pairing: Jihyo x Chaeyoung

summary: Unfortunately, she likes art more than human beings.

A/N: this is for Tay ♥

The girl in front of her was the sort of girl you might not notice at first glance, but if you were to look twice, she would haunt your dreams for a very long time. She could be a coffee shop girl, but her eyes were deeper than that of an average person. She had seen more in a day than some in a lifetime.

"Jihyo, are you coming or not?" a tall, short-haired girl shouted from a group of three and motioned for them to wait a little longer.

Her name was Jihyo.

"What's your name?" the girl asked and for some reason she managed to sound like she cared about the answer.

Chaeyoung tried to think, but was always quicker than quicksilver when there was a nice, pretty girl right in front of her.

"Michelangelo," she blurted and then blinked at her own idiocy. Why did she have to use a stupid chat nickname when she could just say her real one? Didn't her parents name her for that reason so that she could have a proper name to use when someone asked for it? Even her Catholic name would have been a better one.

Jihyo just smiled a little brighter than before.

"It was nice to meet you, Michelangelo."

Jihyo moved a bit closer as if there was something pulling her, but Chaeyoung must have been lightheaded from too much sightseeing to think so.

Then she left and Chaeyoung stared at her retreating back and filed the incident as attractive-strangers-I'll-think-about-three-months-from-now file and turned around, wondering what was the grand thought she had had before the world had almost fallen off its axis.

-

If she was honest, she liked being small.

It was easy for her to disappear in a crowd, especially if she put her mind into it. She could zigzag around people and carefully pass them by without bothering anyone. By the time people would notice that something has passed them, she was already far off. She could walk fast, too.

During her most adventurous days, she played a little game where she pretended that she was on the run. She picked a quiet-looking restaurant or a café and sat there, sometimes so quietly that nobody even noticed enough to serve her. But even if they did, they quickly forgot about her.

Sometimes she got so good at hiding in plain sight that she didn’t feel real anymore.

She had to stare at her own hand that rested on a notebook, with a pen pointed gently - she stared at the veins just below the skin. The skin itself was smooth, her fingers slender, nails clipped and practical. It was her hand. Hers. If she thought about moving it, it moved.

It was a hand that belonged to a young person but she felt so old inside. As old as Rome around her.

It was funny how the hand also felt so far away. Her thoughts and her body seemed to travel a long distance before meeting each other. The space was big enough to fill an ocean.

Even in front of mirror she couldn’t always recognize the girl staring back at her. She could see the person she was supposed to see, but it didn't feel real. She lifted her hand to trace her own outlines on the reflecting surface as if trying to catch light with her hands. Quite often she was not sure whether she existed at all, especially if she hadn't talked to anybody in days.

Maybe she should talk to people, or at least acknowledge them somehow. Look at them in the eye briefly - smile a little to a young mother with a baby in one of the cafés.

There is a great power in being seen by someone else. The distance between the two selves disappear.

Like the day she had met Jihyo.

-

The Vatican Museums were her second home.

Inside her own head she tried to build another gallery like it: rooms after rooms of the most glorious paintings she had ever seen. She tried to collect every piece of meaningful art there and visit it later as she drew or painted.

The free pass she had gotten from her aunt was the most precious thing she had. It felt like a blessing from the Pope himself. If she didn't have the free pass she would end up spending all her savings on the tickets, because there was no way she could stay away from all the art. It even followed her into her dreams. Haunted her every sleeping and waking hour.

There were specific rooms where the tourists liked to gather, especially at the beginning of the museum when they could still see one work of art from the other. By the time they were half way, they were drowning in great art and couldn’t see anything anymore. Every great piece looked the same as the one before. The pictures they had seen in school books - they passed them by without noticing the familiarity.

It was a symptom of art blindness, as she liked to call it.

That was why she only concentrated on small sections of the museum every day. If she were to walk through the whole thing at one go, she would lose all the details, and it was exactly those details that she was after. Because of that she was standing in shadowy corner in one of the smaller rooms and the scattered tourists from all over the world paid her no mind. She might as well have been one of the pillars, well-made and easy for the eye, but in a sea of magnificent beauty, no one would notice her.

"Michelangelo!"

Chaeyoung turned her head slowly, annoyed that she has been discovered again. Jihyo was walking towards her while completely ignoring the things that were around her. This was not what Chaeyoung had had in mind when she woke up in the morning.

"Hello," she said quietly, feeling unbalanced and miserable. "Are you stalking me?" she added, trying to do a little joke, but the way she delivered it sounded more like a -off. If there was one thing she couldn’t do, it was light banter with strangers. But despite her bad manners, Jihyo grinned. It seemed to be a habit of hers.

"I managed to lose my friends," she said brightly, as if she was proud of herself. "I'm sure they are staring at some gold leaf on the ceiling, breaking their necks as we speak." She talked the way river ran over rocks and her lips were strange ones. They were so uniquely curved that it looked like they might have been designed by members of the early pop art movement.

"Aren't you afraid that you won't find them again?" she asked, feeling a pull towards the other girl. Come towards the light, Son Chaeyoung. Take a step closer to the rest of the world. Look at how amazing human beings are. There is more to life than paintings that cannot speak and painters whose bones have gone cold in their graves. But Jihyo was nothing but a siren who she shouldn't listen to when she so clearly smelled of future heartbreak. Human beings always reeked of it.

Jihyo laughed.

When Chaeyoung told a joke, nobody laughed. But when she was being serious, she was suddenly oh so funny. She didn't understand why.

"They always come around. Without me they are like a horde of chickens," she said, pulling a tragic face.

What a goofy stranger. Why didn’t she leave her alone? Didn’t she have her friends to bother?

"But what if a fox comes?" she asked, trying to get rid of the girl by being weird, but Jihyo only pursed her lips and grew thoughtful.

Chaeyoung could almost see them from the outside. Two Korean girls talking about foxes and chickens, in the center of the Catholic world, surrounded by thousands of paintings and statues. Jihyo was a fleeting light and she was a shadow, and together they were art.

There seemed to be a tiny rock in her chest that prickled her skin as it wanted to get out.

"Well, I'm sure they'll scream loud enough to terrify any fox. Besides, there are armed men in most of these paintings," Jihyo made a vague motion with her hand, "surely they'll come to their rescue?"

Fair enough.

-

The original thought had been to concentrate on different art movements at a time and try to copy them perfectly. She had read somewhere that in order to be a good writer you’d have to learn how to mimic others first. She didn't really agree with it, but the thought lingered. Why couldn't it be applied to art? To drawing and painting? If she wanted to be the Great Son Chaeyoung, didn't she have to learn what Michelangelo did before her?

She was into impressionism then. The fleeting effects of natural light.

Luckily, there was so much natural light in Rome that she felt almost overwhelmed by it. Long shadows fell down from ancient buildings, but between those shadows were rays of light so bright that they seemed to be laughing. It was not the sort of light that fell over her city. It was the light of slaves and ancient stones - scorching and ruthless. At the end of the day it died fantastically on the horizon, a great flame and then gone. The moment was so brief that when she finally thought she could capture it, it was already gone. Still she kept trying and chased the light in different parts of the ancient city almost every day.

Sometimes she wished she could talk about it to someone, but who would understand?

When she talked to her aunt during their late dinners, she could still see the light when she closed her eyes.

“Do you have friends?” her aunt asked bluntly in between mouthfuls of pasta.

Chaeyoung blinked at her before turning back to her meal and didn’t answer.

-

She had seen the Colosseum many times before, but even as it had grown so familiar over the years, she still couldn’t help but feel excitement under heavy stone archways as she stepped from light to shadow. If she closed her eyes there was a murmur of a crowd around the podium, like a buzzing of insects outside a window. Caged beasts and men scraped in their small prisons, waiting to be released into heat and death. There was once again the smell of roasted meat and other foods that the audience kept eating while blood was being spilled right in front of them.

She felt humble as her aching feet walked over the ground that so many pairs of sandals and feet had walked before.

But the whiff of history was gone as she passed into sunlight again. The whole place was full of tourists with their annoying habits and disrespect for things around them. They acted as if they owned the whole world and the things that had been created thousands of years ago. Their arrogance baffled her.

"I can almost hear their screams," came a voice from behind her.

First, she was not sure whether it was just another thought in her head -just a louder one. Because she had been thinking (trying not to think) of Jihyo all day, she had suddenly managed to break her own brain and now her thoughts were talking back to her with the person's lips she most wanted to see.

She glanced back.

And there she was, just as real as she had been the previous time. A flurry of glossy hair and kindness.

"I can only hear them in the shadows of the archways," she said, trying to appear like she hasn't been ambushed.

"Why there?" Jihyo came to stand next to her, but Chaeyoung couldn't see the girl's friends around. They had seemed like cool sort of people the day before. They were all older than Chaeyoung was anyway. She had a strong feeling that Jihyo's friends couldn't understand her sudden interest in a Korean girl who happened to be in Rome at the same time.

"Because I can't see the tourists from there."

Jihyo nodded.

"Tourists are funny animals," she said and they both looked down as a group of tourists were standing on a floor far below them. "I like to act as if I'm not one of them. Even in a strange place I try to look like I know where I am going and I only take pictures when it's not too obvious."

They stood in silence and the sun was burning a hole right through Chaeyoung's head. She could almost hear her hair catching fire. Why didn't she bring a hat?

"We are leaving tomorrow," Jihyo said quietly and dug the ground with a heel of her shoe.

Chaeyoung could see it clearly, it was as if Jihyo had opened a door to her. It was an invitation, an offer. Would you like to see me even as we go back home?

So, of course, she had to ruin it all.

"Have a safe journey home," she said flippantly and the wall in her words made her flinch.

"Thanks," Jihyo said and was clearly disappointed. Chaeyoung had thrown the open door right into her face.

The other girl touched her shoulder briefly and turned away. Chaeyoung searched her mind for magic words that could save the situation, but by the time she managed to murmur "wait!", Jihyo had disappeared.

The sun made her eyes see spots of lava as she faced back to it. It was like drops of blood from a dead gladiator.

-

When she finally got used to bumping into Jihyo at the strangest times, she didn't see her again. It made her angry to think that she had been willing to sacrifice her time in Rome by thinking of a girl who was eventually gone. It had tarnished everything she has seen or done. Because out of all the beautiful things she has seen, Jihyo was the only thing from Rome that she missed so much that it made her want to kick herself every five minutes.

There was no remedy for memories.

She fell asleep during a flight back home and when she woke up, she felt blue. She didn't want to go back, but then again going back to Rome didn't feel good either. She was stuck in a mood where she wanted to be nowhere.

-

It was a foggy Tuesday morning when she walked down a street and admired the way people disappeared into milky softness. It gave them a gentle sort of anonymity. A door handle to a small café caught her eye – it was made of warm-toned wood and was such a nice little detail in the surrounding mist that she walked to it and before she had noticed, she had opened the door and stepped inside.

There were only half a dozen small tables and none of them matched. She couldn’t remember ever seeing such a quirky selection of tables and chairs before, but even as they were wildly different from one another they somehow created an overall theme. She stood there and wondered what it was that connected all of them and didn't see that she was being stared at.

They all look cozy, she thought. Friendly. As if they had been collected by some kind, old man who gave them to the coffee shop owner as he had passed away. She could see his warm, dark eyes that shone in the memories of his loved ones even after his death.

"Are you going to stand there all day?" A voice said and Chaeyoung lifted her gaze from the furniture. A girl behind a counter was as warm as the wooden door handle in the cold fog and when Chaeyoung realized who she was, the Italian sun filled her senses again.

"Jihyo," she said as if it explained everything and stepped forward.

"You never told me your real name, Michelangelo."

Chaeyoung couldn’t see any of the lovely baked goods between her and the other girl, as she was too busy staring at the girl’s face in wonder, but she could smell them. She felt high on sugar and butter and possibilities.

"I'm Chaeyoung."

"Nice to meet you, Chaeyoung. What can I get for you?"

Your number, she wanted to say but bit her tongue. There would be enough time for that, she thought and for the first time in a long while she didn't feel invisible or unreal.

A/N: I am sorry for taking forever to update. :( I have been too sad and tired to write. Take care, sweeties! xo