Men in America were larger, bulkier, stronger and more violent.

But they were just as slow.

Tiffany stepped back, lithe and supple as the dancer she was, making fist meet nothing but air. It was different here. Everything was larger, bigger, just…more of everything; as expected of the United States of America, a nation who prided themselves on size. ‘SUPER SIZE ME’ anyone?

But the people were the same.

The men were the same.

They reacted the same, they smelt the same, the hollow feral looks in their eyes were the same…and they hurt just the same.

Mindless, brainless, senseless violence.

That’s what ran in the blood of all men. So predictable and single-minded. She could read them like an open book.

Tiffany stepped forwards and closed the distance, allowing the beast’s fist to contact flesh.

She had grown callous, careless, and more daring than ever before. Simply because the one thing that biologically stopped any human from hurting themselves too much, the one thing that was universal to all living things, the one thing that everyone understood…was no longer an issue.

She sought it, she craved it, she lived for it.

Pain made her body sing, made her feel in control because she had allowed it to happen, made her forget her guilt, her worries, her responsibilities to everything and anyone else, made her forget who she was and who she wasn’t and who she wanted to be. It made her slip into survival-mode, made her hone onto her baser instincts, tune out everything else, made her see her immediate surroundings and the immediate threats, allowed her not to delve deeper into anything else…ignore everything else.

Tiffany could almost feel her innards pulse and shudder at the beast’s impact, and it empowered her. She gazed into the vacant eyes of her victim, stared deep into murky orbs and felt the beast quiver under her gaze, as all beasts should. And then…she ended it.

She was ruthless, brutal, and merciless. Where simply broken bones would have sufficed before, she now sought to shatter it. Where a simple spray of blood was enough, she now craved for a violent spurt of crimson. Where a groan of pain gave her a sense of triumph, she now needed a scream of agony.

She was in pain.

It was all she knew, so it was all she could deal out.

She turned around and looked hungrily around her.

The night was young…

…and her need was far from sated.

The beasts would cry tonight.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

SNSD continued their promotions and their activities. They continued their performances and schedules like nothing was wrong. They were a new and not yet known group. A large one. One missing girl in a group of nine was easily missed. No one had yet to speak up about the hole that was usually filled by an eye-smile. Netizens were still trying to figure out who’s who. The public were busy trying to put a name to a face.

Professionally, the girls were grateful. As they did not suffer any backlash in their image, which was everything to a new debuting group. But personally, it hurt that Tiffany could so easily be overlooked. It worried them that this could lead to the company’s easy dismissal of an employee that seemed to have little salience in the group.

But they had the assurances of Mr. Lee himself. The president. And for that, they were grateful.

What Mr. Lee didn’t tell them was that he was getting increasing pressure from certain members of the board to simply ‘stop-loss’ and cut Tiffany from the group, taking her off payroll. Sure, they had invested a whole ton of money into training the girl. Two years in fact. But if Tiffany was proving to be such an unstable asset, it was better to cut ties now rather than to pump in more revenue into someone who could hightail out of the company and disappear without a trace like Tiffany had done. Nevertheless, Mr. Lee was adamant to the point of expressing a totalitarian ‘because I said so’ attitude and it allayed some of the clambering requests for Tiffany to be removed from SM. But, this action from the normally logical and reasonable president meant that the small trace of dissent amongst the board in regards to the president’s obvious special treatment of one Tiffany Hwang increased. The president’s word was soon going to be not enough to cut it anymore.

The yellow-brick path Mr. Lee had paved for Tiffany was fading and deteriorating fast, and if she didn’t come back soon, it would be nothing but a faint trail of jagged rocks and tiny pebbles.

For the girls, practice was now often a gloomy affair. Despite Taeyeon trying to instill a zest she did not feel herself into the girls, using the simple reason that they were now doing what they had all been dreaming of since they could remember, she was met with forlorn stares and teary eyes. It wasn’t the same without their thug, and right now, if Taeyeon were to bring out a cardboard cutout of Tiffany, she was certain it would be swarmed like bees with honey.

Tiffany was crucial to their group, to their wellbeing, to their continued existence. They were dead without her. Both figuratively and literally.

Taeyeon heard another sigh from the far corner of the dance studio and turned to see their normally happy-go-lucky jokester, Hyoyeon, jut out her jaw and violently stab the plastic covering of the ends of her shoelace into the floor until it splayed-out under the pressure, mumbling angrily under her breath like some madwoman.

Seriously…what has that shoelace done to her?

Everyone of them had been affect in some way.

Sooyoung ate less, and even when she did, the shikshin seemed to deviate towards vegetables, muttering about how Tiffany was always harping on her to eat more greens.

And then one day, Sooyoung didn’t even come home for dinner. This continued on for three days before Taeyeon decided to find out where the girl went instead of coming home. She ended up following Sooyoung back to the hospital. She watched in utter astonishment as Sooyoung came out of the nurse’s station like she had been there many times before. The tall girl had a basin in her hand and a few clean washcloths draped over her shoulder. Then, even as Taeyeon watched, Sooyoung filled the basin with warm water, walked into the ICU, sat down beside one of the comatose patients, and lovingly began to wash the patient’s face and neck, giving the patient a few small and wistful smiles as she did so. Then Sooyoung stood up, mumbled a few heartening words to the patient, and then moved onto the next.

Sooyoung was reliving the moments she had spent with Lexi in this very ward.

Yuri started to have trouble sleeping and ended up having to surround herself with all her existent and non-existent (Yoona actually went out and bought Yuri five more Mickey stuffies) Mickey Mouse stuffies before she could fall asleep. In the end, Jessica pushed her bed so that it was right up against Yuri’s so that