Nothing Worth Fighting For

It was comfortable, being with Tao. When she was with him, Jiyoon felt safe, protected. It was like the rest of the world didn’t matter.

That feeling helped when she went back to school. Soojung was on one side and Tao was on the other. Both had one of her hands in their grasp as they walked through the gates, attracting the attention of many students in the courtyard.

There were whispers about the unlikely trio.

Soojung was the feisty one with enough beauty and brains to become one of the popular kids, but she never left Jiyoon’s side. It confused a lot of people, why such a pretty girl would associate with a nobody who got bullied all the time.

But Tao’s presence added fuel to the fire. Ever since he’d been held back, ever since he’d started skipping class, there’d been rumors starting about him. They talked about him like he was some sort of moron or a criminal. Tao never paid these rumors any mind, but now, he was listening.

Some of them were actually quite hurtful to hear.

Some of them were malicious rumors, made to completely decimate the self-esteem that Tao had worked so hard to build up. Some of them were just plain stupid, made by students who didn’t know any better.

He learned to ignore them after a few weeks.

He quickly realized how pointless the rumors were, how stupid they actually were.

There were more important things he had to focus on.

Like Jiyoon.

Despite the fact that she’d returned to school, there were many points in time that Tao thought she wasn’t ready yet. There were so many incidents where Tao thought Jiyoon was going to lose it, snap, and try to end her life once more. But she held her head high with clenched fists and moved on with her life.

Tao rarely left her side.

He sat with Jiyoon in all of the classes they had together. He found that they had most of their classes with each other, as they both ended up in the drama program, while Soojung was in the dance program with Sehun, Kai, and Hanbyul. But Tao and Jiyoon were always together.

Because of that, he began to notice certain ticks that told him clearly how she was feeling at any point in time.

When she was worried or stressed out, her hands would go to her sleeves, where the healing cuts left by the shards of glass she’d cut herself with lay on her pale skin. She rubbed them like she was trying to erase them from her skin.

When she was sad, she would avoid all eye contact with everyone and her voice would become ten times quieter than it already was. It was so quiet that he barely managed to catch a single word she said.

When she was angry, she would clench and unclench her fists. She would repeat that action over and over, her nails digging into her palm. Once, she was so angry at hearing a rumor about Tao that she drew blood from her nails scraping at her hand.

But when she was happy, which wasn’t very often, she would smile radiantly from the bottom of her heart. She would laugh and smile, real laughs and real smiles.

They weren’t those fake abominations she wore whenever she was walking around school or talking to someone she didn’t quite feel comfortable around. The fakes never really reached her eyes.

Jiyoon’s real smiles took Tao’s breath away.

Maybe it was because they weren’t very common on her pretty face, or maybe it was because he thought her smile was the best reward for his efforts.

Either way, he liked knowing that he was one of the only people that could make her smile like that.

Weeks passed in school.

The boys, led by the familiar face of Xero, just wouldn’t stop picking on Jiyoon. It was pissing Tao off to an extreme level.

He wondered if those idiots had anything better to do than torture a girl who was obviously fragile, obviously broken. He wondered just what it was that they got out of hurting her, making her cry. He wondered how they felt when they were pushing her around both verbally and physically.

He wondered how the other students watching could just stand there and laugh.

It made him sick.

Tao wanted to throw up from the memories of Jiyoon’s helplessness.

Even though he was there to help her, he and Soojung were about the extent of Jiyoon’s defense squadron. Sometimes, if they could, Jongin, Sehun, and Hanbyul would jump in to defend her.

Given the trio’s popular position as the leaders of the dance team and Tao’s reputation for being good friends with them as well as the rumors of him being in a gang, most people backed off easily.

But not Xero.

He constantly slammed Jiyoon’s locker shut in her face, harassed her in nearly every possible way, and sometimes, even attempted to touch her in ways that she didn’t want to be touched. He was horrid, awful, and people just didn’t seem to notice or care about how terrible that the senior really was.

Tao wanted nothing more than to beat Xero’s face in, but he knew that it would get hi