The sky cracking into a fierce amber somehow seems like the best time to set yourself to anything.

Sooyoung rocks her camera on her hip, first letting her fingers fumble around the thin strap digging into her neck and then resumes pacing around her apartment. She both cranes her neck elegantly like a swan and bobs it off-beat like a pigeon, merely drunk from that hazy up-at-dawn feeling. But all too sober from that teenage, romantically deprived feeling. Her eyes are shielded, foggy and dark, but the window blinds beg to be rolled up, beg to capture the area in tangerine light. The mixture of the two different rates of exposure is wonderfully artistic, though.

Sooyoung takes a brisk snap of her window blinds.

“Sooyoung?” Something cawed from the back of her neck, but it sounded neither like a swan nor a pigeon, but a lot like a drowsy Seulgi. Her roommate’s presence well-explained the amount of amber flooding over the walls. “Why the hell are you still up? You have to be at work in like -“ This felt little like a roommate conversation but unfortunately much like a scolding from her mother, and sweat drew into Sooyoung’s palms, and guilt rose heavy around her jaw. She checked to made sure that uncomfortable feeling wasn’t due to the camera strap digging further into her skin – it wasn’t. Furthermore, Seulgi ended her sentence with a detail she didn’t want to remember. “- an hour.”

“I was just taking pictures.” Sooyoung mumbled, as if Seulgi was perched over her feet beneath her and not standing behind her, where she refused to look. There was a heavy sigh. Seulgi’s breath smelt like murky, half-sour toothpaste.

“You’re literally going to be a corpse tomorrow.” And Seulgi probably meant today but Sooyoung didn’t want to correct her; she knew that when it was still partially dark and before your assured alarm, it still counts as a day in advance. Obviously. That’s how the mind tells it’s marooned, dragging body that there’s still enough of a sleeping opportunity within one hour, right?

Drunk from fatigue and romantically sober Sooyoung is speaking spotty nonsense, but honestly, she couldn’t care less. “I don’t know why I haven’t quit that ing office job and made this freelance photography thing what I do full-time, you know.”

Seulgi felt exhausted and sour. Too, like she was disastrously robbed of cradling her Pikachu plushie at this very moment. But her voice naturally sustained calmness, not calamity. “Freelance photography things don’t pay the bills.” It was harsh, but clear and softening, in a way only Seulgi’s voice could let on.

Sooyoung didn’t really want to reply, didn’t really want to do anything. There weren’t enough remarkable things to photograph in their modest living space, either. She comprehended it best to stock up on energy drinks, and then visit all of the coffee shops she could pass by at noon - first showering off the murky haze. Seulgi didn’t see any intelligence in her actions, but with a reluctant sigh there wasn’t much to be said. She faded back through the door frame, enveloped by darkness and a tid bit more sleep.

------

 

Sooyoung was on period three out of nine, already feeling, just as Seulgi had said, like a corpse. She could sense all too well that Hayoung was flickering a worried look up at her from across the filing unit, in the manner Hayoung always mustered – just as much of a delirious junior as her, but professional, mature-looking, sustained. Sooyoung didn’t especially like these pitiful glances, but she’d been getting a lot of those that morning and well, it could’ve been worse. She didn’t mind Hayoung. Hayoung was pretty cute. Hayoung would look stunning in an elegant fairytale photoshoot, through Sooyoung’s sepia lens.

“Um,” the girl’s honeysuckle voice broke the room’s silence, while she paused with a large filing pad in hand. Sooyoung’s alert, caffeinated eyes snapped quickly, sharply into hers. “I don’t want this to come off rude, or anything, you know. But, you know.” She’d weaved herself into a hole, and she knew it. “You kind of. Look a bit like death, today.”

Now, Sooyoung wasn’t quite as tall as her, and aside from her sometimes blank look she was in no means scary, but Hayoung had no idea what kind of things she’d ingested to bear consciousness and was afraid she’d attack her in a mad rage, filing paper tossed high into the air and cabinets ambushed. But Sooyoung just chuckled, her voice surprisingly colourful. Nothing about having an office junior job could usually be related to the word “colourful”.

“Tell me about it,” the girl with light auburn hair drawled, voice jittery but at least humoured, “I haven’t even slept yet.”

“What were you even doing?” The other girl tilted her head, black bangs falling languidly over her eyes. But she needed her eyes to constantly check the door, to see if the supervisor would walk into the sight of both of them totally ignoring their filing work. “Out partying?” she muttered.

“Nah,” Sooyoung shrugged, resting her head over the top of the metal cabinet and contemplating, almost as an automatic response, to shut her eyes, but she guessed one small move and she’d be fast asleep. And then fired. “I may make some pretty time management decisions, but I know better than to make myself into a drunken mess on a weekday.”

Sooyoung was being a bit ambiguous and her cheeks were a slight pastel pink, so Hayoung assumed better to not ask what she was actually doing. But she did have one question;

“If you make some pretty time management decisions, why are you doing a job that mostly involves booking and scheduling meetings and stuff?”

Sooyoung’s face fell and her eyes flickered in slow understanding of the sentence, but within a moment she laughed. A colourful laugh, verging on obnoxious but so joyful you couldn’t even say that. “I ask myself that all the time too.”

There was a click of large loafers newly entering the room, so the two girls mechanically ducked their heads, looking after filing at twice-speed.

Their supervisor stood before them with silky, slicked back platinum hair, dark at the roots. A hum of old cologne surrounded him. His suit looked shiny, overly-ironed. With his voice came a low rustle, and at once Sooyoung and Hayoung looked up again to listen.

“I’d greatly appreciate if you didn’t both cuss when guests could be looking around the complex at any time, alright?” And they nodded, low on the company’s food chain and therefore prey at the willing clutches of any predator’s orders.

Sooyoung wasn’t in the most awake state of mind to say the least, and had to stifle another snicker. “Cuss”. What a weird word. It titled every expletive with some sort of hiss, “cuss”, but Sooyoung didn’t swear with hisses. She swore with brute, gruff strength. That’s the whole point of swear words.

“Sooyoung,” he spoke, vigorously. But luckily he didn’t notice her weak composure and posture, not enough to tell her off. He was just giving instructions. “Hayoung can probably take care of the filing now. There’s a new office junior at the door, could you greet her? Maybe show her the ropes a little bit.”

Sooyoung felt a bit like a weary puppy separated from its master, especially having to make a first impression looking like literal demise. She tossed the remaining wad of scripts in a direction she can’t even remember, escaping the room with Hayoung’s groan of having to pick the papers up following suit.

Sooyoung makes sure to avoid walking past any reflective objects in case her appearance lingers beside her on the way to her remote little office division, and branches her youthful fingers over the middle desk draw. She kept all of her energy drinks and coffee cups in there. Though, the area inside had gotten to the point where it was too full to open without jamming on the frame, but a few yanks and it was open, coffee-laced steam quick to mingle with her nose. Perhaps if she brought the new girl a nice brew, she’d pay less attention to her dishevelled complexion? Seemed like alright logic.

Well, . If it wasn’t for Sooyoung being so on-edge, she would have definitely fallen to the peril of dropping her coffee. For a moment, she was grateful for her sleeplessness.
The beautiful new office junior introduces herself as Son Wendy. The name rolls off her tongue in a way that feels both foreign and simplistic to pronounce. Wendy has an endearing accent with how she puts more emphasis on the “Wen-”; Sooyoung likes it the other way around. The “-dy” can be made sharp, chirpy, feelings so very fitting to whatever smitten first impression she just got from this new person. She’s overthinking this. She forgets that she’s been burbling “Wendy” under her breath for quite some time.

“Rough night, huh?” Wendy takes from the subconscious murmuring, “I definitely understand that. Nine hours is far too many precious life moments wasted sleeping to be the healthy minimum.” Sooyoung indulges in the fact that Wendy steers far away from making an embarrassing person feel embarrassed, in a way with so much clarity and interest, and starts laughing – too much, she’s tired. Also everything Wendy says seems hilarious. But why is she laughing so hard? Why isn’t she stopping? She needs sleep. She probably needs to get away from Wendy already, too, because she’s a stronger hyperactive element to her than any caffeine she’s swallowed into her system today.

“So, that greasy man told me he’d get you to show me around.” Wendy straightened out her posture a tad. It then became apparent to Sooyoung just how tiny this alert, annoyingly pretty person was, and she smiled further noticing how much Wendy had to angle her jaw upwards to talk to her officially. Officially, bar “that greasy man”. Sooyoung definitely liked her.

“Well,” Sooyoung cleared , her voice still sullen and groggy. “It’s probably because the only spare desk in the junior sector is the one facing mine, so you’ll be sitting opposite me.” Her breath caught suddenly when she caught Wendy’s eye, saw her playful smirk and just how in depth her stare was. Sooyoung felt weird so she cocked her cheek, repetitively blinking. “So, yeah, uh. Sorry about that.”

It was just that Wendy seemed like the kind of girl who could show up to meetings every day in unwashed, oversized sweats and literally no one would mind because she still appeared to be stunning, still appeared to be the symbol of beauty and purity and anything that weakened the knees.

-----

When Park Sooyoung arrives home, there’s an amber post-it note on the kitchen countertop that reminds her Seulgi’s on a business trip for a couple of days. She can hardly remember their last encounter that morning, it’s doused in fatigue and blurriness, but it’s frosty and therefore somehow solid in her mind. There’s a burning in her ears, and she feels a bit guilty by how it wasn’t the most comfortable memory to leave Seulgi with. So now she’s set on sleeping like a normal human.

Collapsing into bed, the duvet swoops her under like a wave. The sheets are cold, uninhabited, but they’re still sheets that missed her soft little body.
Her heart is the only thing that doesn’t want to let her sleep, which , but her heart spells out nice things. It paints images of her with her beloved camera, Wendy on display, Wendy smiling into the lens and Wendy smiling at her. And towards the image of Wendy, Sooyoung’s heart is chanting -
Take this… and this… and this… and this…
and this… and this…

-----

Wendy didn’t actually take the extra coffee Sooyoung brought out for her yesterday, because it’s settled on a random office countertop, grossly moderate in temperature. She takes off her leaf green winter coat, letting it hang over the head of her swivel chair, absorbing the sight of her office division with eyes that have slept and eyes that are clear.

“I’m not much of a coffee fan.” She hears a voice, husky but girly. Wendy’s been carefully administering Sooyoung’s confused face while looking at the cold coffee cup. She’s sitting very comfortably on her adjacent desk, sipping on a glass full of… something. “You look nice.”

“Oh,” it’s a compliment that’s sudden and alien and Sooyoung doesn’t really know what to say, so she bows a fraction. “Thanks.” She decides to genuinely look at herself in the reflection of a out window, reads her wide, overpowering smile and thinks she looks better than yesterday. Wendy thinks she looks nice. She looks nice.

Sooyoung emails Wendy her period timetable, introduces her to Hayoung who now lives in the filing unit, and guides her through the raw basics of updating contact lists, scheduling meeting rooms, booking travel requirements, and managing the post. Wendy proves to be a natural at screening incoming calls. If Sooyoung was an office customer, she supposes she’d just keep calling, hoping to hear Wendy’s smooth and ever-passionate voice pick up over, and over and over. But she wonders then how she became such a besotted teenager.

She moves Wendy onto photocopying and gets excited by the use of the machine, and wonders then how she became such an excitable child. Maybe it’s becoming gradually more and more apparent that Sooyoung struggles with professional first impressions.

A/N: I've missed writing a lot. I'll try to post the second part soon enough :) I feel like the phrasing is sloppy and colloquial, but my mind is tired and rusty, so I apologise lol. I more wanted to post this as a scenario idea than something I thought was good. ;;<3