betadine: intermezzo chapter. Part 2 of the bloodbath should be up in a few days! DDD: short short drabbles i wrote to kill writer’s block…
 

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i. paper cut // ki heehyun/jung chaeyeon.

Nothing animates her – and kills her – more than Jung Chaeyeon. Her longtime crush, apple of her eye, hopeless object of affection, daily painkiller and at the same time, the reason behind some sleepless nights. Love is an like that.

Also, whoever invented wall magazines needs to be sent to Hell at once for making their teacher give out assignment as grueling as that. While she herself doesn’t mind some DIY (and honestly, she’s kinda skilled at it), writing down the articles in cursive and cute and rounded hangul is a damnation and a grave insult to her horrid, rushed scrawl of a handwriting.

She’s heavy-eyed and drowsy and she couldn’t care less about said English assignment due tomorrow because right now, the library is nearly empty, sounds of page flapping are lulling her ears and the sight of Chaeyeon with her brows taut and lips pursed and strands of hair pulled back behind her ears is tempting her to nap and dream about it.

Wonderful, wonderful things. Like, an alternate universe where they’re dating and happy.

Is that too much to ask for?

“Heehyun?”

Chaeyeon is looking up at her, tip of the marker hanging a couple of centimeters above a colored origami paper shaped into an apple.

“Yeah?”

“Make yourself useful.”

“Rude…” still, it’s enough to make her straighten her seating posture, forces her eyes open, calm down the rabbit heartbeats (by-product of imagining a happy relationship between them), and push the breath she’s been holding.

Heehyun digests a full five-minutes of racking her brains for something creative and settles with some origami. Lavender-ish blue, yellow, and green. Heehyun carefully folds, pushing down her spiraling fatigue from another sleepless night. Pointy end meeting another pointy end. She pretends to be unaware of Chaeyeon’s curious eyes.

She likes the attention. Poking fun at Chaeyeon for being attentive for once won’t net her a good result. is ice cold.

Heehyun manes the scissor like it’s her second arm – simple DIY comes to her almost too naturally, perhaps as a complimentary gift for having an unripe love life to this day. She shapes the crown, cuts the yellow paper into small pieces with the length one-third of her finger, folds the green into a thin cylinder, does some gluing and sticking.

Chaeyeon has moved onto another article, but Heehyun is not blind enough to miss those glances.

Once it’s done, she holds the stem between her index and her thumb and presents it for Chaeyeon. “For you, my fifteen-minute masterpiece. For you info, it’s a flower.”

Chaeyeon raises an eyebrow and the end of lips quirk along into a small smile. “Primrose?”

“Yeah.”

It’s subtle, but she swears the way Chaeyeon plucks the paper primrose away, the way Chaeyeon mock-sniffs it, the way Chaeyeon holds her gaze for some seconds – they’re supposed to be symbolize thing. Sort of. Or maybe it’s the lack of sleep that’s making her delirious. Time to take off the rose-tinted goggles affecting her eyes.

Chaeyeon rolls the stem lightly, eyes on the carefully crafted petals. “Do you know what primroses are supposed to mean?”

Honestly, Heehyun doesn’t have any left to spare Flower Language 101 some. “Um, I dunno, love? Affection? Loyalty? Eternal love? Something so cheesy even parmesan would bend over? Probably? I mean, it’s a flower, it couldn’t mean something idiotic like – “

“Primroses are supposed to symbolize eternal love, yes. Also desperation.”

She promptly shuts up, her mind going blank for a nanosecond before shooting off into “reconsidering her life choices” mode.

Chaeyeon splutters a laugh at her face right now – probably red and looking like her lungs are emptied out of oxygen – and remembers where they’re in right now and muffles it into the back of her hand. Heehyun groans and claws her face, trying to rub the humiliation from her skin.

“So, Heehyun, desperation, really?”

“Eternal love.”

“Still, you’re really good at folding paper.” Chaeyeon kisses the petal lightly. Heehyun suddenly develops a severe case of envy towards a friggin’ paper. “I’ll keep this.”

“Yes, princess. Please do.”
 

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ii. a goodnight would be nice // kim doyeon/choi yoojung

Doyeon is an expert procrastinator with a knack for last-minute marathoning her reports, but the thing is, she’s been so caught up with her scheduled K-Drama marathon to the point of completely forgetting how much of a piece of work this report that’s due six hours from now, is.

With the bravery of Arthur, Lancelot, Gawain, and every other fancy-pansy medieval knights combined, she brews herself another coffee and dumps half the bottle of Monster inside, creating an elixir that should keep her awake for the next… thirty minutes. And rushes back to her room, light flicked on and bulb swapped with the brightest one available in the Kim household.

She slips back into her swivel chair, nearly tripping over discarded papers, faces her laptop and hurts her eyes from the maximized brightness.

Well, hopefully Yoojung is into girls with glasses…

An hour passes by so quickly and there’s still an eternity worth of essay to type and research to do and the google-fu skill of a sleep deprived student is mediocre at best, slowing her down by a good sixty-percent. Doyeon shouts something gibberish and rests the back of her head against the backrest. Trying to think of something that might lessen the urge to dry-hump her bed already.

Maybe she should call someone. But who in their right mind would still be awake at 1 in the morning?

Juna, maybe. With a girl clinging to each arm.

Heehyun, but she’s an Emo Bear writing raps about teenage suicides and STDs and third-world problems starting above 11 PM.

…Soomin probably goes to bed at 10 PM sharp…

So, she abandons her report on Ingenhouzs’ experiment and speed-dials Yoojung, needy for someone to talk some sense into her. Yoojung picks up not long after.

“Doyeon?”

“Would you believe me if I said I’m dying?”

“Why are you dying so late…?”

“Not my choice. When the Devil comes knocking and all you have left is yourself, a coffee, some half a dozen stock of Monster, — “

“You haven’t finished your biology report.”

Doyeon spins her chair around, crosses a leg, relaxing a tiny bit. “Spot on! Talk to me.”

“Doyeon, it’s one in the morning…”

“And you aren’t sleeping. Why?” She spins back around, puts the call on loudspeaker and notches the volume to the possible highest. Yoojung’s voice fills the otherwise silent house, accompanying the crunchy click-clacking of keyboard.

“Actually…” Doyeon hears a muffled shuffling and some banging noises. “Sorry. I had to put the phone on my desk and put it on loudspeaker because – “

“You’re doing yours too, aren’t you?”

Unsureness clogs up the other line and Doyeon laughs, poking fun at Yoojung even though they’re blocks away from each other. Yoojung sounds a whimpered stoooopp…

“You sleepy?”

“Sorta… I mean, it’s 1 in the morning and we had P.E today… I’m not The Flash enough to survive all-nighter after doing sprints.”

“We can survive this together.”

A pause, sounds of typing filling in the silence, both from her side and from the other side. “How?”

“Talk to me.”

“Phone bills!”

“You would rather doze off and leave your report unfinished and let that old hag murder you? Dang, personally I would like to get married first before I go out with a bang,”

“Good point…”

Even if tomorrow, or rather, today, but later when the sun’s well up above, she’s going to be skinned alive by “that old hag” for real, at least she has spent the night before listening to Yoojung talking about anything and everything. It’s the best kind of send-off offered without asking her parents some pocket money for a last trip to Honolulu.

“…and well, I personally think Woozi is really nice. He helped me throughout Modern Literature and…”

…even if she’s talking about their “cute classmate”. Well, he’s cute. She isn’t. Pass it on.

Doyeon chugs more Monster’d coffee and realizes that she has emptied her cup clean. “Oh? I don’t really talk to the lil guy. He looks small and weak and irrelevant.”

“That’s ‘cause you look like the second coming of WWE Diva Molly Holly even though you couldn’t even climb a tree without using a stepladder…”

Well, at least Yoojung’s giggles and recounts of the most uninteresting bite-sized daily tidbits ever are doing better in keeping her alive than her elixirs…
 

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iii. porcelain heart // jung eunwoo/im nayoung(/zhou jieqiong)

It doesn’t take professional sleuths to pull a conclusion that Im Nayoung might be, in fact, the long-lost Martian alien NASA has been dying to prove, hidden in plain sight with her 170-something height and her unusual talent in getting into troubles. Eunwoo has this unexplainable urgency to be the front-runner when it comes to laughing at her misery.

Eunwoo plops on the empty seat in front of a restless looking Nayoung. As restless as Im Nayoung could look, that is. “What’s troubling you, Romeo?”

Nayoung opens and closes it back in reminiscent of a fish. “It’s. Um. Nothing. No, no. It’s something, but at the same time, it’s supposed to be ‘nothing’ ‘for me’.”

She follows Nayoung’s line of vision – and. Oh. Just the usual rowdy morning with a guy hitting on Pinky. But in all seriousness, who wouldn’t hit on Pinky?

She’s gorgeous. She chuckles and laughs for a polite front but does a fairly good job at making it sounds convincing enough to the dumb man’s ego. Beauties in her school seem to have mastered the art of conquering chromosome Y’s, but Pinky carries this air of purity and innocence that the other beauties lack.

Kim Sejeong is an albino serpent. Jung Chaeyeon is a paradisaea in black. Zhou Jieqiong is a… plain ‘ol white swan.

She befriends the right people!

“Ignore him. He has no chance, Pinky’s like, three skies away from him.”

Her words fell upon deaf ears. Eunwoo could tell that Nayoung is anxious, not from the way she looks, but it’s in the details. Nayoung ruffles Mochi’s feathers whenever she’s feeling on edge, and that’s exactly what she’s doing. Mochi looks hella uncomfortable, probably because Nayoung’s putting more force than usual.

Beginning to feel bad for Mochi, she tries to distract Nayoung, “Jealous? Don’t tell me you’ve booked yourself a spot in the long line of Queen Zhou’s suitors?”

“Is the line even… co-ed?”

“Ey, I ain’t her stuffed confession bear. How should I know?”

“You’re her friend?”

Mochi looks pained now. Eunwoo decides that enough is enough and holds Nayoung’s hand in hers, thumbs idly tracing circles along Nayoung’s surprisingly large hand. Is this really a girl’s hand? “Listen, Buddha,”

“Stop it, everyone calls me Buddha now.”

“About time. Anyways, I feel bad for Mochi so if you wanna save your gal that much, then you better get that off the safety confine of your seat and bulldoze that guy with your bravado.”

“My voice is fairly high-pitched.”

Eunwoo looks at her like she just grilled a thalassemia-victim with a BBQ set. Nayoung snorts expressionlessly.

“Okay.”

“Good.”

“She looks like she needs help. Swans are generally harmless.”

Of course. Im Nayoung is… like that. Last time, she got into a detention after she tried to defend Siwon, the latter falsely accused of being a drug user for “looking tired all the time”. Siwon works late-night shift of her family’s liquor business but the teachers were an and Nayoung was being a messianic Buddha.

She gives Pinky a glance – the guy has seated himself comfortably in front of a smiling Pinky. Eunwoo knows better that the smile is her “I’m uninterested in you and I think I’d rather watch paint dry than listening to your fourth weekly recount” but honestly, Eunwoo doesn’t know how to deal with them. Pinky doesn’t like it when she scares the guys off anyways. Something about tolerating others’ attempts.

Im Nayoung, on the other hand, is too much of a Martian that she couldn’t help but want to see how the girl settles the thing between Pinky and her abhorrent admirer.

 She pats Nayoung’s hand two times and lets it go and ushers the girl to get going. Nayoung hands her Mochi and perches the snowy owl on her shoulder. “I’ll be off.”

“Yeah, save the Baozi Princess. Come back only when Bowser’s finally out of picture. Get ‘em, Romeo!”

Martian Im Nayoung and her good heart. Eunwoo pats her in the back one last time before the girl marches her way to Pinky’s seat, fists balled beside her.

Though, she’s taken aback by Nayoung’s offhand comment, two steps away from her. “Eunwoo?”

“Yeah?”

“You kinda look like an owl.”

“Meh, I’ll take that as a compliment. Some owls are cute.”

Nayoung turns back and continues her adrenaline-pumping short journey to Pinky’s seat. Mochi shifts on her shoulder.

“H-hey there, Count Paris,”

The guy is looking at Nayoung weirdly and the glint in Pinky’s eyes come back in almost an instant – Eunwoo couldn’t miss it, even though the seat she’s in right now is four desks away and she wasn’t even especially paying attention at Pinky, not when Im Nayoung is spluttering an awkward one-liner trying to steel herself into a Hasselhoff.

Maybe she’s an owl for real… (Eunwoo thinks – it’s nice, maybe that means Nayoung actually paid attention to her a little, so the attraction looks less a lonely one-way road now.)
 

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iv. with my chest ripped open and my heart taken // kim nayoung/kim sejeong

The sun rises, sets, rinse and repeat in the cycle that consists of 24 hours and 365 days and some eternities of longing for a better tomorrow. She just summarized her life, packed all the dreariness into one sentence. She has unread chats and voicemails from her brother but there are more important things to take care of.

Her irrational fear of tomorrow. The angry, ugly her reflected in the mirror. Sejeong grips on the sink tighter and her phone, placed safely on the rack away from her reach, buzzes, notifying a new message.

It’s probably Nayoung. She hasn’t answered Nayoung’s messages since school is over. It’s well 9 into the night and Sejeong’s mind is occupied with a lot of crapsack craps: taxes, ever-rising electricity bills, school fees, her mother’s deteriorating health—

The rift forming between me and Nayoung. Her reflection, red-eyed, asks her, what did you do this time?

She has the answer somewhere but the courage to say it aloud nowhere. Her phone buzzes and blares its set ringtone and Sejeong slowly reaches out for her cell and sees the name Kim Nayoung flashing on the screen.

She coughs out toxic air out of her lungs and fixes her dry throat and combs her side-part even though she knows Nayoung won’t be able to see anyway, but she’s too far gone.

The rift forming between me and Nayoung. The rift forming between me and Nayoung…

She tries a smile and bounces into the easy tune Nayoung has familiarized herself well. “Hmm? What’s with the call? Miss me?”

Her reflection is still red-eyed and the grin askew and her shirt blotted with water. Thank god Nayoung isn’t here.

“My voice? Ohh. I was karaoke-ing in my room to let off some steam. Tutoring kids struggling with their puberty and pimples is soul-consuming, you know? Hmmm. A bit hoarse, yeah. What, do you find it y~?"

Sejeong closes the toilet's creaky door behind her, leaves her angry, ugly reflection behind. She'll come back another time. But for now, Nayoung...