"Omo, unnie, shut up.” Soojung silenced her older sister in that abrupt way of hers.

“Yah, Soojung. I was only talking because you’d asked me a question-”

Jessica’s mouth was muffled by Soojung’s palm before she could finish. She didn’t want to believe they came from the same womb sometimes.

In the silence that followed, Jessica heard more clearly the tune that was bleeding out from the taxi’s stereo. Soojung grinned at her before turning to the driver.

“Ahjussi, could you turn up the volume?”

The familiar piano notes knocked against the walls of Jessica’s heart. Images flashed vividly behind her eyelids. One single black figure stood against a white background, still, waiting, and then eight more silhouettes emerged, making the perfect nine. Into the new world. She couldn’t think of a more appropriate debut title if she tried. It had been three months since their first performance as SNSD, and Jessica was happy their song was still on the radio.

Next to her, Soojung sang along a little too enthusiastically. Jessica noticed the driver’s questioning glances in the rear-view mirror at the impromptu karaoke session. She was empathetic. Soojung could be a little too much at times. Most of the time.

“Oh my favourite part is coming up. This moment warmly wraps around me. I want to tell you all of my heaaaaaaaaaart!”

“You know, one would think that your favourite part would be your own sister’s solo lines, not Taeyeon’s.” Jessica pretended to be annoyed, although she was touched that Soojung knew every word of the song as well as impressed by Soojung's decent high note.

“Do you hate Taeyeon unnie?”

Jessica turned to look at Soojung and saw she was dead serious. Soojung had that habit of switching between her teasing and serious sides in the blink of an eye, and it drove Jessica crazy.

“No. Why?”

Soojung shrugged. “I don’t know. You never talk about her. Like, you’d say stuff like, ‘Oh, I went and saw that movie with Yuri last weekend’ or ‘Hyoyeon really loves that ice cream flavour’, but I’ve rarely heard anything about Taeyeon unnie. I mean, I get it. Yours is a big group. You can’t be close to everyone.”

“I’m close to Taeyeon,” Jessica said defensively, like she would in an interview, “Me and Taeyeon. We’re close.”

“All right. What’s her favourite colour?”

Damn it.

“Gosh. I don’t know. She probably doesn’t have one.”

“Blue and purple, my idiot unnie. You’re worse than the fansite nerds.”

“And you’re such a fansite nerd. I’m still offended that I’m only your second bias in SNSD.”

“Pfffft. What are you talking about?” Soojung looked shocked, “My second bias is Yoona unnie.”

“You rascal!”

Jessica attempted to smack her sister’s head but Soojung’s reflex was too quick. An intense tickling battle soon commenced in the backseat of the taxi. Of course they were going to spent their precious rare day off like this. And Jessica wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Girls.” The driver cleared his throat pointedly as the car pulled to a stop. “We’re here.”

Jessica leaned away from a giggling Soojung. She looked up at the building that housed the dorm she shared with the other eight pieces of SNSD. Her home away from home. Jessica was never fully at peace at the dorm, always feeling as if she had left half of her heart at her first home, where her real biological family was. But the funny thing was, when she left the dorm to be with the said family, she felt the exact same thing. She had accepted it as a fact by now: she had two homes and two families, and she couldn’t choose one over the other anymore. She had never intended to love the girls as if they were her own flesh and blood, but apparently her heart had its own plans.

“Will you be alone in the dorm?” Soojung’s serious mode was on again without warning.

“Nah. The rest are probably partying inside already.” That was a lie. The other girls were probably still spending the last moments of their free day with their families before their lives as SNSD resumed again. If she was lucky, Tiffany would be inside though, since her family was in another country. Either way Jessica didn't want her little sister to feel sorry for her for being left alone. Soojung had enough to worry about as it was, juggling school and SM training at the same time. And Jessica would know. She'd been there. She'd been there for seven long years. 

“Okay then." Soojung seemed only half-convinced. "Bye, my idiot unnie.”

Jessica smiled. That basically meant I love you in Soojung’s language.

“Bye, you ugly child.” I love you too.

Jessica watched as the taxi pulled away with a piece of her heart, before making her way to the building’s elevator.

The living room she opened the door to was dark and quiet. Her intact eardrums reported the absence of Tiffany. Jessica felt suddenly exhausted, head to toe, mind and body, and almost threw herself flat on the couch when she noticed someone was already there.

Jessica was reminded again why the girl was nicknamed Kid Leader. Make-up-free and sleeping, Taeyeon barely looked twelve. Jessica felt an overwhelming urge to squish her mochi cheeks. She had read somewhere about the reason why people had violent reactions when confronted with cute things. They didn’t know how to deal with their feelings of endearment, so they subconsciously wanted to destroy the object causing their uncontrollable emotions. Human nature scared Jessica sometimes.

Bending closer, Jessica realised the reason why a light sleeper like Taeyeon had not been woken up by the sound of the front door. She was sleeping with her earbuds in. Taeyeon did that often, and Jessica wondered often what it was she was listening to in the car, in the waiting room, on her bed in the morning on the extremely rare occasion that Jessica went to wake her up instead of the other way around.

Jessica wondered.

The taller girl gingerly plucked one of the earbuds out of Taeyeon’s ear. She grinned when Taeyeon didn’t stir, and inserted it into her own ear, expecting some obscure emo music to come flowing in just because Taeyeon seemed like the type but…

It was her own voice singing.

Jessica’s voice.

Every muscle Jessica had in her froze in unison, not quite sure how to deal with this turn of events. Her ears weren’t fooling her. It really was her cover of BoA’s Everlasting back when Jessica had been a trainee. Even though SNSD had only debuted 3 months ago and were as rookie as rookies went, her trainee days somehow felt like a different lifetime. She couldn’t believe Taeyeon still had the recording, let alone listen to it like this.

“Isn’t this scandalous?”

Jessica blinked out of her daze and looked down to find Taeyeon gazing lazily up at her. She realised then what position they were in, with Taeyeon’s body basically sandwiched between her and the couch and one of Taeyeon’s earbuds in her ear. Well, she supposed that was one way of getting closer. Soojung would be proud of her.

“You’re really creepy, you know?” Taeyeon’s voice was laced with sleep, with a hint of a smile.

“Says the one who fell asleep to my singing,” Jessica quipped, attempting to shift the embarrassment away from herself.

It worked. The white mochi buns below began to colour pink, and Taeyeon wordlessly slithered out from underneath Jessica. The taller girl shifted to a less misunderstandable position as well, but somehow the borrowed earbud remained in her ear the whole time. They ended up sitting side-by-side on the couch, listening to Jessica belting out promises to a lover she never had.

“In my defense, I put the playlist on shuffle. Your song just happened to be on right when you stole my earbud.”

“I didn’t steal it.”

“Well, you haven’t given it back.”

“I’m borrowing it for a while to listen to my own angelic voice.”

Taeyeon chuckled, leaning back against the couch. “I guess I have nothing to say to that. How’s your sister?”

“Oh, you know. Annoying as hell and mocking me every chance she gets. What else is new?”

“I’m envious.”

“Didn’t know you were into annoying sarcastic little rascals.”

“No.” Taeyeon laughed. “It’s just you guys are close. It’s obvious.”

There it was again. That nostalgic, reminiscing, classic Taeyeon look. Take those wistful eyes out of the context of the baby face and one would think Taeyeon had lived a long and eventful life, having experienced at least two wars and five divorces. At least.

“You never told me about yours,” Jessica said as her younger voice poured into her left ear, Even the fact that we met by chance.

“My what? My sister?”

“Your everything. Sister, brother, parents. Yourself. We've trained together and debuted together, and I hardly know anything about you. Just now, Soojung quizzed me about your favourite colour and I didn’t know. She called me ‘idiot unnie’.”

Taeyeon laughed. “I like Soojung already.”

“Jerk.” Jessica shoved the other girl, which only caused her to laugh harder. “So, come on, tell me something.”

“Erm, I don’t know.” Taeyeon scratched the back of her free ear. “I… I like cactus.”

Jessica pulled a cushion into her lap and hugged it while looking at the other girl with expectant eyes. “Yeah? Okay. Why do you like cactus? ‘Cuz it’s hard to kill and stuff?”

“No no. Nothing so symbolic. It’s just…” Taeyeon’s hands squeezed something invisible in front of her. “… bulby.”

“You like it because it’s bulby?”

“Yeah. No, you don’t get it. Stop laughing. It’s round and cute and looks like it’d be nice to hold but actually has these mad pricks so you shouldn’t really touch it. I like the contrast, I guess. Kind of like-”

Taeyeon cut herself off so suddenly that Jessica couldn’t help but raise a questioning eyebrow.

“Kind of like what?”

“Like... someone who looks cold but is actually warm inside. Or vice versa. Or something. Yeah.”

Jessica wasn’t sure why the usually well-spoken leader was babbling. She was tempted to tease Taeyeon but at the same time was afraid to make the girl so uncomfortable that she would stop talking all together. Jessica decided not to push it. It was rare enough that they had a nice moment like this to chat.

“I see. Tell me something else.”

Taeyeon seemed to consider for a second, but then shook her head. “Maybe another day.”

“Oh come on. Soojung would have no respect for me if all I learn was that you liked cactus ‘cuz it’s bulby.”

“Hey, what’s the rush? We’ll have plenty of days between now and the next time you meet Soojung, and plenty more after that.” Taeyeon smiled, small but genuine. “Forever, it’s Girls’ Generation, isn’t it?”

Jessica’s lips curved up on their own. It was a promise. Just then, the outtro to Everlasting was fading out in their shared earbuds, only for the intro of the same song to start again automatically. Jessica’s smile widened into a toothy smirk at the realisation. Taeyeon had put her song on loop, not shuffled the whole playlist as she had claimed.

The shorter girl, having given herself away, yanked the earbud out of Jessica’s ear and jumped up from the couch, mumbling something about making dinner.

Jessica sat giggling to herself. So she hadn’t known what Taeyeon’s favourite colour was, but she knew her favourite playlist now, and that playlist only had one song.

A/N: Thanks for reading guys! (This is an edit so I forgot to thank my earliest readers forgive me)