A/N: I'm probably thanking you people so endlessly now. But hey, I have a very good reason why. I haven't written at this length of chapters since I was in sixth grade and it just makes me happy. I'm very much hoping I'd still be getting your support so I could finally finish a story after so long. So, again! THANK YOU!!!!

***

Sulli dreamt of being in heaven – that the clouds felt soft against her skin as she lay in them.

She was even lent one of the angels, given a chance to hold her even – hold her against her peacefully beating heart.

She learnt as a child that the cherubs sang the sweetest melodies and she wasn’t sure why she thought of them now. The cupids, those little arrow flinging angels, Sulli felt them around.

And, at least in her dream, it was true that they were capable of singing—

And, to her, they had good taste in music, but she never realized that they sounded like a twentieth century emotive rock band.

‘You have stolen my heart,’ they whispered in her ears, softly lulling her further into sleep.

—or not.

Sulli’s eyes immediately snapped open the moment it occurred to her that it was her ringtone she was hearing.

Soojung’s eyes fluttered open and she gently pushes herself out of Sulli’s embrace.

Sulli mentally curses as she reaches for the gadget in her pocket and fumbles for the answer button as soon as she gets it out.

‘Hello—‘

‘—WHERE IN THE HEAVENS ARE YOU!’

Right, a moment ago, Sulli had been in heaven until her mom’s voice blasts through the tiny speaker on her phone.

‘Um—‘ Sulli looks up at the clock hanging on the wall, knowing clearly that she was very much in trouble, ‘—I was in the clouds. The cherubs were singing and—‘

‘—GET HOME. N. O. W.’

Soojung buries her face in her pillow to muffle the laughter coming on even in her sleepy state.

‘Okay—‘ Sulli answers, sounding very obedient ‘—and mom? Err—are you mad?’

‘YOU BET YOUR DRUMSTICKS I AM!’

‘Um, mom—‘

‘ONE CALL! ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS CALL AND—‘

And Sulli pulls her phone a good distance away from her ear, knowing very well that the lecture will last throughout the night.

She slips it inside her bag, letting her mom finish her little Fuhrer speech on the other line in there.

‘Well, looks like I’ll have to go now,’ Sulli says nonchalantly, even slipping a folded arm under her head as she kept her eyes on Soojung.

Soojung lays begrudgingly back down and nods her head against her pillow.

‘I’ll call Seung Pyo and tell him to take you home.’

Sulli sits up from bed and starts slipping her feet back into her shoes, while Soojung starts talking on the phone with her driver, telling him to get the car ready for Sulli.

She was about to reach out for the other shoe when Soojung tugs at her shirt.

‘I’ll see you at school?’

Sulli blinks at the question. Of course, she would be seeing Soojung at school unless she broke a leg or went blind. So, she gulps at the possibility of inert messages Soojung was sending her.

‘Of course,’ she decides to say and she could already see the obvious disappointment in Soojung as she lies back down and turns the other way.

Sulli quickly slips the other shoe on, taking the couple of seconds she had to do that to figure something out.

She was Choi Sulli and it shouldn’t be difficult. Definitely shouldn’t.

As soon as she secures the shoe around her heel, she walks to Soojung’s part of the bed and soothes the girl’s hair off of her face.

‘Hey.’

‘Hm?’

‘I—‘

Sulli looks down as if searching the floor for better words for a second. She gets a glimpse of her own arm and almost immediately, her mood brightens.

‘It’s my turn to take you somewhere tomorrow,’ she says with a smile and it was so fresh and child-like that Soojung was reminded of the first time Sulli smiled at her at the music store.

‘And bring my sticks, okay?’

Soojung nods.

.

.

.

It had been a while since there was anyone else in the Jung Estate.

Seeing the familiar girl who had slipped into his home countless times – legally and illegally – and in and out of his daughter’s room, he decides that the next time the girl takes another step on the garden below Soojung’s window—

That would be the time he would be making his own form of clarifications—

And Jung Yunho clarified things to a crisp too.

.

.

.

‘Were you scolded last night?’

Soojung was genuinely apologetic, even her hands were light when she slipped her fingers with Sulli’s.

Then she lets herself fall back a little as Sulli led her through the taller girl’s neighborhood park.

Sulli shrugged her shoulders.

‘My mom—well, I guess she was too worried to scold me too much.’

‘I bet it still feels nice somehow.’

The envy was evident in Soojung’s words though she wore a smile like a child making family trip suggestions to an interested father.

‘To the heart, yes,’ Sulli answers as carefully as she could, and immediately thoughts of a joke to lighten the mood for Soojung, ‘—but terrible to the ears.’

Effectively as usual, Soojung lets out her lovely laughter and Sulli would always stop wondering why they sounded so beautiful to her.

The moment Sulli spots a bent lamp post a few steps away, she holds back a smirk and tugs Soojung towards it.

‘Ta-dah!’ she practically shrieks in excitement as she waves her hands at it like a raffle prize.

Soojung should have known that there would be a strange “catch” to this little trip to the park. She lets her smile freely spread across her lips and she folds her arms in anticipation.

‘This—‘ Sulli began ‘—is where I crashed my bicycle into as a kid.’

Worry flashes through the shorter girl’s eyes and Sulli waves it off, assuring her not to worry.

Sulli then settles cross-legged on the grass very close to it. She gestures for Soojung to sit beside her, and as soon as she does, Sulli holds out her left arm.

‘I broke this when I crashed.’

‘That must’ve been a pretty nasty crash,’ Soojung wonders out loud as she observes the obvious dent on the lamp post.

Sulli nods and it was strange how she smiled at the thought of it.

‘I was waiting for my dad then.’

Sulli had to take a deep breath before saying that. The truth was she barely had sleep. This was a very sensitive part of her life and for the first time, she shares it with someone who isn’t her flesh and blood.

She was raised believing that things couldn’t be completely “owned” — that things, even people, couldn’t be spent a hundred percent of your time with. As a kid, she had not known of bigger forms of selfishness.

With this, she hoped that she could break Soojung’s shell – the one she carelessly broke but hadn’t peeled off; the one that was between them.

‘He promised to teach me how to ride the bike he bought me.’

Soojung was silent. Though her eyes were wandered in the distance, the way her lips drew into a smile, assured Sulli that she was listening.

‘But he didn’t come—‘

Sulli didn’t sound one bit like she hated telling the story. Actually, she sounded enthusiastic, like a child telling her mom that she scored highest in class.

‘—so I got on the bike, kicked off the pedal and did just fine until I collided with this lamp post.’

Sulli fell silent, but this part she didn’t calculate. She wanted to reel the memory back into her head willingly but Soojung speaks up a little earlier than she had expected.

‘I never got to be on a bike—‘

Sulli felt the swell in her chest as Soojung spoke. It was working.

‘When mom and Sooyeon left for the states, I was the only one my dad had.’

Sulli nearly even holds her breath as if the slightest sound she’ll make will stop Soojung from opening up.

‘I guess I never got to be a kid because I promised him that we would be okay—‘

Then she pauses, looks down at her fingers that was now pulling at the little blades of grass under her feet.

‘—I promised him that we’ll do better than Sooyeon and mom were doing, so we ended up taking care of each other.’

Another pause. But this time it alarms Sulli because she says nothing else.

Sulli wanted to push Soojung further into telling her more. ‘Sooj—‘

‘—sometimes—‘ now her voice quivered and Sulli immediately holds back her tongue ‘—I wonder if I did the right thing, or if I had the right to even decide then because I was so young.’

Sulli would have had an ounce of hatred for the older Jung, but it dissipates at how Soojung spoke about him.

‘I only end up telling myself that maybe he was young, very much in love and hurt then too — that he had to hold on to the closest thing he could hold on to just to keep himself up. Even his love for music didn’t keep him afloat then too.’

And the taller girl didn’t think she’d feel being in the mix too, but with how memories of her early childhood, which were the only times that she spent with her father, sped back to the clearer part of her mind, she knew she couldn’t pull back now.

She knew so little about her father.

‘I was probably too naïve back then too—‘ Soojung says and lets out a laugh that tore Sulli right back into the matter at hand ‘—because I told him that I’ll be his music if he couldn’t find himself in it anymore.’

For a second, Sulli wondered where the humor in that part of the story was, until she remembered that Soojung was practically killing herself to be musically perfect every single day.

‘Is it working?’ Sulli asks, sans any form of calculation now.

‘What?’

‘Did you get him back up?’

Soojung shakes her head.

Sulli looks back at the other girl who had stopped playing with the grass now and knew that somehow, her hands glided differently as she lets the tips of the little blades tickle her palm.

‘Did you bring my sticks?’

‘Oh,’ Soojung immediately pulls the pair from her bag and it doesn’t slip how the red ribbon Sulli had used to tie them together was still there. ‘Here.’

Sulli doesn’t take it from Soojung’s grasp though.

‘We’re naming them today,’ she says instead.

‘Gosh, I haven’t thought of a name yet,’ Soojung apologizes but Sulli waves it off.

‘It’s alright,’ she smiles as she takes the other end and keeps it in her grasp while Soojung had the other. ‘I have just the names.’

‘That’s called improvement, Choi,’ Soojung lightly jokes and it immediately brings a twinkle in Sulli’s eyes. ‘So who are they going to be?’

‘This—‘ Sulli points at the shorter stick with her free hand ‘—will, from here on, be called Krystal.’

Soojung thought that it was meant to be a joke because it was the shorter stick after all; she had thought that the longer one would have been the other girl.

‘—and what?’ she says, sarcasm already at the tip of her tongue as she was about to gently push the sticks into Sulli’s grip, ‘the taller one would be Jinri?’

Sulli surprisingly doesn’t react to the joke and presses on, ‘the taller one will be Appa.’

With that, Soojung’s hand stiffens at the other end of the pair of sticks.

‘See?’

Sulli completely takes the sticks from Soojung’s grip now and waves the pair before her eyes.

‘Krystal can only play good music with Appa.’

Soojung doesn’t move or talk, her eyes were still on the silently rejoicing Sulli.

Now Sulli takes Soojung’s limp hand and uses it to pull the end of the ribbon, untying the two sticks in one smooth movement.

‘But Krystal cannot stick with Appa forever. I can’t play with the two of them tying each other down like that—‘ Sulli says as she airdrums a little, meaning for it to be a gag to make Soojung laugh. ‘See? They got to do their own thing too.’

Sulli quips on, but Soojung’s gaze falls on the ribbon lying on the grass; she hadn’t noticed how red it was until now.

Sulli even does a dorky beatbox with , but Soojung couldn’t bring herself to laugh—

In one swift movement, Sulli falls on her back as Soojung tackles her into a tight embrace.

Her sobs making the both of them shudder.