Part 1 of Heartlines (Sewn Along the Galilean Moons)

Title: Callisto
Pairing/s: Seola/Bona
Summary: (dreamsoulmate!au) In their dreams, they loved each other very much.
-
A soulmate!au where you meet with your soulmate in your dreams but don’t remember anything when you wake up. When you sleep it’s like living your other life you have no recollection of. Apparently, the dreams stop when you meet each other outside your dreams.

Or the hundred times Hyunjung and Jiyeon try to meet and the one time they actually do. Or something.
A/N: a rarepair fic dedicated to the 5 seolbo shippers i know (i'll probably write more about wjsn's lesser known ships in later chapters so fingers crossed). real names are used instead of stage names, slight angst, slow burn, etc etc. i realize i've been writing for wjsn for one year already. wow. happy 2018!

1.

Hyunjung is eight when she first meets Jiyeon in her dreams.

It is her older sister’s second trip to the hospital this week. At some point while waiting in the lounge, she opens her eyes but doesn’t remember closing them.

A girl is looking down on her, hugging a plush toy twice her size.

Hyunjung sits up to make space.

“I’m sorry,” The girl sits beside her. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

Hyunjung shakes her head, “It’s okay,” though not so much as give her a second glance. When her vision refocuses, she notices the nurses walk too slow, and the pattern on the ceramic tiles beneath her feet are dancing to a song she couldn’t hear.

Maybe next time she should ask her mother to get her eyesight checked.

Before the white noise of the hospital background becomes too quiet, the girl beside her asks, “Are you waiting for someone?”

“My mom and my sister,” Hyunjung bites the inside of her cheek. She notices the girl shift uncomfortably in her seat. “Are you hurt?”

The girl nods and squeezes her teddy tighter. She gestures to her stomach. “A little bit.”

“Ah, it’s the same as my unnie, then.”

“I ate a lot of spicy food.”

“I hope you feel better soon,” Hyunjung draws her lips back to a little smile. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Kim Jiyeon. How about you?”

“I’m a Kim, too! Kim Hyunjung. How old are you?”

“I’m seven years old.”

“I’m eight. That makes me your unnie.”

Jiyeon smiles so wide she doesn’t look like she’s in pain anymore. “I don’t have a lot of unnies.”

Hyunjung smiles back, and suddenly it’s just them bridging the gap between experience and innocence with questions and answers. Little legs sway over the lobby chairs, too short to reach the ground, smiles pure and memories untainted.

Jiyeon asks Hyunjung why she’s all the way here in Daegu when the hospitals are better in Seoul. Hyunjung says they’re spending the summer here as vacation, “Maybe next summer I could come to your house.”

“My mom makes the best gopchang in the world,” Jiyeon boasts, “unnie, if we do that then can I come over to your house when we visit Seoul?”

“Of course! I’ll even show you around the neighborhood.”

Hyunjung hears her mother calling in the distance. She steps down, but instead of touching the floor, her foot passes through the tiles, Jiyeon doesn’t look like Jiyeon anymore, and she’s falling and falling and falling.

-

Hyunjung wakes up in her mother’s arms. “You slept on the lounge chairs again. Good thing I caught you before you fell! Aigoo, aigoo. Come, we’ll get ice cream before we go home.”

Hyunjung stands up and turns to her sister, who looks a whole lot better with color on her face. She asks the first thought that comes to mind, “Unnie, what did they say about your stomachache?”

Her older sister ruffles her hair and laughs. “Turns out I’m allergic to shrimps.”

“Not because you ate too much spicy food?”

“Who told you that? You know I’m bad at eating anything spicy.”

Hyunjung furrows her brows. When they get ice cream, she’s a hundred percent sure that her mother got her chocolate but the first few had stung the edge of her tongue and burned the rim of her lips, as if she’s eaten something spicy.

Maybe something like red pepper paste or several servings of extra spicy ddeokbokki.

2.

Hyunjung meets Jiyeon again in her dreams fourteen years later.

The thing about dreams is that you never know when they start; the beginnings always happen in the middle of action.

This time Hyunjung finds herself smacked right in the middle of an intersection. Following the person in front of her, she ends up outside their university, the smell of sizzling street food and loud chatter of students dissipating in the afternoon sky.

She sees a girl standing by a food stall surrounded by people—her friends, Hyunjung assumes, with the way they’re hovering around her.

White shirt tucked loosely in denim shorts, dark hair past shoulders, fingers wrapped around a paper cup of ddeokbokki; Hyunjung knows it’s Kim Jiyeon even before she thinks about it, as if she’s known her all this time, as if her mind has lined up lights all over Jiyeon’s outline, her name blinking above her head in neon lights.

Kim Jiyeon. Daegu. Likes spicy food too much. Age twenty-two now.

Even from a distance, Hyunjung could tell that Jiyeon has grown beautifully. Her facial features aren’t striking per se, but in a unifying picture, she looks stunning. Very stunning. Especially that gummy eyesmile.

Something about the way she exudes confidence and simplicity is so surprisingly attractive.

A tall girl appears out of nowhere and dangles an arm around Jiyeon’s shoulders. Jiyeon jerks her arms away from her immaculate white shirt. Everyone’s eyes go wide as plates, searching for an evil orange blot on her front.

“None?” Jiyeon asks everyone around. Her voice is the loudest Hyunjung hears as if she’s speaking inside her head. When they answer her with a frantic head shake, she heaves out a sigh and pouts, “Don’t do that again.”

Tall friend pouts back in an irresistible way that Jiyeon relents immediately. Someone else snorts and from then on everyone’s speaking at the same time again.

Hyunjung catches Jiyeon’s gaze. There’s a split-second of awkward affirmation before Jiyeon’s smile widens. She waves, “Oh! Is it Hyun—” and her dozen of friends turn their heads to her at the same time.

Hyunjung’s eyes dart from Jiyeon to her friends’ and back. Everyone except them has a forgettable face, as if the features are just there to make her think that the canvas isn’t blank.

Jiyeon parts her sea of friends and walks towards her, “Hyunjung unnie?”

But Hyunjung has already taken a step back, and the heel of her shoe doesn’t meet the pavement, and she’s falling and falling and falling again.

-

Hyunjung wakes up sweating. The edge of her lips are burning with a familiar sting. Adrenaline rushes up and around her veins, her heartbeat ricocheting off her chest and lodging quick drums in .

She remembers the thrill of seeing someone again after years of waiting. There was a name and a face from her childhood—there was a smile, too.

Before she could grasp anything, her mind clears up the fog—one sequence after another, hair cascading down petite shoulders, lashes fluttering in rapid succession, lips curled up and away, fading, until there’s almost nothing left except for a trace of a beautiful smile under the sun.

It’s not even close to a semblance of silhouette but it’s more than enough.

On her way to the shower, her forever partner-in-crime, Chu Sojung, laughs at the sight of her, “Have you gone crazy, unnie? Who the hell smiles so wide on a Monday morning?”

Hyunjung swears she could’ve said something witty, but for some reason, she’s too happy to be bothered.

3.

As soon as Hyunjung falls asleep the following night, she sees Jiyeon sitting on a brick wall, swaying her legs impatiently.

Jiyeon steps down and walks up to her. “Hyunjung unnie, right?” she asks, her eyes darting quickly up and down, “Kim Hyunjung from Seoul?”

“You’re the same Kim Jiyeon, right?” Hyunjung nods and asks back. “The kid at the hospital who ate too much spicy food? From Daegu? Where have you been?”

“Yes. That’s me. Listen, unnie, I have something to tell you,” Jiyeon’s lashes flutter up, a brief apologetic smile connecting their gazes. “This isn’t real.”

“What?”

“We’re in a dream.”

“What do you mean this isn’t real? What do you mean we’re in a dream?”

“This isn’t real. We’re in a dream,” Jiyeon repeats as if to convince herself as well.

Hyunjung takes in the sight of Jiyeon—denim jacket folded at the sleeves, cuffed jeans, designer cap, a cute pattern on her nails that look like the ones she wore three weeks ago. “You look real,” she puts an arm where Jiyeon’s neck and shoulders meet and gently squeezes through the fabric. “Hm. You feel real too. Soft.”

“That’s how things are here,” Jiyeon’s eyes linger where Hyunjung’s hand had been a second ago where the denim should’ve creased under pressure. “Unless you look at the details, you won’t be able to tell the difference.”

Hyunjung opens to speak, but Jiyeon grabs her hand and begins to scribble lines of red ink over her arm. “We just met again and you’re already vandalizing my skin? Hey- where did you get those markers?”

“I’m trying something. You know, that movie, maybe if I do this then...”

“Which movie? That’ll be a nightmare to remove,” Hyunjung mutters to herself. Sojung will ask a lot of questions.

“Nightmare,” Jiyeon tries to fight off a grin, unsuccessfully, before writing again. When she’s done, Hyunjung turns her wrist and reads the neat line of words:

151, Bongeunsa-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul. KIM JIYEON.

“Jiyeon, why did you write your—”

Jiyeon hands her the markers and rolls her sleeves up. “Do the same and write your name and address on my arm,” her eyes sweep the surroundings, “Hurry up, we’re going to wake up anytime soon.”

Hyunjung could barely keep up but does as she’s told. She writes her name and her address on Jiyeon’s slim arm in huge letters. “How do you know we’re going to wake up?”

“There’s a pull,” Jiyeon gestures to her back, “something tugging. You should feel it too.”

Hyunjung freezes. She looks down to see the ends of her shirt being stretched into small portions. There’s tugging on her sleeves too, little reminders that their time’s up. When Jiyeon hurries to write one last word on Hyunjung’s arm, Hyunjung looks around and sees it’s just the two of them in the middle of nowhere, standing in front of a low brick wall on a blank space of swirling colors.

“A dream, huh.”

Hyunjung turns her arm to read as soon as Jiyeon’s done, but the letters overlap, thunder rumbles in the distance, she falls into nothingness, and everything turns black.

-

The raw sound of something smacked against the whiteboard snaps Hyunjung awake. She sits back up. Her professor and classmates are staring at her in a mess of disappointment, disgust, and amusement, courtesy of the small fraction of her friends by the corner.

“Kim Hyunjung,” the professor calls out. “Your parents didn’t send you to school to sleep through your lectures.”

Hyunjung clears and keeps her eyes on her notebook, “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Her seatmate, Son Seunghwan, nudges her by the elbow. “Way to go, future pres. Had a good dream?”

Hyunjung only smiles in reply. In the middle of lecture, she takes the red marker on her desk and twirls it between her fingers. She turns her wrist, tracing the tip from the back of her hand to the inside of her elbow.

Her arms look pale today, too pale and unblemished, that normally it would’ve been a great thing. Now it just feels odd.

Somebody pokes her on the back. She glances behind and sees Jooheon wriggling his eyebrows. He asks if she’s okay.

Hyunjung makes an ‘ok’ sign and mouths, ‘Why?’

Jooheon leans forward and smirks cheekily. “You were smiling a lot in your sleep.”

4.

The next time Hyunjung and Jiyeon meet in their dreams, they’re standing on fluffy clouds on a bright blue background, like one of those stock photos or overly saturated sky wallpapers that appear on image searches.

Reality and dreams have drawn their own lines—red, like the ink on their arms. Jiyeon’s writing is clear on Hyunjung’s arm now, as hers is on Jiyeon’s.

Remember, Jiyeon had written right before Hyunjung woke up, the letters big and angry, but neither of them remembered.

Hyunjung smears the writings with her thumb. The ink leaves her fingertips like fine ash, smooth and soft between the fingers, carried by the wind to a place she’ll never know.

Jiyeon imitates her and red ashes dissipate in the air quickly. “I should’ve known,” her face contorts into something more bitter than disappointment. “Everything that happens here stays here.”

Hyunjung stands beside her, wondering if for some reason she falls over the edge of the clouds she won’t plummet to her death. “How come you know stuff that I don’t? You seem to have it all figured out. I’m still wrapping my head around whatever this is.”

“Wrapping your head. Unnie, your humor, really,” Jiyeon sits over the edge, her smile lighting up her entire face, and maybe it has something to do with the sky behind them becoming brighter.

Hyunjung lets out a shaky laugh. “So, tell me all about this. I’m listening.”

“Well, I-” Jiyeon takes a deep breath. “I think when we sleep we meet in our dreams but don’t remember anything when we wake up. The first time we met when we were younger we didn’t remember any of it, too.”

“Well,” Hyunjung mutters. “That’s sad.”

(A few weeks later, she would look back to these words and wished she hadn’t said it out loud)

“For some reason I’m always the first one to arrive,” Jiyeon adds.

“How long do you wait before I arrive?”

“Long enough to realize I’m in a dream. But you don’t really arrive, unnie,” Jiyeon narrows her eyes, “you just sort of appear when I’m not looking.”

“And the place?”

“Sometimes it’s random, like where we are right now. Though I think, maybe it would be the places we’ve been to as well, like the hospital and the street food stalls outside our campus.”

“That school, you mean—we go to the same school?” Hyunjung grabs a handful of clouds and raises her hand to Jiyeon’s face. The clumps of cotton seep between her fingers like hourglass sand. “Now that I think of it, the streets kind of looked familiar.”

“I suppose so. I just transferred last month. Unnie, we literally wrote our names on each other’s skin,” Jiyeon laughs. “Gangnam and Gwangjin, remember? We don’t live that far away from each other.”

Hyunjung finds the courage in her to sit closer beside Jiyeon, dangling her feet over the edge one after another. “You ended up in Seoul, after all.”

“My mom used to say everyone ends up getting washed up in Seoul one way or another, like some kind of shore.”

“How has this shore been treating you, so far?”

“Kind. So far.” Jiyeon takes a clump of clouds and makes a packed ball with it. Once it takes shape, it crumbles in her fingers. “Everyone here’s always in a hurry, always half-running. I guess that’s how huge cities are supposed to be.”

“Not entirely. I told you I’ll show you around the neighborhood when you come and visit.”

“You can show me around next time, then,” Jiyeon replies.

“Jiyeon,” Hyunjung leans back, rearranging the words in her head before settling for something less pessimistic. “How sure are you that there will be a next time?”

"I just do," Jiyeon crinkles her nose and smiles too wide. Her eyes, caught by the sun, are the loveliest Hyunjung has ever seen them in. “You want a next time, too, don’t you, unnie?”

Hyunjung doesn’t answer. She turns away and draws shallow lines on the cloudbed with her finger before she does anything stupid, like let herself be attracted to someone she won’t remember when she wakes up or something.

When the wave of consciousness tugs at her, Hyunjung doesn’t fight it. She lets herself pass through the clouds. Jiyeon remains beside her, clutching her arm, squealing, laughing.

They fall and fall and fall and for the first time in her life, maybe Kim Hyunjung isn’t afraid of heights.

-

The first thing Hyunjung does after waking up is wake Sojung up and bombard her with questions before her consciousness sweeps everything away into oblivion.

A childhood friend. A name. A face. A smile. An adventure waiting to start. Remember.

A stranger. A name without letters. A promise unsaid. A smile disappearing in the sun. A song not meant to be sung. Remember.

“A childhood friend that isn’t me? Unnie, I know all your friends. Childhood and recent ones,” Sojung drawls.

“Exactly my point,” Hyunjung hurries over to the old boxes under her bed.

Sojung looks at her with half-open eyes and tucks her hair behind her ear. “How about Kyungri unnie? Woohee unnie? Hyerim unnie? We hung out a lot when we were kids.”

“If it was Kyungri unnie, I’d know for sure,” Hyunjung thumbs the pages of her elementary diary looking for names.

“Jooheon oppa? Hyungwon oppa? Seulgi unnie? Soojung unnie? Jung Soojung?”

“No, no, no, no, no. I’d also know if they were my classmates,” Hyunjung sighs in frustration.

Something at the back of her mind tells her that even if Sojung recites all the people she’s met throughout her life, she wouldn’t get it right.

“Look, unnie, I know your dream dilemma is as real as it gets but we really need to prepare for the elections,” Sojung gets up and begins folding her blankets. “If we don’t have a solid line-up by the end of the semester, we’re better off as independent candidates.”

Hyunjung moves on to the next diary, one entry after another. A name. She needs a name. Just one. “We don’t have a problem with Soobin, Luda and Dawon,” she mumbles. “They’re relatively known and had already been representatives before. I talked to them a few weeks ago.”

“Oh? You talked to your crush, Miss Park Soobin?”

“We’re each other’s crushes,” Hyunjung corrects her, “only that she’s still in denial about it.”

“I’m surprised you got to Luda and Dawon first before the others.”

“I already told you I’m on it,” Hyunjung reaches behind her without looking and hands Sojung a piece of paper. “I already have a top twenty. Give me your top three pick next week.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sojung huffs.

Hyunjung snaps her diary shut and walks out to the showers, making a mental note to surprise Soobin with a box of chocopie by the end of the day.

5.

When Hyunjung isn’t paying attention to anything else other than how relieved she is to see Jiyeon again, everything swirls and gets dragged to a side, and they end up standing between busy street food stalls and bright neon lights from nightclubs and karaoke bars.

“Wow. We’re really here. Gangnam.” Hyunjung looks around, wide-eyed, “Jiyeon, it looks real.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Jiyeon beams.

Hyunjung points to a block of gray by the corner street. “There’s a cafe over there. My friends and I go often there on weekends,” and as she says it, the block melts into something more specific, something more resembling a building schemed with dark colors and wood planks and servers walking around dressed in neutral colors.

They look at each other and let out a gaping, “Wow,” in unison.

They spend their dreams like this, building worlds, creating landscapes. Night after night, Jiyeon paints the scenery with her impression and Hyunjung fills the gaps with her memory.

After touring the streets of Gangnam, they go to Hyunjung’s neighborhood in Gwangjin, then to Jiyeon’s mansion-like house in Daegu where Jiyeon makes a promise, “Unnie, when we meet outside this dream world, I’ll treat you to all the good restaurants I know in our place and have my mom cook gopchang for you.”

Hyunjung refrains from asking about the what-ifs and answers, “Okay.”

After the usual hobbies, favorites, dreams and desired futures, the small talks become something deeper. They become conversations that don’t need words.

Hyunjung notices that when they walk, Jiyeon would dangle her hand by her side. Sometimes she curls a finger or two around Hyunjung’s pinky, or hold her by the arm and let her fingers trail to her wrist then back up like it’s supposed to mean something.

Whatever it probably meant, Hyunjung doesn’t get any of it so she saves Jiyeon the hesitation.

She holds Jiyeon’s hand, half-expecting it to feel anything but a hand, especially them being in a dream. The funny thing is that on the contrary, and this takes them both by surprise because Jiyeon’s hand is soft and warm and a perfect fit in Hyunjung’s.

By the time they reach the Han River, their cheeks are bright red and no one has said anything yet. Even when the tugging on their shirts begin, instead of letting go they hold on to each other more.

When they say their goodbyes, Jiyeon smi