Songs:

¬ Are You Gonna Be My Girl

¬ La Costa

“You guys must live very far, right?” Yoohyeon asked while her gaze examined the explicit transfiguration of the landscape, as green and blue reigned over the grey and red tones they were already getting used to back in the city. She felt like they had experienced more in their scarce days in the city than all the years she spent looking at white. Amazement never ceased to roam through her senses, despite noticing how unfazed every new person she met seemed.

    “Of course,” Kibum’s eyes softened, and an emotionally weighted smile balanced his pain and content in brief quietude, “we have no choice.”

    Yoohyeon decided not to pry, so she turned her head towards the backseat instead in hopes of starting another conversation that would potentially lighten up the mood. However, she didn’t say anything either, given that she noticed everyone’s attention focusing elsewhere. Gahyeon just looked out the window, studying the seemingly never ending trails of Evergreen, but Siyeon sat in the middle seat with her eyes closed while one of her fingers traced circles on top of Bora’s hand. Despite having an idea of what her friend might be thinking, the dancer was, on the other hand, hard to read; her face showed almost zero emotion as she peeked at the tranquil surface of vast water. At one point, though, she took a glimpse of the one next to her and reluctantly placed her hand on Siyeon’s lap. With an exhaled smile, Yoohyeon turned her body back to the front and began to think. Siyeon only does that with people she trusts, she thought, and most of the doubts she could’ve had about Bora vanished. 

    “We live out here to avoid being targeted.” Kibum spoke after moments of silence, sensing awkwardness in the scene. He got Yoohyeon’s attention again.

    “I figured.” She said. “What do you do then? How do you get food or… I don’t know, live?”

    “I’m going to explain everything, but it’s better if you meet everyone first,” He raised his voice while looking at the rearview mirror, startling the other three. “...in your case, Yooh, you’re just going to catch up with old friends.” He smiled brightly this time.

    “You’re seriously not going to tell me who’s there?”

    “You’ll see, you’ll see.”

    After a handful of acres, he took a turn and drove into the forest. Gahyeon straightened up in her seat, somehow thinking it would give her a better view of the sunlight scurrying through the gaps of leaves; coruscating veils of white stayed still, playing with the colors and the gist of the wind. Siyeon had her eyes open then, but instead of letting go she held Bora’s hand closer to her.

    “Okay, yes, you made sure no one can find you.” Yoohyeon joked as the car kept moving and moving, delving into density. “I’d get lost in here.”

    “Yoohyeon, if I remember your mind well, you’d get lost in your own house.” Kibum laughed as he slowly started letting go of the gas pedal.

    “You don’t know her then.” Siyeon spoke, sharp and with unaware hostility. The man’s laugh died out and got replaced by Gahyeon’s, who was amused at the sight of his face mildly freezing. Before anyone could say anything else, the car stopped moving in front of a big wooden house.

    “This is us.” He said before opening the door and gesturing to them to do the same.

Siyeon felt uneasy. This man omitted too much information, in contrast to what she had experienced with Bora, Minji, and everyone else. And Yoohyeon doesn’t get lost anywhere. In fact, she’s the only one she’d trust her guidance anywhere, whether it’s out here or in The House. Maybe she does drop stuff too much and falls, but never in the time she has known her she has gotten lost. She looked at her friend and then at the man, and how they talked like they had known each other for years… was she overthinking? She probably was, she thought, so she focused on the house they were approaching instead. The rich jacobean brown stood out from the green and soil, and the windows were somewhat dark but they made her intrigued. The inside didn’t look completely brown.

Kibum stood in front of the door and held the handle as everyone got to the front porch. “Now, I give you a formal welcome to our house, which hadn’t received visitors in a very long time so Taemin will be excited.” His eyes showed hints of mirth before opening the door. “Guys, there’s people here!”

Upon setting foot into the house, they were shocked at the amount of visual stimuli they were receiving. Siyeon’s eyes danced around the tonal harmony of color boldness hugging every piece of furniture, every piece of decoration, every space; everything. “Not even Handong’s apartment is this beautiful…” She said, which earned a restrained laugh from Bora. Yellow reigned over every other tone, and tints of mustard embellished the cushions as well as coexisting with matte blue and white on rugs. Strangely shaped vases of different lengths and shapes stood proud in almost every corner and surface, and even the lamps dared normalcy. Bold, bold, bold; lines and swirls, concrete black on the walls contrasted with squares full of things similar to what she saw back at the hidden place Bora took her to… certainly a visual festin, which made her get lost in a smile and contentment. Everything was so coordinated, well blended, so familiar.

“Yoohyeon!” A man ran from one of the rooms and exclaimed when he saw the tallest woman. “We were so worried about you when we left. I’m happy you’re okay.” He almost ran over his words after giving her a brief hug. But then he made sense of the other people he didn’t recognize, so, full of hand gestures, he spoke; “Hello, my name is Taemin and I keep this place pretty.”

“You did this?” Yoohyeon asked while looking at the surroundings with a different light.

“Yeah. I am what people call,” He approached the wall and leaned on it, “...an interior repairer.”

“Designer.” Kibum corrected him and walked past him, waving his hand for the others to follow. They did, and, after some steps, a blanket of foreign heat circled around them. “Hey, is Kai…?”

“Back at the furnace, again.” 

    Siyeon turned towards the source of the voice, and saw a woman with dark blue, or teal, hair, and another one trailing behind, whose raven colored head ventured to camouflage with the walls. The unusual color reminded her of the ash grey Yoohyeon had up until they got out of The House. She looked at Bora without thinking about it, and she saw she was atypically quiet. As the two strange women greeted Yoohyeon and exchanged embraces, Siyeon whispered; “Are you okay?” To which Bora just nodded and quickly dismissed with a hand wave.

    She learned that the dark haired woman’s name was Dahyun, and, for some reason, she didn’t talk. In the conversation the seven of them just had, she didn’t utter a single word, but rather nodded and smiled with a closed mouth. On the contrary, Wheein, the one with blue hair, was a little more talkative and energetic. Her arms had a cluster of drawings on them, which Siyeon wasn’t able to take her eyes off of. Her clothes were big and flowed together with her movements, and her smile almost never left her face. Before she could conjure a thought integrating everything she had seen in those past minutes, Kibum opened the back door and revealed a man running with a long metal pole that had a scalding red ball stuck to the far end. He rested the metal on top of a short surface and crouched down a little to blow through it, making the fiery ball swell up. After that, he grabbed a smaller stick, put it against the material, and spun the long pole, making the hot part change shape and the hues of warmness form a spiraling optical illusion. Siyeon’s eyes were locked on the transforming thing, and got hypnotized by the yellow and red morphing into apparent inexistence, since it got clearer and clearer until it finally revealed it was glass.

    “We have visitors.” Kibum announced as the man was grabbing the long pole again to run back to the furnace. Instead, he stopped everything and waved. “That’s Kai.”

    “Yes I am. Oh, Yoohyeon! I’ll be with you guys in a second, I gotta-” The glass fell and shattered to pieces in front of his feet. “...Yeah, well.”

    Siyeon remembered that Yoohyeon mentioned these were all people she met in The House, and then she thought; they don’t look like they used to be there. She doesn’t recall seeing anyone in there that would behave like this, or do anything that they did. Yoohyeon… maybe, but she was a different case. Ever since she entered this house, she got a different feeling, similar to what she felt when Bora took her to that hidden spot that doesn’t exist anymore.

🝰🝰🝰

“You’ll eventually remember who you used to be before going there. Memories come back. Painfully, and slowly, but they do.” Wheein gave everyone a cup of water and placed a bowl of hummus on the coffee table. “Turns out I was a tattoo artist. And I did some of these.” She pointed at her arms.

“How many times?” Kibum inquired as he tapped on the left side of his head. Now, they were all sitting in the living room, ready for chatter and, most importantly, answers.

“What do you mean?” Siyeon’s confusion dripped off of her words.

He moved some of his hair to reveal his scar. “How many times did you get the procedure?”

“Uh…” She still wasn’t aware of what he would've meant. She had never known what the scar meant, nor where it came from.

Gahyeon sighed and shifted in her seat; “Three.” And Siyeon immediately turned her head towards her, eyes focused on nothing in particular, but striking. “You didn’t go through it Siyeon.”

“She did. Once. She just doesn’t remember.” Yoohyeon entered the conversation; “Fifty something. I stopped counting.”

Dahyun almost choked on her drink, and everyone’s eyes were now on Yoohyeon. “For real?” Kibum managed to get out.

“Yes.”

His expression turned grim as he sat back in disbelief.  “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I mean, I never got used to it, but.. It happened and now I’m here, right?”

“Seriously, what are you talking about?” Siyeon's irked voice interrupted with a frustrated tone.

“Surgery. After our investigations that basically caused an apocalypse in that hell building,” Kibum paused to shake his head while smiling, “...we found out that they do some kind of brain surgery once they bring you in, which wipes out your entire memory and leaves you completely blank. Then they tell you that they’re happy to have you here, blah, blah, blah, all that you probably remember, and then you start working indefinitely until you ‘disappear’. Or at least disappear from the main building, because you don’t just vanish, if you remember that damned door to the basement.”

“But it seems it only works that first time, because I never forgot anything else after that.” Gahyeon said and the others agreed.

“It seems like they don’t know that, because, every time, they woke you up like it was your first day there. And I think… there’s no one left that would tell them that. At least I thought so, because you guys are here now so I’m not sure of what to think…” Yoohyeon scratched her head. “I thought they had killed you. I thought I was the last one left from the first batch.”

“A woman helped us get out. I don’t remember if it was a doctor or a guard, but we were all hiding in one of the gyms when she found us. She let us leave.” Wheein spoke and the others nodded, confirming the veracity of the memory. “I was angry and wanted to go back for you, but we couldn’t. Everything was a mess, and all we could do was keep running until we weren’t physically able to anymore.”

Yoohyeon’s eyebrows dared to touch. “When I went back for Gahyeon, a guard did that same thing.”

“She asked where you were.” Kibum reminisced. “I think she knew you, but we didn’t say anything ‘cause… First, why did she ask? Second, we really didn’t know where you were.”

“I was down in the basement… I wanted to get more information after you left but ended up getting trapped.” Yoohyeon noticed Siyeon, Gahyeon and Bora were completely lost in what seemed to be a conversation between old friends, so she proceeded to explain; “As you may have known, I was one of the first people to be put in The House, along with these guys over here. Dahyun came like a year and a half later. In the beginning, things were a little different there, and you don’t know this because you left,” She pointed at her old friends, “...we could actually get out until the sunset, the food was a little better, we didn’t work as much, and so many different things… I remember the thing we did the most was exercising. But anyway, sparing a lot of details, we found out about the basement and the file room, and we noticed that the unknown people we saw in the files appeared in the following weeks, and they kept a log of everyone there. We were less than a hundred people there at first, right? Anyway... It became routine that us five would break into the basement to get information; doing that, we learned that the people who ‘disappear’ just get moved to the basement, and that The House wasn’t the whole world like they make you believe, but rather a facility. We went as individuals several times, which made us get caught and get surgery a few times. But, there was one time, which triggered the whole revolt, that I stole something from the basement… a patient file, if I remember correctly, and…” She paused and put one of her hands on her face out of frustration. “...told everyone I encountered about it. It spread and then everyone was reluctant to follow orders while demanding the staff to tell them what was going on. First, the staff was trying to calm everyone down, but seeing that it wasn’t working, they threatened to start shooting. No one calmed down and started to trash everything, so… you know what happened next. I was incredibly stupid, so I went back to the basement to try to look for more information before running away, but I got caught by a doctor. Then the surgery... then the next day they made it seem as if I was the first person in The House, and a few weeks passed before new people started showing up.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about this before you disappeared?” Siyeon’s query dropped heavily.

“I wanted to be as careful as possible… Those last days I felt they were monitoring me more than ever, so I knew I had to act quick. I think they saw me hide papers in clothing, and you know I was one of the people that got any paper property burned. If I had told you this and my plans before, I think it wouldn’t have been that successful. I didn’t know how you would react, and I couldn’t risk you reacting the same way I did back then. In theory…”

Yoohyeon’s silence preceded the sound of Bora’s ceramic cup hitting the hardwood table, and after that she got up and walked towards the front door. Siyeon watched her with an unsure gaze, but then stood up, grabbed her cane and followed her outside. Everyone tried to find comfort in the silence, but as moments passed, they resumed the conversation, and later talked about how they were holding up that deep into the woods. The two recent escapees learned that the others were living as off the grid as possible; Kai made all the vases, lamps, and other things made out of glass, Taemin was in charge of any decoration and cleaning, Dahyun took care of the garden so they would have food and didn’t need to go to the store as much, and so on. After The House, they became different people, in different senses. They all remembered who they were, but that version of themselves didn’t really exist anymore.

🝰🝰🝰

Bora stood distant on one of the many rocks piled up on the edge of the rich blue of the lake her gaze lingered on, never once moving since Siyeon exited the house and spotted her. She walked towards the dancer with gentle steps, not wanting to disturb Bora’s apparent tranquility, nor accidentally step on a stray pebble that would make her legs accidentally lose ground. When she reached her, she stood right beside her and tried to look for the other’s focus point, maintaining the silence that allowed only the sounds of surrounding nature to be heard. They both watched everything’s immobility and found comfort in it; the plate of green bruised blue rested in between metaphorical fences composed of proud coniferous trees, translating the timeline business of conscient beings into a locked state of present tense. Being there, feeling the soft forgiving breeze against their features, smelling the tickling mix of wood, watching the sewn needle leaves wave with the wind… it was an indescribable pause that demanded indivisible attention. Although some things had the power to make them focus their thoughts elsewhere, somewhere; on someone. Siyeon kept her eyes on a single expanding circle shaped wave in the middle of the lake, but Bora looked at her feet, not able to ignore the other’s presence.

“The conversation wasn’t entertaining you enough?” She asked before finally looking at Siyeon’s face, trying to joke her way out of an emerging uncomfortableness.

“You already know I prefer looking at anything with you over talking inside those walls.” Her eyes never left her initial focus, but her words felt as if she was staring straight into the dancer’s soul. “It’s what I have learned to do these days.” This time she did look at the shorter one and smiled. “It beats any day I spent in The House. By a landslide.”

“I, uh…” Bora’s gaze returned to the rocks they were standing on before exhaling into a smile that also invaded her eyes. “I’m glad.” And she had an idea. She remembered, to be exact, what she was thinking about the first time she brought Siyeon to stargaze on the roof; the latter apparently hadn’t experienced anything other than what she had shown her. She remembered what she was thinking about, the ideas she fought with thanks to the nervousness of that moment. That day, when they laid under the translucent duvet of a full moon, was one of the first times in a while that she felt such a feeling, or whatever it was… such a thing that pulled her into breaking her structural way of waltzing through time and space. Siyeon, even if she was lost in this new world, seemed more grounded than her, while still being able to let her mind wander higher than she could imagine. The smile she gave her just now made her want to bring it out endlessly, and the genuine wonder in the younger one’s face brought her some kind of unexplainable happiness she hadn’t felt in a while. Maybe it was the stillness of the water, or the sound of a bird that just flew above them, or the freshness they could breathe, or sadness, or the opposite. Awareness wasn’t really present at the moment, or so she thought. Maybe she was more aware than she had ever been. Upon letting her conscience free of restraint, she started taking off her shoes, earning a confused look from Siyeon.

“What?” Siyeon asked mid chuckle. 

But Bora didn’t answer. Instead, she tossed her shoes onto one of the nearby rocks and, one feet after the other, stepped into the water. Coldness invigorated her senses from the moment she submerged her feet, and it reminded her that she was there; not in the studio, nor on campus, nor anywhere else. As she stood on the rocks a few minutes ago, an overwhelming veil of distress wrapped around her, not letting her defocus from negativity, from danger, from mental saturation, from fear of what was to come... The past days engulfed bitter information that piled up until she couldn’t really handle it. She was tired. Specially of the aspects that tainted and morphed her initially unchanging chronology. Might have been something in the water, she thought, that suddenly cleared her mind. She took a deep breath through her nose, eyes closed, and opened them with an exhale before gesturing to Siyeon to follow her.

“Are you crazy?” Her eyes looked around while her arms tightened around her torso.

Another breath, but this one was shallower; “Do you trust me?” She asked, and extended one of her arms towards Siyeon.

“Yes, but…” She focused on the water and paused, then looked over Bora’s head, towards the deep parts of the lake where it was unable to identify where the soil was. She had never gotten into any type of body of water. After seconds of thinking, and after seeing Bora hadn’t retrieved her hand, the grip she had around her waist lessened. “Yes.” She took off her shoes and slightly jumped into the water, creating a splash in the process and, since she could only fall on one foot, losing balance.

“You’re calling me crazy?” Bora laughed as she grabbed Siyeon’s forearms to try to stabilize her. The latter laughed too, later resting both of her hands on the dancer’s shoulders. “Be careful.”

They stayed like that for a few seconds, not knowing if they should stay in that exact position or move deeper into the water. Bora looked up and her irises found Siyeon’s already fixated on them, which made her immediately shake her head and move her body away. Though, one of her hands stayed on Siyeon’s forearm, before sliding down and tightening the grip on the latter’s palm. Like that, they both walked deeper and forward until the water reached their thighs, not minding the wetness of their clothes. At one point, Siyeon felt something touch one of her feet and got startled, to which Bora responded with a laugh and theorized the culprit was probably a fish. The younger one followed her laugh, and Bora’s smile grew even more as she listened; she succeeded, another success for the subconscious checklist. Time masked itself with absence, and hands making water splashes marked the gift of pause; they forgot everything while focusing solely on savoring the moment. It reminded Bora of when she lost herself while dancing. That feeling of pure bliss that transformed happiness into effortless play.

It was a minutes long sequence of encapsulated delight; a vignette disappearing too soon into verbal interruptions.

“Siyeon!” Yoohyeon called from the front door, making them both look at her and separate from each other. She waved her hand to tell them to come back in and later went into the house, surely expecting them to follow her immediately. Siyeon nodded and started moving towards the rocks, but Bora caught her arm to stop her.

“It’s a lot for me too, you know…” Bora let out, looking down as if she was ashamed of what she just uttered. “I’m…” She sighed, weighing whether she should embrace vulnerability for once, or keep it all in like she had been doing. As soon as she cut herself off, though, Siyeon pulled her into a hug. “...I’m scared.” It didn’t matter anymore if she let it out or not. Hiding everything already drained too much energy out of her.

“Me too.” Siyeon held her close for some time. “Me too, but I’m not going to let anything happen to you. This stupid leg won’t stop me.”

That cracked a smile out of Bora. “Are you sure?” She asked mid laugh.

“Yes!” A sure affirmation that fell short as soon as Siyeon tried to get out of the water by hopping onto one of the rocks. She lost balance instead after feeling a mild sting when she tried to put pressure on her wounded leg. It made Bora grab her arms to balance her again, and then help her get out while still laughing.

“Sure, sure.”

Back inside the house, everyone else seemed to have been expecting them.

“I have to take you back soon, but before I do that I think we need to talk about what you told them.” Kibum pointed at Gahyeon and Yoohyeon. “About the event you remembered.”

Silence.

Siyeon shuffled in her seat and tried not to let the rising tightness in bother her too much. “What about it?”

“You said a painting on the wall triggered those memories.” Kibum continued, but all Siyeon did was nod without looking at him. He looked at her, expectant, just like everyone else. Yet, her glistening eyes signaled him to stop.

Yes, she remembered. The memory was almost visually clear, but the muddy mix of negative emotions felt heavy on each one of her senses. And the mood of the room certainly didn’t help with opening up unrestrained, calm… the mention of the event suddenly became weightier than before. Her recoiling presence didn’t go unnoticed by the others.

“Okay, don’t worry about it. If you don’t want to talk about it now, we can leave it for another day.” He nodded and stood up. “We met today. We still have a lot of visits pending, right?”

Everyone that resided there said their last words and goodbyes before disappearing into their awaiting activities. Kibum, on the other hand, led the others back to his car so they could drive back to the city.

🝰🝰🝰

“Why were you there when we visited Cocoon?” Bora’s incisive question slashed through an initial atmosphere of content, the unforgiving javelin aiming straight towards the driving man. “You know that is… was what we used to call it, right?”

“Yes, I know. I used to visit even before I got taken away. After coming back, one of the first memories I got back was that. So I visited often, when I could.” The deep worn red and grey of erosion victimized buildings appeared in a faded distance, indicating they were close to their destination. “It’s almost a cosmic joke that I ended up finding Yoohyeon out of anyone I could’ve encountered there. I mean, after seeing those white walls… man, it transported me back to that damned building. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. For the first time since we got away, I felt like they were breathing on our necks waiting for us to slip up… But that’s not happening.” He ended his monologue with a rushed emotionally charged phrase, thinking, cutting himself off before spiraling elsewhere.

The car approached the messily intersected roads of the city, slow and deemed stealthy, all while entering the visual field of a pair of eyes that looked through abstemious blind openings. From the inside of a light desisted apartment, with it’s only source of illumination coming from the vertical lines the window shades weren’t covering, someone worded the renegades’ arrival. “I see another car. They’re slowing down.” The man’s voice monotonously interjected an already ongoing conversation, stern and detached, but not disinterested.

“If it’s still not them, Mr. Lau here is going to have severe problems with me. We’ve been here almost all day, and I have more important matters to attend.” A woman strutted away from the darkest place in the room, almost looking like she had just untied herself from the center of the ghastly ink of the shadows. One of her hands gripped the handle of a long, significantly heavy, rectangular hard case, which she carefully placed on top of the nightstand. An ill side smile invaded her face as she undid all the metal latches and opened the case. “You better not be lying to me. This beauty hadn’t seen the light in years.” Her stringent grave tone didn’t vary with her words; poise masked anger still scurried through. She took out the cylindrical scope and looked through it, directly at one of the two men that accompanied her. “Oh, hello.” The small chuckle morphed into an unrestrained short laugh before she took the scope away from her eye. Upon seeing his unresponsive face expression, her initial bliss disappeared into a jaw clench. “You better not be lying to me.” Her eyes narrowed into a lazy shape, and the smile was back.

“I’m not lying. I was here when Kim Bora brought her. She told me her name was Monica, but she matches the description perfectly.”

“Let’s hope so.” The woman said as she took out the sniper rifle out of its case and started assembling the detached parts. “Open it.” She pointed at the window with the gun’s barrel as she put on the suppressor. The man followed her directions and got out of the way to let her mount the rifle on the edge. One of her eyes located the approaching vehicle and followed it, later noticing and identifying the people getting out of the car. Another smile; a hungry, dissatisfied, pleased statement. “There you are,” the intersection of the guidelines of the scope laid steadily on the unsuspecting black haired woman’s forehead, “Lee Siyeon.” Her finger slid onto the trigger and caressed it as she watched Siyeon moving, talking, wounded, smiling... breathing. “Oh, look at your friends. Should I just…?” She lowered the aim, so the scope now showed the woman’s chest. Her finger’s hook strengthened around the trigger.

“Ma’am, she’s right there, unmoving… why are you hesitating?” The other man, the one previously in charge of vigilance, spoke, but quickly retracted after seeing the further narrowing of the woman’s eyes.

“Don’t tell me what to do, or I will for sure not hesitate to make your jugular cry its last farewell against the blade of my knife.” Her sentence ended in a downsliding graveness. “You’re done.” She prepared her shot, now back at pointing at her head. “No second chances this time.” 

And a muffled expulsion of air announced she pulled the trigger.

“What do you mean no second chances?” Henry asked after putting his hand on the shoulder she rested the gun on, perhaps with distorted proprioception, feeling the push of the buttstock.

Seconds transcurred in silence, with her gaze fixated through the scope, frozen. When she finally looked away, a sigh marked a limit. “You are the most useless person I have ever worked with.” With an emphasis on ‘ever’, she stood up, grabbed the gun with both hands and swung the buttstock against his gut. After the hit, she placed the firearm on top of the case and rushed to take out her handgun, as Henry coughed and clutched his torso. “Get me Lee Siyeon.” She cocked the gun and headed towards the door, anger increasing with the image of her bullet striking the car instead.

“What about Kim Yoohyeon, and the others?” The third man asked while getting his weapons ready.

“Did I stutter?” Impatience expressed itself with a wide, ridiculing smile. “Get me Lee Siyeon!” Her exclamation spurt choleric sentiment through her teeth, and with it everyone in that apartment ran out the door in search of their target.

This took quite some time... hello again. I hope you guys are all safe and healthy. These times haven't been amazing, but here we are. Tell me what you think about the story, or the characters, or that flying bird in the lake. I love seeing people engaged in the story (and frustrated because of a character's actions lmao). Anyway, Lee Siyeon who even is she