October 24 2015 - Happy birthday to Krystal! Her present on this glorious day is not having to appear in the chapter. Take a break before the comeback. 4 Walls! I ordered four copies because I may or may not have a tiny problem… There better be photo cards, I swear…

I rushed this update out in celebration of Krystal's birthday, if you couldn't tell. It hasn't been wholly proofread yet, so I'll work on it after I get some sleep. You readers should be pleased I managed to scrounge this up before November (unlike my warnings in the story's status updates; hope some of you read those).

Seulgi is mad at Seungwan. She remembers this much. She’s tired, and she’s mad but she’s also, unfortunately, a rather hormonal teenager who does in fact have some fondness for Seungwan in her heart (they were friends before all the mess went down, after all) and a disposition that’s—

More to the point, it’s not like kissing Seungwan is bad per se—

But the principle of it is—! Is—!

She doesn’t remember being this easily distracted. (It must be Soojung’s fault. All her bad character traits are rubbing off on her.)

(Actually, is thinking about Soojung at a moment like this creepy or what? It should be deemed inappropriate at the very least.)

Seungwan pulls away but just letting her pull away also feels like letting her get away with everything like nothing really happened so Seulgi manages to push out her arms a little and that kind of helps create the sort of impression, hover light, that she’s shoved Seungwan away. Kind of. Well, Seungwan seems to get the point anyway and the whole flustering confusion of the situation makes it difficult to tell who moved first. (She hopes.)

“Hey, what was that for?” Seungwan whines.

“You kissed me!”

“You kissed me back!”

Ignoring that for the moment—

“Well sorry if I’m not understanding things really well,” Seulgi says, not particularly sorry at the moment. “It seemed like you hated my guts for the past few weeks, but now you want to stick your tongue down my throat?”

Seungwan lets out an aggravated sigh, an exhale of hot air and crosses her arms. “We’re going back here? Right after my heartfelt confession?”

“What ‘heartfelt confession’?” Seulgi hiss-yells. She realises it’s gotten unbearably warm in the room. “I don’t understand anything that’s going on!”

“I like you, you useless idiot! I said it! I said it! I like you!”

“What?”

“Are you deaf or something? I like you,” Seungwan boldly declares and since it must be the third time or so she’s heard it, Seulgi’s brain finally accepts her eardrum’s requests to turn the sounds into meaning.

“Seriously? You like me?” 

Seungwan shoves her in the chest, half a step away. Seulgi recovers her footing pretty quickly, though.

“Yes I like you, you dunce! Is that so weird to accept?”

Seulgi’s about to answer, yes it kind of is, but—

“Never mind! Don’t answer that! I need to say some things to you first.”

Seulgi promptly shuts up.

“I did a lot of thinking,” Seungwan says, “and it made me realise a lot of things.”

She takes a deep breath in.

It’s going to be a speech. Seungwan’s gone and dragged her here and Seulgi’s going to have to listen to her give a whole damn soliloquy that, with Seungwan’s orating skills, might very well convince her to stop being angry. Seulgi can’t have that.

In a deluge of hormone-addled, riled up, sunk down feelings, adrenaline and more pumping through her veins, she realises she doesn’t have to take it at all.

“And that somehow justifies making me feel like some sort of social leper?”

Seungwan’s rocked off her expected pace and path. Dazed. “You weren’t a leper. I just didn’t— We ate together. With Soojung. Once or twice, we did. I didn’t—”

“You ignored me. Whenever you could, you ignored me. Whenever it was inconvenient for you, you didn’t. Figures you couldn’t even commit to hating someone.”

“I told you. I don’t hate you. I—”

“You like me. I get it. You don’t have to keep saying it.” As if the words are just words like that. Every time Seungwan says it so carelessly just makes Seulgi think it’s worth less and less worth believing. Ironic, considering how much Seungwan had to hint at it to try and get the message across in the first place. Less is more is less and everything is a mess.

“I sure do have to keep saying it because you sure don’t seem to understand.” Well, there it is. Even Seungwan’s surmised as much. “You definitely didn’t get the message until I practically had to set of a firework to attract your attention and make you figure it out.”

Seulgi’s jaw drops in disbelief anyway. “You can’t seriously think what you did was fine?”

“It’s not all my fault!” Seungwan protests. “What I did wasn’t good, fine, but what did you do?”

“I tried to reach out.”

“When?”

“When?” Seulgi scoffs. “Talking to you at lunch. Talking to you as you pass me in the halls. And again in the spare study classroom in—”

“Spare classroom?” Seungwan’s eyes glaze over, recalling it. “Then? Of course it couldn’t be then.”

“Why? Because you didn’t want to?”

“I didn’t want to start a serious conversation in a room where I knew we’d be interrupted! And with good reason too! Look at this mess? You think you could have handled having a whole bunch of senior barge in on this?”

“Could I? Could you? Of course you couldn’t. It just wouldn’t do to have the great Son Seungwan’s image be tarnished by arguing with her friend. If I even am one now.”

“Of course you’re my friend!” Seungwan’s hands ball up into fists by her side. “How could you even—”

“It sure hasn’t felt like that.”

Seungwan flinches. Good.

“I tried really hard” Seulgi says. “Do you know how difficult it was to try and start talking to you when you were brushing me off like you were the arctic shelf?”

Seungwan interrupts, rambling in a mutter under her breath. “The arctic shelf doesn’t really brush anything. If you’re saying I’m cold, you’re mixing metaphors.”

“Don’t talk over me!” Seulgi snaps. “Stop it! Just stop!”

Seungwan stops. She stops dead in her tracks. She doesn’t so much as breath, stiller than ice, stiller than stone. The metaphor can be apt now, she thinks, indignant.

Seulgi takes a breath in. Out. In once more.

She speaks. 

“Even if you change the topic, it’s still the same problem. Do you think this is enough? Do you think just saying a few things will fix things? Will change anything?”

How much of what you’re saying do you really mean? Seulgi wants to say, but of all the things she things, she still doesn’t dare. Disgusting. Still a coward to the end, she supposes. Change for a bit, but character epiphanies must have their limits and her tongue bites itself back on instinct that can’t just be overruled by anger, however righteous. Is it because she can’t believe what she’s hearing or because she won’t let herself believe it?

“‘Is it so hard to believe’?” she quotes. “What if it is, huh? Do you even realise what people think of you? Can you even process, just a little bit, how other people think?”

Maybe she can’t. But also, just as likely, Seungwan has no idea what to think. They can act close and be close and spend time together but, and it’s just strangely funny and painful at the same, Seungwan doesn’t know and Seungwan won’t know about her something that a random strange middle schooler overheard from whatever back room noise still echoes through cold walls. Seungwan won’t know until Seulgi tells her and Seulgi won’t tell her unless she’s asked. Even then, even if she is asked… Well, how would Seungwan even know to ask if she never hears about it? That was what she wanted anyway, right? (What she wants? What’s the tense? Why’s she so tense?)

Seulgi won’t say a word so of course Seungwan doesn’t know. And if Seungwan doesn’t know, why would she try and think that way? Seulgi sure wouldn’t? Yet Seungwan is Seungwan and brave and bold and brash enough to dare to dream about thinks Seulgi can’t even begin to fathom and she confessed and she kissed her out here in a semi-public space just because of the absence of other people. What is the point of even trying to comprehend the way Seungwan thinks? The point, maybe, is that she does try to. Does Seungwan ever? 

In an endless, boundless plain of space, the limits might be the borders of the expanse. A circle might be corner less, or it might have an infinite number of corners, according to mathematicians, anyway. So just the same, Seungwan’s lack of limits lead her to fail to comprehend anything else. Seulgi’s just making things up, probably, but it tight be an explanation for a person who so profoundly likes other people can’t understand them at all. If she even tries to do that. Or if Seulgi’s just mistaken that way Seungwan talks for like at all. 

(, ‘like’. ‘Liking’. She’s just going to go and make it harder for herself if she thinks in backwards loops like this.)

Seungwan swallows. Maybe she’s finally grasped just how pissed off Seulgi is. How exasperated and tired and upset she is and the way it’s frazzling her nerves. “So maybe I was just a little too fast and skipped a few steps. Let’s go back. All I meant— I just wanted you to understand that I really do like you. I really, really like you.”

Seulgi says. “So what? So you think that you can just kiss me like that? So you think everything you did was okay? So you think I’ll just accept your feelings like that?”

“Well, I…”

“It was not okay. Seungwan, you really hurt me.”

Seungwan’s expression makes another spike of anger or disappointment (just something bitter and sharp) flare up in her. It’s not guilt. Just a sort of bemused confusion—blurry and fuzzy until it takes on the acid edge of denial.

“I just didn’t talk to you.” Seungwan says. “It wasn’t that long. You don’t have to be so dramatic. It was just—”

“And I hate how you do that! Don’t just brush off my feeling likes that! You can’t tell me to tell you what I’m thinking and then just say what I think is pointless. Because then— Then what’s the point of that? It’s hard enough for me to just say it and you’re not helping.”

The room is overtaken by their silence again. The silence is solid and cold. Not snow, or a heavy, sense-dulling blanket this time but something just as suffocating, like drowning in molten lead—all the weight but with none of the heat. Or even like being trapped in a vacuum, the absence of everything boiling her blood in nothing.

Seungwan’s voice cracks. Seulgi can her her lips pry apart, almost dry but damp enough to want to stick together without a concerted effort to try and speak.

Effort. Everything today seems to be requiring too much of that.

So Seungwan’s cracked voice cracks the brittle silence and Seulgi listens to her talk like it’s the only thing that’s to be done.

“I don’t know,” Seungwan whispers. “I don’t know. I was stupid and I don’t even understand why myself. I can’t think. I can’t think and I can’t breath and I just— We’re stupid teenagers and I have no idea what I’m doing and I just— I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I made you feel like that. I want to say it’s the last thing— the last thing I wanted but that wouldn’t— That would be a lie. There was just— There was at least one part of me that wanted to hurt you. Just a little bit. Because it felt like I… I wanted you to feel how I felt.”

“You felt hurt?” Seulgi says. “By me?”

“I don’t know if it was jealousy or feeling neglected or something else.” 

Jealous of what? There’s too much to process so Seulgi just tries to hang on what she can understand at the moment. Maybe, another day, if there is any other day for them and she sure hopes there will be, the topic will come up again. Maybe she’ll understand better then. But dwelling on stupid tiny details that gnaw at the shadowy backs of their heads is at least a little responsible for what they’ve dug themselves into so Seulgi just tries to keep moving. Someone needs to. And there’s another part of her brain that nags at her and tells her if she does this too much, too many things will get left behind in their moment and yet another voice that tells her leaving things behind is fine and another one that says otherwise and she doesn’t have time for this constant criss-cross of back and forth waffling. She just picks this course: one course, whatever it means. Only one route for now. It’s all that can be dealt with so far and she just has to believe it’s fine and believe it’s enough.

Because she can’t just let everything amount to nothing. This has to mean something. She has to make it mean something.

“Like, I barely understand all the things that are making make stupid choices but that was how I felt. And I was mad at you for being so— For not realising anything.”

Realising things she didn’t dare think about, Seulgi realises. Reasons, rather. She can tell herself the way Seungwan sidled up beside her arms, looping around hers, was nothing extraordinary time and time against and in isolation that may very well have been the case, it was accompanied by a host of other things that should have at least aroused an inkling of suspicion. That was, if she was even type to dream about as much.

And she can understand what Seungwan meant. Feelings didn’t make sense half as often as they didn’t. Like now, with this irrational (was it really though, because Seulgi’s gut told her it wasn’t wholly unjustified) anger towards Seungwan for— Well, what exactly? Or is she angry at herself? At both of them? She doesn’t get it. It just makes her feel sick and hopeless and at the same time there is the possibility— Just knowing that Seungwan’s feelings are—

She can think it. She can think it if she wanted. Seungwan already did. And the air in this classroom makes her feel— Feel. Well, just feel like things were possible with all the stupid optimism high school was meant to be filled with before society and an economic restructuring had determined it would be replaced with career pragmatism and cynicism. It makes her feel and it makes her want to jump down that hole just to see what’s there. Thoughtless and doubtless and care free. A leap of pure, blind faith. Blind faith and trust that must somehow mean believing in something hopeful. Daring to think there’s something worth while down there worth jumping after.

“I’m sorry,” Seungwan says, with gravity. “I was mad at you for not realising things. I didn’t know I wasn’t realising them either. I’m sorry. I guess it was for nothing, after all. I shouldn’t have— I’m sorry.”

‘For nothing’? What was then? Is it too much or too little? What’s brought them here and where’s it going to end.

It can’t be for no reason at all, right? 

If it hurts, it’s because you care.

Words from ages ago come back with a grip on her heart. Seulgi steadies her breath, straightens out her hands. Now is now. Now isn’t before. And Seungwan is Seungwan, no one else. Which means Seulgi is still herself too and no one else. Maybe unfortunately, maybe not. Whatever it means if it means anything at all, she has to figure out herself. And that’s the real terrifying thing, almost as much as being alone again.

But Seungwan’s not her only friend, after all. There’s still Soojung.

Soojung. If there’s fallout, she wonders which side Soojung will pick, if Soojung will pick a side at all. If there is fallout, can it be worse than it already was and would Soojung notice enough to realise lines needed to be drawn? And if she never does, does that mean Soojung was never her friend after all and that it was just all an elaborate machination she’s made up to comfort herself after Seungwan left her? What else can Seungwan do to her, intentional or otherwise? All of it: just a leap into an abyss with not a shred of visibility.

Her silence is telling. She thinks her silence is telling. Because the truth is she can’t tell what Seungwan is thinking at all, only makes guesses like blind stabs in the dark without a clue of what makes the mark, what gets hit, what ends up bleeding.

But she knows Seungwan matters. She matters even if she doesn’t understand how or why. Maybe there never will be a why.

“I never…” Seulgi gulps down the hard lump in her dry throat. “I never said I didn’t like  you either.”

Seungwan blinks, frozen. Her eyes are glassy and clear, shimmering wet and damp, dewy.

She can’t say ‘It’s okay’. It’s not okay. What Seungwan did can’t be okay to her. What she did and does…well, it’s not going to be fine either, but it is. It just is. It has to be. For the first time in a while, she supposes she can make it be that way.

‘I forgive you’? That might be better but it’s not true. Not yet. And she can keep on caring about Seungwan but not forget about this or about what happened. And maybe she will forgive Seungwan one day, but not yet. Saying anything else will just be a lie. Seulgi doesn’t want to lie. It’s tiring. She’s tired. She’s always tired. She doesn’t want to be anymore. She realises she hasn’t wanted to be that way in a while.

“You just… You can’t assume everything is going to go the way you plan it in your head.”

“Okay,” Seungwan says, breathy. “Okay, I won’t.”

“And this is just— Things can’t just stay the way they were before. We have to do something about this. About us. Both of us.”

“Okay,” Seungwan repeats, still a little dazed, but at the same time, her gaze is so focussed  and sharp and directed straight at Seulgi. It makes her feel like she’s nothing and everything at the same time: insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe but the linchpin in their own tiny world.

She watches Seungwan swallow silently, just the bob of her neck something as it goes down .

“So, are we… can we…?”

A leap of faith. Jump. Just jump.

“Okay.” Seulgi breathes. “Let’s try.”