Today’s weather was perfect. The perfect time near the end of spring when the weather is not too hot or too cold. A breeze was rolling, so calm it was not enough to send their laid out towels on a mad tumble across the beach. The sky, blue and cloudless, was creating an illusion of a never-ending horizon.  

An amazing time to just lazily sunbath while reading a light murder-mystery novel, surrounded by good friends, good snacks, and noisy little s who didn’t know how to play beach volleyball. At all.

“AIM PROPERLY GODDAMMIT.”

It was the fifth time Hana, who was sitting on a reclining chair beside her, had to get up and violently serve the volleyball back to the group of incompetent people swarming around the wrongly erected net. With that, Suyeon found out that Hana was a national volley champion in her elementary school years.

“Why don’t you join them?” Suyeon asked when Hana sat back on her chair.

She puffed while running her hand to tame down the loose strands of hair from her high bun, “because they’re friggin amateurs. No fun.”

“Whoa, okay there master,” Jaewa, a scrawny looking personal assistant who didn’t look his age (he still have to show his ID everytime he bought alcohol. And he was 34. A 34 years old married man. With 2 little boys), lazily lowered down his sunglasses and snickered at Hana, “show off.”

“Prick,” Hana sneered back at him.

She was just about to kick up a cloud of sand in his direction before Suyeon raised her hands up and stopped her. Hana seemed pretty pissed of that missed opportunity of fun (harassment type of fun) and plopped back onto her recliner.

Suyeon only stopped her because she had her beach bag right on the trajectory of where the sand cloud would go if Hana did kick them. The thought of having to clean up her bag outweighs the amusement she would get of seeing Jaewa spitting out sand for the rest of the week.

She was that good, that was.

Besides annoying other people, they have something else to do anyway.

Suyeon began to tug on Hana’s arms. Then, when she got her attention, she nudged her head at the direction of the sea, “unnie, let’s take a dip.”

“Now?” Hana sounded unsure and suddenly her interest to the amateur volley player group increased, as she kept taking quick glances towards them.

Suyeon only answered back with a nod. As the wind grew stronger, surely the wave would begin to pick up too. And that would be the perfect condition to execute their plan. The plan that is quite dangerous, but well… what’s the fun of life if you didn’t live it precariously?

It all could be traced to their conversation last night.
 

The group arrived at the hotel quite late. What’s with traffic and all that jazz. After a brief quarrel over who would stay with whom in which room, Suyeon finally could drop her luggage (how in hell Kyuhyun managed to get her clothes from her apartment was still a mystery) in a room that she shared with Hana.

“Do you wanna use the bathroom first unnie?” Suyeon asked. But Hana looked disinterested and only answered with a weak headshake as she was laying face down on the bed.

Suyeon only shrugged at her weird behaviour and rushed to the bath to wash off all the accumulated grime from their journey. She told Kyuhyun numerous times to roll up the window, it’s not like they’re driving in the middle of a pristine mountain road, they were in the middle of the city’s main highway! The air filled with pollution and dust rolling up like clouds. But of course, he didn’t listen. She prayed he would wake up tomorrow with a gigantic zit on his nose.

But when she saw that Hana hadn’t move an inch even after she had finished her long bath time routine, Suyeon grew worried.

“Unnie, are you okay?” She lowered herself carefully to sit at the edge of her bed.

“Uhum…”

“You’re lying,” Suyeon began to give her calf soft little nudges, “come on, just tell me.”

Hana then plopped around, landing on her back. Her face was red from all the time it spent pressed down on the pillow. “Don’t laugh at me, okay?"

“When have I ever done that?” She wanted to sound nice, but the expression on Hana’s face indicated that Suyeon had laughed at her before. Several times. “I’ll try my best not to…”

“I miss having a boyfriend.”

Not even 5 seconds have gone pass since she made her promise that Suyeon let out a snicker, “are you drunk?!”

Hana suddenly bolted up and gave Hana a firm push. But that didn’t stop her laughter. That only prompted her to go on a loud rant.

“Ever since I broke up with my boyfriend 2 years ago I haven’t met with any other man, okay? And now we’re on a beach, and I’m going alone, and I just think ‘Oh wow! How much fun this is going to be if I have a boyfriend to take?’ I’m not like you, ok? Who’s being chased around by 2 men, not taking to regards how one is a sorry excuse of an overgrown 5 years old and one is more fitting to be with me!”

That was enough to set the mood down with a gloomy overcast.

“Jungsoo?” Suyeon broke the silence with a serious question.

Hana solemnly nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“I thought he like you… So much,” Hana mumbled back, her head hung low to avoid Suyeon’s eyes.

“Unnie! If you told me earlier we could’ve set our problems so easily! Seriously why didn’t you tell me?!”

Hearing the excitement in her voice, something that wasn’t supposed to be there when a friend of yours admitted that she was having a lust on your beau, Hana picked up her head to take a peek, to see that Suyeon was smiling and clapping her hand.

She grabbed ahold of Hana's shoulders and said, “I’ve been looking for ways to tell him that I’m not interested to be in a relationship with him. But I don’t know how! He’s too nice, really, and I’m just so afraid of possibly hurting his feelings… But look at you, unnie! You’ll be so great together!”

Hana’s face lit up with a hopeful smile, “really? You’re not joking right?”

“I’m serious!”

“Okay! Okay! I’m in!” They both proceeded to hop on excitedly on the mattress like deranged teenage kids on sleepovers, “what should we do then?”

“I have this idea I’ve been wanting to test since like… Forever,” the gears on Suyeon’s brain began to tick. All those fun… All those possibilities! They trickled down like a fountain of honey.

“What is it?”

“Unnie, I hope you can swim because we’re gonna get wet tomorrow.”
 

So first we’re going to take a swim. Nothing suspicious, just a paddle around the shallow parts of the beach. Then I’ll go and leave you alone in the water for a while, grabbing a float that I left on the shore or something, we’ll figure it out, no worries. Only then… Will the fun begin. 

“Oh… Oh my god!” Suyeon dropped the noodle float on her hands and pointed at the distance with a very convincing look of shock, with that, she managed to get the whole groups attention. “U… Unnie?!”

Everyone’s senses perked up into alert. Several gasps were heard but they were all petrified on their spots with all the suddenness of the event.

There, quite far away toward the middle of the ocean (‘you’ll have to swim further away, ok? To make it less embarrassing. It’s a bit silly for you to drown on the shallow beach, right?’) Hana was doing a very loud and splashy, but still believable, of course, act of drowning. Added with a very nice touch of gurgled shouts of ‘Help’s.

With her super sharp opportunistic eyes, Suyeon had carefully calculated the perfect moment for when Jungsoo was being someone closest to her. So that it was easy for her to grab ahold of his arm and screamed, “oh my gosh, help her! Help her!”

Although it seemed that he didn’t need her commands to jump into action (or water, in this case), because even before she finished half of her sentence, Jungsoo had swam up to Hana and gallantly carried her to dry land. By the time he laid her down on a stretch of towel, the whole group had converged in on them.

“Are you okay? Can you breathe?” He worriedly asked while softly patting Hana’s back. She somehow had swallowed a bit of seawater and thus managed to put up a watery coughing act that was a brilliant touch to make him all the more anxious.

“I’m great, it’s okay,” she weakly tried to wave everything off, but another forced coughing fit was all it took to bring this show to a successful wrap.

“I’m going to take you to the infirmary,” Jungsoo skipped the ‘lemme help you up, my lady’ and straight up carried her in his arms, princess style.

“Do you want me to accompany you?” Suyeon tried her best to not grin at the slumped figure of Hana while she said that.

“No, it’s okay. You stay here. Keep a watch on our bag,” she gave Suyeon a weak smile. And off they went body in arms to the hotel. God damn give that lady a drama because that was an amazing performance!

But it seemed one person was not entirely convinced.

“So she drowned, huh?” Kyuhyun was the only left who stood next to her, watching Hana and Jungsoo walked into the hotel, even after the group had dispersed to do whatever thing they were doing before the fiasco, “fascinating.”

Suyeon dropped her worried frown to give him an eye roll, “what, you expect people to be able to breathe underwater?”

Kyuhyun shrugged back, “I don’t know? Drowning at beaches just seemed so improbable.”

“Improbable is not impossible,” she was not in the mood of some witty banter so Suyeon walked back to her reclining chair, determined to erase the image of this half dressed, beach haired, hunk of a cutie with a few pages of her Agatha Christie. Surprise surprise, he decided to follow her.

“How does it feel? Your boyfriend jumping to the water to safe some other girl?” He asked sarcastically while taking her spot on the chair. He leaned back and popped his sunglasses on, then proceeded to stare at her with a knowing grin on his face.

“One, he’s not my boyfriend. YET. Two, Hana's a friend so I’m okay with that,” she crossed her arms and stared back at him. But he suddenly threw her guards off when he averted his gaze and bursted out laughing. “What? That’s my chair and I’m going to stand here until you moved away.”

“Ooh Suyeon… If only you could see yourself.” He breathlessly said at the end of it.

“What? What?!” Panickly she looked all around her, paranoid that she might’ve had her s out this whole time or something. But no, her bikini strap was still tightly hooked around her back. So why was he laughing?

“You’re a blusher, aren’t you?”

She was red. Her cheek, her neck, her ears, chest, stomach, you name it. They were all red. It seemed that her heart and circulatory system couldn’t maintain their usual work and began to go into hardcore mode with the sight of a scantily clad Kyuhyun laying suggestively on a beach recliner. It. Was. TOO MUCH.

With her head hung low, she furiously turned around and stomped her way to the water. So flustered was she that she forgot to take off the scarf tied on her hips until the water around her was already knee deep. After fumbling with it for a while, she decided to swallow her pride and walked back to put it at least beyond the reach of the waves. But that turned out to be stupid. As not mere three steps and she could hear Kyuhyun scream, “AM I TOO Y FOR YOU SUYEON?!”

She decided to just throw the balled up scarf and hoped for the best. Nope, it landed just short of getting lapped up by the short ripples. Dammit. But she ain’t gonna go back to face that sort of treatment by him. So, she immediately took a plunge and let the cold water erase the traces of her shame away.

Still holding her head under the waves, she slowly swam to the deeper reaches of the beach. Trying to block out all the embarrassment by immersing herself to the calming sways of the sea. Suyeon was a great swimmer, even though she never told anybody, but she could hold her breath for quite a while underwater. So it took her lungs some time before they contracted in protest for a supply of fresh air, not until she got into an area where the water was well above her head by tens of centimeters.

But when she kicked her feet together to bring herself up to the surface, she was only greeted by a familiar shot of pain over the entirety of her left leg.

It was that moment of stasis where you couldn’t believe certain bizarre thing just happened to you. She just helped her friend stage a drowning act, and here she was, drowning herself over an improper stretching of her leg muscles. And as the sting of the cramp began to beg for her full attention, a thought flashed in Suyeon’s mind.

‘Fate is a cruel, cruel .’

A/N: YO WASSUP sorry I didn't update for the last 2 weeks > < I'm having my final exam shenanigans and I didn't have time to write... Not saying that I'm done with my exam but you know what... I don't care anymore? I've done my studies and I'll just pray for the best...
Anyways! As you can see, Hana's faceclaim is Shin Minah, because I think she's cuuute :P And Mo's Kwangsoo just because.