Tiffany avoided Seohyun like the bubonic plague. She knew it wasn’t the healthy or even the right way to deal with their situation, but she couldn’t bring herself to have Seohyun rehash what everyone seemed to be wanting to tell her:

That it wasn’t her fault.

She knew they thought it.

All of them.

Jessica.

Taeyeon.

Yuri.

Yoona.

Sooyoung.

Hyoyeon.

Sunny.

Seohyun.

Nayeong.

Jaesung.

Ahjussi.

Ahjumma.

Teddy.

Every single one of them.

Every.

Single.

One.

The world would tell her the same. That she couldn’t have done anything. That it wasn’t her fault. That she wasn’t to blame.

And they could be right.

For all she cares, they could be goddamn spot on, right down to the tee.

In fact, she knew they were!

But it didn’t erase how she felt about it. This wasn’t something she could control. She couldn’t stop herself from feeling guilty. Heck! She even knew the term for it. The term those shrinks would slap callously on her as a label the moment she walked through their door and lay on their god-awful Freudian couch.

Survivor’s guilt.

It was like a slap to the face to be so easily dissected and diagnosed. To be treated almost as a specimen. Something. Not someone. She hated shrinks and their psychobabble, their self-important shrink-speak. As if she were just a case study for their next journal publication.

To hell with them!

She was not something they can read like a book. She was human and wanted to be treated as such. Granted she was a very messed up human, but she didn’t need to be psychoanalyzed. Not when she knew half the things they were going to say to her, when she knew exactly what they were going to label her as, when she knew so very well that they would merely treat her past as something to ‘get over’ from.

She refused to ‘get over’ her family, even if it meant she would stay messed up for life.

Tiffany was simply not ready to let go.

‘Do not let the world tell you you shouldn’t feel guilty. Feelings are not based on logic. You feel what you feel. If you feel guilty, then you are guilty.’

Who knew a stranger with his own dark past could speak so well to her? Tiffany knew there was another part to the man’s words, but she allowed herself to conveniently forget it. At this point, she was scrounging for validation of how she felt and obstinately refusing to see anything else.

So she let her guilt cling on and parasitize itself onto her life with the tenacity of bindweed, allowed the guilt to bloom and grow, choking and strangling everything in sight.

She let herself wade deeper and deeper into the mire, slowly and deliberately suffocating herself to the point where no one else could help her and pull her out; till she simply disappeared, with no one the wiser.

Tiffany was letting herself die.

Slowly, but oh so surely.

Just like Dom.

And she was already marked for it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Tiffany only got worse from that night on.

The girls would barely even see her around the dorm. The moment practice ended, the thug would take off to god-knows-where and either not come home till well past midnight or sometimes not even at all.

Jessica struggled with herself a lot during this time. She wanted to be there to support Tiffany and be the person the thug could come to for help and lean on. At the same time she remembered her promise to her girlfriend. She promised to be patient. To wait. To continue loving Tiffany despite her seemingly falling apart at the very seams.

Jessica was in no danger of falling out of love with Tiffany, even if the girl was a mess. Tiffany was her mess and Jessica wouldn’t even entertain the thought of giving up on her. But Jessica didn’t know what the blessed middle ground was in this case. She felt she was a failure for Tiffany if she didn’t know when to step in and tell her ‘enough was enough’ to intervene and tell her she needed to get help.

Sometimes people just need a little tough love and a harsh push in the right direction, even if it was against their will. Sometimes they were too caught up in their own web, strangled and unable to see that they were right at the cliff, blind to the fact that they were in desperate need for someone to pull them out.

It didn’t help matters at all that Tiffany was so hardheaded and completely volatile when it came to seeking help. Jessica last conversation about talking to a psychologist was a good example of that. The brunette was caught between her promise and simple good rationality, and she was afraid that if she didn’t make a decision soon, it would be too late and Tiffany would slip away from her fingers like sand.

These days, Tiffany didn’t even seek her out to drown her own grief and sorrow in anymore. Instead, the younger girl came home in increasingly bad shape, to the point where their make-up unnies were complaining of having to use too much concealer to cover up all the bruises all over Tiffany’s body.

Of course, none of this was lost on Mrs. Kang. The woman kept a hawk-eye on her ‘favorite’ trainee, and Tiffany’s deteriorating state was ammo for her next push to shoulder Tiffany out of SM.

Mr. Lee also knew he had to do something about Tiffany. The man knew the girl was getting into unsavory business and he tried many times to visit the dorm to have a talk with the troubled girl. But just like everyone else, Tiffany avoided him at all costs.

None of them were ever given the chance to even see the girl most of the time.

No one could do anything.

And Tiffany was slipping.

Soon, she would fall out of reach.

And the worst part was…Tiffany knew.

And she was letting it happen.

She wanted it to happen.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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