" off, Wonwoo."

The guy walking beside her doesn't move away and continues to move along. After they rested below the bus stop, with the rain drizzling and finally coming to a stop, Seulgi has rushed on without minding him.

"Why should I? I'm on my way home too." he shrugs it off, and continues to walk beside her as she doesn't stop.

She breathes out exasperatedly while running her hands through her golden locks, clad in a sleeveless Guns and Roses top and basketball pants. Her nose fumes, air passing the ring-sized piercing in the right side of her nose. "Geez, you don't have anything better to do, I guess?"

No matter how pissed off Seulgi is with this guy, who is now way taller than her, he's the part of what is left when she was not so ed up in the head and broken. So she lets him linger and bother her all he wants.

It's been quite boring these days to spend her days smoking in her room and drowning herself in bath tubs, disappointing and drowning her mother's expectations and dreams over and over again.

"And what the hell is with that grandfather's glasses you're wearing? You're getting stranger since the last time we met," her hand is ready to snatch it away but Wonwoo only holds her wrist and fling it away.

"Don't touch it with your nicotine scented fingers. It's a classic and it's called spectacles. Besides, I look good in it." Wonwoo with his hair pushed back, rising strikes of black hair with sharp jawlines, sharp cheekbones, penetrating eyes and skin white but not pallid (unlike her who is now snowy and pale looking) doesn't faze her at all. It's still the same old Wonwoo who looks down at her even more easily with his tall height. To avoid that, she always steps a bit faster in front of him.

So now, Seulgi walks a step ahead of Wonwoo, him catching up and falling behind one at a time, but he doesn't complain. Strange.

"What the hell is wrong with the weather these days?" she hisses with the bright sun already valiantly shining up up in the sky. "What time is it now, Wonwoo?"

"I don't wear a watch."

"Then use your phone, duh," she rolls her eyes and Wonwoo is now right beside her.

"Then you can use yours also."

"Goddamnit, Wonwoo. I don't give a about phones, I don't even own one."

"Chill, lady."

"Shut up, asshat."

Wonwoo feels like raising his middle finger at her since she was all sensitive and violent these days, with words more than with her fists. But he chooses to not do that, as he can't do something so rude like that to someone he barely knows. Wonwoo barely knows anything about her now. "It's 1PM right now. Say thank you for the least, young lady." 

She turns to look at him beside her with a glare. "Yes, thank you, old man."

Seulgi tugs on her yellow hairband out of her small wrist, bringing her hair up to tie it into a bun, revealing two arrow shaped piercing and a peace-shaped one on her right ear, as Wonwoo walks half-a-step behind her on the right.

His eyebrows furrowed when his eyes land on the nape of her neck. With her loose t-shirt, he can see the lower part of her nape with a dead battery and flowers stuck on to it. No colourful or monochrome colours filling the lines. It's just there to make a shape with her skin as the colour itself. 

He press two of his fingers to her tattoo, and she flinches and stops dead on her tracks. They are in the path near her home and she's silent, as silent as a child who is caught in the act of doing something illegal. Loose strands fall to the side of her face as she has tied it into a high bun. 

"How long?" Seulgi hears it more as how long has she been hurting herself like this, how long has she been messed over by her father, promising her a good school and instead got one with bullies and scammers, girls who burn your skin with their insults and cigar sticks, boys who would you right there if you don't give them what they want.

He did that to her when he found out his new wife (no way in hell she is her mother, no matter how kind she treated her, Seulgi can't forget how they dumped her to hell) is pregnant two months old and all the expenses went to her. She remembers also how she has cried and wept and thrashed to be returned home, but his pride was too high in letting her mother find out that he can't take care of her.

Along the way, she lost herself while trying to survive the war in her school, trying to get decent grades while blending in with the girls she loathed to death and the boys she would like to kill, if her fists were enough to knock them with their troupes and underlings. Out of all the school there, she just had to be signed into the worst one. She still couldn't believe how her father was cruel enough to do that, how someone whose blood and genes run inside of her to do that.

On the day of her graduation, she saw herself crying to her mother, trembling and whispering that she wanted to go home and be with her instead. Back then, her with no piercings but only with golden locks and her thirteen years old self inside a sixteen year old body, with skin marked with different kinds of bruises. Some had faded away, some were still there, hiding.

She was so relieved that her mother agreed and took her here. Home. She feels more calmer now that she is now in a safe place. Though Seulgi doesn't really believe that.

With a trained fear and cautious thinking engraved on her mind, she can never feel safe anymore in any place. But at least, here she is reminded how happy she was back then and how perhaps, being here, it will be possible to be like that again.

At least right now, she is able to breath without being scared if it would pull anyone's nerves.

But some habits that stay never leave after all, like how she's prone to smoke to forget (Seulgi thinks it's stupid, but she can't help to do it when she can't sleep at night and her thoughts are filled with so much worry and anxiety), how her tattoo is actually one of the better things that she had found beautiful for the past few years. It shows how dead she feels inside, yet at the same time she still has it in her to think of her friends and mother and her brother, the flowers which beautify her pitch black world.

Her nose piercing is one of the things that reminds her of the past, and she still keeps it there as another scar, another form of a bruise. Seulgi keep some of her wounds there, as a reminder that she is still here and alive.

Seulgi doesn't flinch anymore, when his fingers trail along the ink marked deep to her skin lightly, like petals flowing through her skin. His cracked fingertips brush over the soft surface of her skin with light freckles on it. Each touch is made to remind her how he has softly and carefully traced his fingers around the lines like it's going to crack anytime soon. The feeling of his rough fingertips pressed to her skin reminds her of the existence of this tattoo, and something beating inside of her.  

It's just Wonwoo who is an asshat and the guy who touched her chest back in elementary school when it was still as flat as a board (not like it's not flat now, but you can still see a bit of a curve on her chest, though not so visible) while they fought. "I can't remember it," she moves away when his fingers come into a tug to the end of her loose back collar. 

"Well, aren't you clever enough to forget the day you made a grave mistake? That thing can never be erased," he points out the fact she's already known and she only crack her knuckles out of habit.

"I know. I already know, Wonwoo," she turns to look at him with a stern gaze. "Who are you to say that this is a mistake, when you don't know anything about me?" 

This hits Wonwoo hard because he realizes that she's right. Looking at her now, reduced to bones but with toned arms and legs, she looks nothing like the Seulgi in the past. She looks more beaten up and crushed over with the paleness of her skin as if lacking nutrition. She reminds him of a demon, with her glazed eyes and herself who seems to fade away into the background, deep lines by the sides of her nose and dark circles below her eyes. Nothing like how Wonwoo is now, clean and prim looking. 

"You're too young for all this , Seulgi. I tell you now," Wonwoo finally lets a curse slip through his lips, and Seulgi lets out a wicked smile for a moment then falls into a deep frown.

She enjoys this so much, she enjoys tricking people into confusing her as sane or not with her mood swings. 

" off, Wonwoo," she tries once again as she turns on her sandals and walk to the steps of her house. She stops when she still hear footsteps behind her. Her mom is probably in the kitchen now so she shouldn't curse. "Why are you following me?"

"I'm letting myself in. It's boring in the house by myself," he brushes away the distressed tone in her voice away, as if they hadn't been fighting a minute ago. 

"My mom is there."

"She would want to see me again."

"What the h-"

"Your mom thinks I grew up to be a handsome kid right? The last time I was here," he grins with his teeth spread out in that boastful way and she sighs, opening the door and letting himself enter first, not without trying to trip him in his step.

In the end, she lets him bother her again. She could have gone to Seungwan, but she doesn't want her to notice how wrong she looks now, and it's more difficult to approach the other two boys even if they are her friends.

Partly because how much of an she used to be in the past (but it's not like they aren't s, except Seokmin of course. But she thinks she doesn't want Seokmin to see her like this now).

Mingyu looks as different as she is now, except that she hasn't talked to him for two weeks after her return, for he is always surrounded with his groups of friends (which reminds her of the bunch of nasty and gruesome cliques in her old school, and by that time, she was too annoyed to approach him). The only reason she is with Wonwoo right now, is because he follows her all around to bother her like he used to, and she feels comfortable with that.

Of course, he doesn't stumble as he's already been tripped the first time on his visit last week. So Seulgi shoves him inside, and of course it doesn't affect anything with his broad shoulders covered in his long sleeved green shirt, with his sturdy and bony figure. It only creates a little push for him to the inside of her house.

"Mom, I'm locking the door!" It's her kind of greeting since her mom tends to forget the front doors and it terrifies her if any stranger will come in (which is a normal thing to feel).

"Yes, dear!" Her mother replies loudly, probably from the inside of her room, trying to knit in her spare time in a Sunday like this. 

"Mrs-"

"Let's not bother her. She barely has any time for herself, you know," she steers his attention away and head upstairs with him following her behind. It's the first time for Seulgi to take him to her room after a long time, and it doesn't feel any different now despite how much change had happened to her and to him. Wonwoo, becoming less of a prick than he was with a pair of circled lens spectacles. 

 When she reaches the front of her door, the wide door is not closed properly and leaves a crack into it. Her mother had probably entered her room to take her already ironed clothes in, but remembering the unlocked door and her fear for burglars, she searches for any sign of an object she can use to hit. To hurt so that she won't get hurt.

"Wh-" her palm clasps his mouth shut when his deep voice begins to resonance in the hallway of her house. She forgets to mention how deep and boyish her voice is now, unlike in the past. 

"There is possibly a burglar there, goddammit. Don't you realise the front door is not locked?" she hisses lowly to Wonwoo, to which he only nods without any fear or surprised look. And her hand snatches the red umbrella hanging in one of the hallway's hangers. 

"I think you're being too paranoid," Wonwoo mentions, but she ignores him and slips through the gaps of the door, pushing it apart to create the least bit of a sound.

She doesn't look at Wonwoo behind her, trying to figure out the person sitting in her bed, with a photo frame in her hand, fingers graze across the plastic glass.

But what she feels right there, after seeing her all these years is anger. Anger like what she had felt after knowing her father betrayed her, leaving her in hell, and right now she feels an old flame rising inside of her when Seulgi stopped receiving her letters and were left alone in the dark. 

As if she notices the strange change of air in the room, no longer as cool as then with three people inhaling the same room with a faint hint of cigarette smoke trying to be hushed away with air freshener, she looks up. Soojung with blaringly brown eyes and more whole and herself than Seulgi ever will, taller and grown up and mature looking.

Seulgi looks away before even seeing her reaction, because no matter how angry she feels right now, she missed her. She doesn't want her to notice how much she has changed.

She missed Jung Soojung so much it hurts more than anything, it can even match the pain she felt when she trashed and nobody listened and cared.

Before she can say anything, she finds herself being enveloped by Soojung's arms around her, her hand placed on the back of her head as if she's holding a broken precious thing that is named Kang Seulgi.

Soojung hugs her so tight to the point she feels more real and whole than before, reminding her of their childhood when it was the other way around: Soojung, who wept at the smallest things and Seulgi would be too tough to be toppled down.

"Soojung came back from the dead," the words they have uttered way back in the past roll out from her lips, and this time without the laughters, them spinning under dead leaves falling above their head, without Soojung worrying for Seulgi falling from the tree.

This time, it's just Seulgi with her cracked voice and face buried to Soojung's brown locks, Wonwoo hiding a smile somewhere in the back of his mind as he has been good in hiding his feelings anyway, standing behind Seulgi while Soojung smiles at her, then at him. Thankful that at least, there are three of them now, a half of their whole group.

"Yes, I am, Seulgi."