Sohee sits cross-legged on her twin bed, wearing fluffy socks that reach her bare knees, and reading her favorite book. A worn copy of The Giving Tree lays flat on the crinkled pewter gray blanket, the pages precariously pinned down by her thumb and pinky. In her other hand, Sohee holds a grape juice box, trying not to spill the dark liquid on the sheets. The house revels in silence, a peaceful kind that Sohee has learned to savor especially in light of recent marital troubles.

On weekends, her parents work. Well, Father works, and Mother typically ventures into the city to explore, leaving Sohee alone in the house. She'd like to say they trust her, but that meant they actually pay enough attention to her to foster that reliability, and that is the greatest fallacy. Instead, it is more like they lack the worry of Sohee disobeying, knowing that in the end, she'll stay perfectly in place.

It doesn't matter in the end, for regardless of the reason, she is able to dabble in her own activities without the obstruction of outside influences.

Tap. Tap. Tappity-tap.

Her body stiffens, and she jerks her body around to face her window. An ocean blue curtain covers the glass, but a shadow of a figure takes shape on the silky fabric. She is on the second floor. Sohee shifts herself, The Giving Tree forgotten. Her heart speeds up, and slowly she inches off her bed and to the door, ready to run to the phone. When her hands touch the doorknob, it comes again.

Tap. Tap. Tappity-tap.

A familiar voice accompanies the knocks this time. "Sohee! Open up!"

Sohee, again, freezes, eyebrows wrinkling in confusion. That sounds like Tae. A frown staining her visage, she marches to the window, opening the curtains. True enough, a boy with cheeks made for blushing smiles at her from the other side of the cool glass.

She undoes the latch and opens the window, being careful not to smack the boy in the face, even though she really, really wants to. Tae runs a hand through his cosmic locks. "Sup."

"Are you crazy?" she asks, straight to the point.

"Good to see you too," he greets. He no longer speaks to her in Korean unless they're exchanging top secret information. Mr. Lee has explained that it was more beneficial for her learning curve, whatever that is.

"How are you up here?" she questions instead, now worried for the security of her home.

Tae moves to the side, showing how he’s standing on a little roof platform underneath her window. Then, he gestures to a similar raised surface that almost touches edges with hers from the other side of the fence. The gap between the two is small enough for someone to walk across. "I live next door."

She frowns. "I thought you were across the street."

He makes a funny face as if it was the most incredulous thing he’s ever heard. "Why'd you think that?"

“You said you lived there.”

“I said I lived across from you, as in across and to the side,” he says, matter-of-factly.

She sighs, then picks at the hem of her dress. After a moment, she takes a deep breath, and tries with all her might not to push him off the ledge in that instant. "Why are you here?"

"Wanna come over?" he asks cheekily.

"I'm reading," she states.

"So?"

She blinks, and he blinks, and she sighs even louder. "Mmkay."

She slings her leg over the window and crouches to get out. Tae helps her up, but he stares at her weirdly. When she asks why, he peers inside her room, pointer finger stretched out in a question.

"Don't you have to ask your mama and papa first?" he inquires. "I asked my dads and they said yeah as long as the door's open, whatever that means."

She shakes her head. "They're not home, and even if they were home, I can't tell them. They don't… like you," she informs him bitterly. Before Tae could prod further, she scrutinizes house, and the gap between the roofs. "Is that where your room is? Do we just jump?'

His face is still contorted into uncertainty, but he bites his lip, trying to play safe, and nods. "Yeah, just walk over. You won't fall if you're careful. I can hold you if you want." He lifts his hands to follow through on his promise.

"I can do it myself," she says, inching away from his traveling limbs.

The two traverse from one platform to the other with ease, and Tae crawls through his window first as Sohee wore a dress. Once inside, he holds out his hand to her, making sure she didn't fall on her way in. She manages not to slip on the stray soccer ball that lays near the entrance.

"Well," Tae starts, "Here's my crib!"

Looking around, all Sohee could say is that the room is utterly, stereotypically boyish. Clothes scattered the floor in frantic heaps, and posters of famous soccer players were hung in an arbitrary fashion. Even the bed screamed male with the crumpled dark blue sheets with the—surprise, surprise—Power Ranger print.

Sohee scrunches her nose, staring at him intensely. "So, what now?" The potential testosterone levels leaking from each wooden panel sickens her.

Tae chuckles nervously. "About that… "

She crosses her arms. "So you're telling me you made me stop reading and come over, but you don't know what we're doing?"

"Well, I didn't think you'd say yes!"

She pouts. With nothing else to do, and not mean enough to just turn around and abandon him, she takes to observing more of her surroundings. He has a desk beside his bed. Frames of his family, large and crowded, decorate it. However, the most prominent feature is the old fashioned radio cowering behind the wooden placeholders.

Tae toes the carpet, thinking, but then his face lights up. "We could play Dungeon Defenders. It's a multiplayer RPG tower defense game. Of course, you'd have to start from level one, we all do, but it's really fun."

"But I don't know how to play Dungeon Defenders," she protests.

"Duh, that's why I'm here," he says. "You up for it?"

Honestly, once she sees his beaming smile which stretched like taffy, that is sweet and hopeful and nice, she doesn't think she had the tenacity to refuse. Nonetheless, she raises an air of nonchalance and apathy.

She huffs. "Okay.”

As it turns out, Sohee is very good at Dungeon Defenders—too good actually. Initially, they had run into many mishaps given that she had to be taught which buttons released which action, but once she grasped the basic mechanics, she played well for someone who had never touched a controller before. The game is based upon strategy and management, and for a post-second, pre-third grader, Sohee is the best at that. The combat, not so much, but Tae covers that ground.

"Are you sure you never played before?" Tae asks, stabbing a monster with his character. It’s a knight, of course, what else, and he’s dominating the arena.

Sohee is busy setting up a trap. "No."

Her parents don't like these violent video games, claiming they'll rotten her mind and consume her. Instead, they buy miscellaneous books to appease her need for entertainment. Often, the books they buy aren't even within her reading level, so she'd hold them off or try to read them with terrible inaccuracy. She remembers an instance where they seriously gifted her Lord of the Flies in Korean for her birthday, and shudders.

"Just asking, 'cause you're doing great," he comments, then whispers to himself darkly, "better than me."

"That's 'cause you ," she says plainly.

"You take that back!" he shouts, and taking his right hand off his controller, swipes it across Sohee's face, obstructing her view of the screen. The two struggle with each other, trying to gain a one-up. At the same time, the characters in the game are shunted aside, the monsters breaking through their defenses with ease.

"Tae, you're making us lose!" she screams, grabbing for her controller while simultaneously pushing his face away. "Get off!"

"Never!"

"No, stop—"

"GAME OVER!" the screen chants, and with a rough shove, Sohee peels Tae off her. Her expression puffs up when she reads the two dreadful words flashing on the small television. Their characters had fallen. The monsters destroyed the Eternia crystal. It is over.

"See!" she tells him angrily. "We lost, stupid!" It is the worst swear word in the dictionary, and she can't believe she said it aloud, but the rage devoured her completely.

He waves his hand at her. "We can just redo it, no biggie."

Sohee scowls at his lackadaisical attitude, and they play again. This time, without the bloodthirsty tendencies whisking them away.

The clock ticks, and after the sixth round of the fifth wave, Sohee pauses the game. Tae falls off his bed, having been completely absorbed, shouting, "What! We were gonna win, I could level up!"

She stands, brushing off her dress. "I need to go home. Mother and Father should be returning. I'll see you later."

He doesn't respond, in fact, he even seems a little nervous at her statement. For a few moments, she waits for him to say something, but he never does. He just opens his mouth and closes it again, but it is clear he doesn't want her to go.

"Tae-Tae?” she asks, taking a step forward. He’s never this serious.

"It's just—" Tae twiddles with his fingers, and glances at her with unease. "Why… Why do you call your parents mother and father and not mom and dad?"

“We’re just different,” she replies, heart growing heavier as he grows bolder in his prodding.

Tae his lips, biting. "Then, how come they aren't home with you even though you’re only seven?"

"What?"

He exhales, turning red. "I mean, we—my dads and me—hear yelling, and you walk to school by yourself when you’re sick, like really sick, and we live so far away. And they hate my family because we’re… not like yours, so—you okay?"

His eyes bore into hers and Sohee refuses to meet them. They were like space, twinkling and vast and deep for someone so young. Like the snake in the Garden of Eden, they provoke her surely, enticing her to tell. She decides she hated gazing into his starry eyes.

"I don't ask about your parents, don't ask about mine, were just different than yours," Sohee says with finality, and strides to the window where she plans to leave. She didn't come here for an interrogation. Then again, what did she come here for? For fun? Adventure? The salty taste of uncertainty and consternation slides over her tongue, and it propels her urge to vacate the premises.

He scrambles to his feet, stopping her from exiting. "No—Sohee—I'm sorry. It's just, I wanna be friends. And—"

"And what?" she asks sharply, hand on the ledge.

The muscles of his face slacken. “I want you to talk to me."

She stiffens. Her grip on the windowsill tightens. Her pale hands turn whiter with tension. "I'm okay. I'm… fine."

He doesn't look convinced, and she doesn't think he ever will, but he never voices his concern. A brief period of reticence passes between them, a quiet sort of conversation that meanders in the unspoken words that hang in the air like tinsel. It is almost a competition except they both don't know what the prize is, nor is it a reward they wanted to confront.

Finding there is nothing holding her back, she crawls out the window, and makes her way to her room. Her knees dig into the rough brick, leaving scratch marks her parents would surely question her about. At the moment, though, the future implications of that sequence of events is pushed to the back of her mind in her need to escape from the stifling atmosphere of Kim Taehyung.

There is the unmistakable sound of creaking wood. "Sohee… "

When he calls her name again, she is already precariously balanced between his house and hers. Her right foot barely met the tiled platform. Her other foot is firmly planted on his roof.

"If you want you can—if you don't mind, you—I mean—" He his lips, and draws a deep breath. "You wanna come back next weekend? We can beat the wyvern..." The way he speaks is hesitant and careful, a soft sentence that claws at her back as if he is scared. It is fragile, lacking the worry and promise that drove her away, and for that, Sohee pauses to consider.

The dark pigment of her attire and her ghostly complexion blotches the blurred canvas of the pinkish-blue sky suspended from the heavens. It would have made a wonderful photograph—the contrast and the irony and the way the world seems to stop and wait for her decision. As if time won't stir unless this petite child of only seven found her voice and replied to the hopeful boy worth a million sunsets.

"I don’t know, Tae," she answers breathlessly, clutching onto the hem of her dress.

She lifts her foot off his roof and onto hers.

The wind howls, the sun drops into the murky abyss, and the blue taste of something promised dies on her lips.

Tae pushes his cauliflower around on his plate, turning the veggie over and over. His mind is occupied by icy eyes and large cheeks, and his shoulders sags further towards the Earth in remembrance of her plea. He can’t understand the need to be alone. He shares everything with his dads, and he seeks constant companionship on the playground. Solitude is foreign, and rather poisonous if you asked him.

“Baby, what’s wrong?” Daehyun asks, nibbling on his piece of steak.

“You’re not eating your favorite food,” Baekhyun comments.

“No, it’s just, what—” his eyes dart around, “—what if someone doesn’t want to be friends with you? Like you really want to play with them and they say no.”

Baekhyun stills, fork halfway to its destination. “I suppose you should leave them alone then.”

Tae shakes his head, his heart beating. “No, like… you know they need friends, they don’t have any, and you have this big, big, big want to make them feel better, but like, all the time.”

Daehyun folds his napkin, and thinks for a bit. “In your lifetime, you will meet a thousand people. Some people will influence you for the best and others for the worst. Irregardless, each person will change you, and you need to be the judge of whether or not you want their change and if they want yours, and if Sohee is someone worth keeping around, then the effort put into her, into understanding her, will pay off. For the both of you.”

“I didn’t even say it was Sohee!” Tae protests.

“You didn’t need to.”

“Keep out of my business!”

Baekhyun flicks his forehead. “Don’t speak to your father like that!”

~

True compassion means not only feeling another's pain, but also being moved to help relieve it.

~

A somewhat shorter chapter I suppose. It was intended to be longer, her parents making an appearance, but I guess this is okay. There are way to many problems needing to be addressed. This is just one of very many. It'll be alright, though, the tag I used is fluff, not angst.