a/n: it's the start of volume two! drama galore!!!! also, if you frequent my tumblr, you might have seen this chapter coming bc it's posted as a drabble there from quite a few weeks ago. but i highly doubt it LOL, because it has what, 9 notes? haha. linkin park's given up is embedded into this chapter, do check it out if you're into that sort of rock ;)

It’s a Saturday. And Sihoo is here again, alone in the school band room as he recreates his own stage and passionately plucks the strings like lit fire, pressing on pedals and arching back and forth like no other. But it’s a Saturday, so the room’s only to himself (and not hogged up with Mari and Jaemin whispering sweet nothings to each other.)

Han Sihoo likes these Saturday mornings spent by himself; using Jaemin’s electric guitar and having his own rock concert, annoying the out of those super studious martians cramming in the student café one level above with his heavenly riffs of burning awesomeness. (Sometimes, he even screams.) It’s nice to return to his element – the electric guitar. He had to go for bass because there was no one else in the band who could play it, and since he could play both, he had to take that place.

He’s just about jamming to Linkin Park’s Given Up, face contorted into the perfect picture of pent up teenage angst, complete with his singing of badly-pronounced English, when the door opens and his nose is hit with the smell of sweet, sweet blood.

Holy .

He’s frozen. He can’t move. His hands have stopped strumming. Jo Ahra stands by the doorway, and amused smile on her face.

She’s going to say something judgemental, ugh. What have I done. wHAT HAVE I DONE. she’s going to tell everyone, and Mari will not let me live this down. And Jaemin, argh that brat, will have a field day when he knows I’m using his-

Ahra strides into the room, her eyebrows quirking up at Sihoo’s expression of mortification when she walks in his direction.

“Hi I can explain-” Sihoo begins.

She walks past him, and towards her spot at the keyboard.

Her hands ghost over the keys when she turns it on, and then her fingers slam onto the keys with an almost possessed tempo. It’s familiar, it’s this song, it’s the buildup to the bridge and Sihoo stares in awe as she bangs her head to the imaginary rhythm. The chords are clashing and it’s much tamer on the keyboard for a song like Given Up, it’s almost cute, until she opens and-

“PUT ME OUT OF MAH MISERRYYYY!”

Sihoo wonders what jaws are for if all they do is drop. To. The. Floor.

“PUT ME OUT OF MAH MISAERIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!”Ahra continues to scream like a rockstar as she hits the keys with vigour, pouring passion into the scream bridge part of the song.

“PUT ME OUT OF MAH, PUT ME OUT OF MAH-”

Is she going to say it? oh my-

“-ING MISERYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!”

Wow, she did, Sihoo marvels as his hands travel to the strings once more. She’s still screaming (the official audio version one features a 17 second long scream of the word “MISERY” and Jo Ahra looks 200% determined to outlast it,) and for someone as skinny, pretty, and delicate as Jo Ahra, this is no small feat.

When the screaming part ends they plunge back into the chorus, and Sihoo joins in with his riffs on the guitar. They shriek in unison, the soundproof walls unable to contain their cries of badly accented English.

“I’VE GIVEN UPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP! I’M SAEK OF FEEELING! IS THER NOTHING YOU CAN SAE!”

There’s a hint of a smile pulling at the ends of as they go into the ending part. Sihoo just hopes she doesn’t break the keyboard.

“TAKE THIS ALLLLL AWAY! I’M SUFFOCATING! TELL ME WAT THE IS WRONGGGGGG,” and it’s at this crucial moment that Ahra decides to turn to Sihoo and give him the stupidest grin ever, “WITH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

The songs ends there as Ahra tries to catch her breath.

Sihoo sets the guitar down and blinks. Dafuq just happened?

She sits on the group table as she pushes her hair to the side. “I don’t think I’ve greeted you yet. Good morning, Han Sihoo.”

He drags a chair and sits in front of her.

“Did that just happen?”

“It did.”

“But.. you…”

“I was tutoring some kid in Year 1 for Maths upstairs. And then I heard you play. Only you play like it’s your last concert at the Tokyo Dome or something.”

“Was it noisy?”

Ahra laughs. Laughs. Genuinely. It’s very weird and it also makes Sihoo’s heart twist in ways he does not understand.

“What do you think? The kid couldn’t get anything in, I told her to go home first and we’d do a catch up later on.”

“Ah, crap. Did I trouble you too much?” Sihoo asks as he scratches the back of his head. These kinds of questions are very uncharacteristic for someone like him.

“Did I… did you just say that? Han Sihoo asking me? If he troubled me?” Ahra teases, punching his shoulder lightly.

“Well did you just memorize the whole of Given Up by Linkin Park and scream to it too? Jo Ahra, who walks the halls of this school as a living, breathing untouchable goddess? I can’t believe my ears as well.”

“It’s a good song.”

“It is.”

“Have you always been like this? Every Saturday, alone in the band room?”

Sihoo smiles sheepishly.

“Okay, that’s it, I’m joining you.”

He sputters almost immediately. “What?”

“Ah, I guess there’s a lot you don’t know about me. For one, I like rock, and also, I have a Youtube channels dedicated to classic rock songs that I play by ear and artistic covers of dubstep songs. And uh, you were hilarious when you were singing.”

“Wow.”

“I’m quite cool, right?” Ahra says as she nudges Sihoo.

“Wow.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Just. Wow.”

Her face colours into a pretty pink and it scrunches up into embarrassment  when Sihoo says, “You’re pretty cool, Jo Ahra.” And he wants to pick her up and squeeze her face for hours and-

What did I just think. Backtrack, backtrack, Ahra is just a friend I like to fluster, but it’s not working. He finds himself falling, sinking into silent admiration of Jo Ah Ra as he looks up her videos on his phone.

After a comfortable silence they share due to Sihoo surfing her Youtube channel and basking himself in harmonies, Ahra speaks.

“Hey, have you eaten? You usually feed at night right? It’s been 12 hours.”

“Yah, how do you know all of this?”

“Mari, uh, tells me things.”

“You don’t have a problem with me drinking blood?” Sihoo wonders.

“I think I’d have a bigger problem if I saw you eating brusselsprouts and garlic cloves.”

His senses are kinda clouded with the smell of both Ahra and the packet of synthetic animal blood in his hands but he has much better self-control than Mari (who spazzes to him daily about how Jaemin’s blood is drawing her in and killing her softly) so yeah. He suppresses the urge, and pokes the straw into the packet that reads “TOMATO JUICE”.

“You’re not scared?” SIhoo asks.

“You’re not scary.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Dude, yes. Yes I am, Mr. Undercover Bloodsucker. And you still haven’t treated me to tomato juice.”

Sihoo shoves the packet of blood in her face with a teasing smile. “Want some?”

“Ew, no!” she squeals as she swats it out of her face, her nose crinkled cutely in disgust.

“You’re so cute, Jo Ahra.”

“Are you okay, or are you high on blood,” she deadpans, but a blush is crawling up into her cheeks.

“I don’t know, ” he says and does the “aing” biting thing.

Ahra feels like she’s going to lose her mind. Oh my.

“Please don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Sihoo says, feigning ignorance.

“That… thing.”

“What thing?”

“You know, that biting thing.”

“What biting thing?”

“Oh my god,” Ahra huffs, “that thing. You know what I’m talking about. It drives me insane.”

“In a good way?”

She slaps his shoulder. Hard.

“Do it for me. Then I can understand what you don’t want, or rather what you want me to do,”Sihoo suggests.

“NO!”

“Oh come-on, you were a mix of overflowing aegyo and second-hand embarrassment when you did it at the accessory shop last week,” he points out.

“Which is exactly why I’m not doing it again.”

“Please? This is Han Sihoo pleading for you to do it!”

Ahra buries her head in her hands. All she wanted to do was to impress and freak Sihoo out today with her explosive performance and then leave in style.

“Fine,” she mutters, and does it. Sihoo starts grinning like an elated puppy as he pats her hair. Usually she’d be mad if anyone touches her hair, but all Ahra’s trying to do now is to not betray her look of mortification by bursting out into a cringey smile.

“There, I’ve done it, what more do you want?”

“Confession time!” Sihoo says cheerily, “you start. How long have you liked Jung Jaemin?”

“Why me?”

“Because.”

“I don’t know, five? Six months? I’m over him already,” Ahra says, but she’s biting her lip as she still winces about his multiple rejections and her wounded pride. Ouch.

“Huh.”

“Hey, I’m Jo Ahra. I don’t waste time on people that are uh, a waste of time. I kind of learnt that with amnesia or not, Jaemin loves her. Don’t ask me why. Either way, I had to give up,” she says as she shrugs her shoulders.

Sihoo’s almost shocked at how casually Ahra is treating this situation, but it’s something he’s since discovered after being near her for a while. That she isn’t someone who gets scared, she’s very sassy and if you’re not in her way, she’s strangely very frank. It’s a 180 degrees turn from the girl she was before to Mari, when she did the blood prank on her own gym clothes.

Ahra is also very pretty when she’s shocked, that’s one of the things Sihoo actually meant for real when he confronted her before the whole class in the face of her prank falling apart, excited murmurs, and amidst extreme .

“It’s my turn. I get to ask whatever I want, right?”

“Yeah. I bet you’re going to ask me if I had anything going on with Baek Mari, which is a no for at least a few hundred years. Nah.”

“Well, that wasn’t what I was going to ask, but okay. Everyone can see you’re over her; girls have eagle eyes. My sources tell me that you even gave Jaemin a heart to heart talk to wake up his idea and get Mari back.”

“Sources?”

“Dude, I rule this school.”

“Wow. So what’s your question?”

“You know… those four months that you’d been gone; the same four months that Mari had disappeared from school, what were you doing? Or rather, what happened to you?”

“Uh,”

“Don’t tell me you were home alone being a typical delinquent, playing Outlast 3 and Counterstrike and DOTA and Payday, because it’s what everybody thinks happened. Which is a stupid notion, because you’re not like that.”

“How are you, like, so sure?”

“I’m Jo Ahra.”

“I was, uh, recuperating. That’s about as much I can tell you.”

“What happened to you?”

“I don’t know if I can tell you. Maybe next time? I’ll cosplay as Joker and tell you all about it when I lean in and snarl, “Wanna know how I got these scars?” Yeah. Maybe next time.”

Ahra is strangely persistent, and thus Sihoo attempts to leave the room because it’s his only means of escape. Just as he’s about to reach the door, small hands wrap around his wrist and holds him in place.

“Ahra, I have to go-”

“Anyway, you have a lot to catch up in those months you missed. You’re failing advanced math and chemistry, Sihoo,” she explains, and then her next sentence rushes out all at once. “If you need help, uh, Icantutoryouforfree.”