It’s just… I don’t know. With you, it’s always been second nature. Being with you is as comfortable as breathing and we’ve always been like this – straddling that ambiguous line between lovers and friends. If it were not for your injury and all that happened that night we probably would have continued in that fashion for all eternity, wouldn’t we?”

Yes. They both knew they would have. They would have dragged their feet over marriage long after the other members have had theirs, citing everything from career to non-compatible partners before societal pressures nudged them into settling down with a man that they could stand.

Tiffany could see it in her mind.

And then, in cafés where they would visit each other – not as superstars but as the wives (possibly even mothers) of others - they would nurse their coffees, look into each other’s eyes through the steam and Tiffany would wipe the foam away from the edge of Taeyeon’s mouth while thinking wistfully of the could-have-beens. It would be easier that way, and they didn’t even have to look for a man that they loved because it wouldn’t matter anyway – so they just needed to find one that loved them.

It would be easier, but it would also be exceedingly painful.

She took a deep breath and continued.

“Even after we got together I don’t feel… It doesn’t feel like we did. You don't trust me. I know you love me but you don’t tell me anything. I mean, look at what happened after the airport incident. You just took off without a word. Do you know how worried I was? I don’t feel like you’ve ever treated me like your lover. To be honest, sometimes I feel like we are simply… friends with benefits.”

Tiffany concluded – and blushed. In the tangle of her mind where she had thrashed out her thoughts it had sounded so rational, logical and convincing. Of course it made sense. Of course she was right – she just had to make Taeyeon see her point. But when she had said it out, somehow it just made her feel like that one time when her parents had showered all their attention on one of the homeless kid they had found sleeping in their backyard before sending her to an orphanage – the conflict of jealousy and the belated surge of embarrassment at her own childish reaction battling for dominance in the color of her cheeks.

Taeyeon ran a hand through her hair and sighed.

“I know… I screwed this up, didn’t I? I sprung it on you and never gave you the chance to think it through. I never celebrated our love. I never dared to tell anyone about us – and I never really let you in. I never let anyone in. I wasn’t ready to love because I wasn’t ready to trust anyone with the task of loving me.”

Taeyeon let her words trail off as her lips twisted crookedly at the memories from their past.

“Taengoo, you need to learn to trust us – to trust me. Trust that we’re strong enough to carry your burdens and to carry your love. Trust that the people you love are as strong as you are. We are a team. Lean on us. We will not fail you. I will not fail you. And it… hurts that you don’t know that.”

“I’m sorry. I know. I’m bad at this trust thing. I’m bad at this love thing. I know.” The fire burned in her cheeks as Taeyeon clenched her fists and tilted her head upwards as she felt the sting in her eyes.

Tiffany didn’t know what to say. She loved. She loved. But it was hard. Almost as hard as when she had to uproot herself from a family that was still grieving from the lost. Almost as hard as when she had watched herself become a mere spectator in her family’s lives. She had made a huge sacrifice fighting for her dream and she just… couldn’t be sure she could afford another.

But then Taeyeon looked up.

“I’ll work hard this time Tiffany. I’ll work harder than him and I’ll win you over – fair and square.”

She wiped her hands on the over-sized black t-shirt and reached out.

“Let’s start over again. Give me a chance.”

Tiffany leant over to clasp her hands within Taeyeon’s out-stretched ones.

Ah.

She thought she had misplaced it a while ago.

“I’ll love you properly this time, Fany-ah.”

Looking at Taeyeon through eyes that were blurring and misty Tiffany thought she knew now - the answers to the questions she had asked herself that night when Taeyeon had returned to her.

“I’ll learn to open up to you.”

She knew now that her mother had not always known who to love and how to love. It was something that she had figured out through the actual process of loving itself.

“I’ll make you see how beautiful you are to me.”

She knew now that love wasn’t a birth-right. It was a long and rickety trek down where there was no paths to follow – only ones you left behind in the form of faint trails of freshly crushed grass from where you and your partner had trodden on. It was an endless tussle of give and take, of compromises, of trial and error, and of an exuberant big-city American meeting a cheeky down-town Korean. It was of first fights, and of hurting each other, and then of learning from each other. It was of pain, of the disappointment, of embracing difference, and of blind faith. But ultimately love was of effort. Love was what you fought for.

“Let’s take it slow. And one day – maybe you will come to love me the way I love you.”

It was what Taeyeon had always been doing for their love, and was continuing to do. Tiffany resolved to learn to do that as well.

She smiled through her tears as Taeyeon uncurled one of her hand from their clasp to pull her own necklace out from underneath her shirt.

Tiffany felt its counterpart shift against her palm.

“From the start right? Let’s start from the start.”

Tiffany could only nod as her eyes followed the motions of the key swinging from Taeyeon’s neck.

“Tiffany Hwang. Will you go on a date with me?”

She could only nod as she clasped one hand over to stifle the happy sob and the faintest trace of a smile.

She could only nod.

--------------------------------------------

Oh tear ducts and rust,

I’ll fix it for us,

We’re collecting dust but our love’s enough

You’re holding it in,

You’re pouring a drink,

No nothing is as bad as it seems,

We’ll come clean

Just give me a reason,

Just a little bit’s enough,

Just a second we’re not broken just bent,

And we can learn to love again

It’s in the stars,

It’s been written in the scars on our hearts,

That we’re not broken just bent,

And we can learn to love again

We’re not broken just bent,

And we can learn to love again

- Just Give Me A Reason; Pink

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A/N: As always, I would love to hear from you.