beep beep.

jongsuk himself wasn’t an experienced actor. all his acting was limited to photographers telling him to look a certain way or him telling models to do so. 

“unhappiness or sadness, depending what expression you want to express,” he explains before attempting to show her a demonstration of the difference. going from happy to unhappy and then to sad was perhaps not the easiest transition but he made sure to look a tad extra more defeated for the last one.

she watches what the other does and then nods to it. every day, it feels like she learns something new. if she’ll remember it later or not is a whole another deal. yumika puts a pout on like she had done before. “unhappiness.” then she does it again, but just a tad more dramatic. to anything watching, it’s probably really funny. “sad... neck.”

the girl mispronounces it and then smiles again. looking down at her notes—which are, mostly, drawings—she tries to find any other emotions. yumika gasps and looks at jongsuk beside her. “wow! surprise!” she adds in english.

“Yes, bad,” her tone was firm. If given a choice, she would not be having this conversation. Her eyes fixated at Yumika trying to figure things out. It took courage for this poor girl to audition for a foreign company and it must not be easy for her during daily practices either since comments are communicated in Korean. For a moment, guilt began pouring in. Perhaps she should try to lessen her use of words.

“Remember the mistakes you made during rehearsals? You made the same mistakes again and missed the tempo of the song,” she confessed, wondering if the other understands her. “Wrong tempo,” she translates again in case the sentence was too long for her. “This is not the first time, you should be careful.”

the more the other talks the more the words make sense, and the more it hurts. she had been doing the same mistakes this entire time? they had a long time to practice—all together and alone as well. of course that the coaches pointed out when she did something wrong but, by the time they were out performing, yumika really did think she had everything learned correctly.

“tempo?” her lines weren’t much. only a few, really. it’s easy for her to get carried away with dancing and having fun to maybe end up not delivering her lines at the correct time. how could she do that any better than how she has already been doing?

he listened intently to what she said and tipped his head forward, nodding quickly. he did believe they could do it. the first choice, bonnie and clyde, was a good song, they just had to made it a reflection of both of them. he needed to figure out how to say that clearly. puffing out his cheeks, he leaned forward to press his palms down against the table in front of them, letting his palms meet the cool surface. 

it doesn’t take long for him to find the words he was searching for, his voice soft now as he tried his best to explain, “i think so. we just need to make it fit us.” sammy offered instead, the corner of his mouth quirking upward now, “i’m sure they’d enjoy out performance if we made it fit us. we’re both young. we can make it fun and youthful. it doesn’t need to be too sexy. we can make it sweet too. we have all the time in the world to make it the right cover for us, if you want to, of course. we just need to do our best. and help each other.”

he looks like he’s thinking a lot, so yumika waits for a bad reaction to come through. he presses her eyebrows together and watches him as he moves. she’s used to taking some time to find the right words but most other people already know them. when he gives her an affirmative, though, the girl returns to her smiley expression. of course, sammy was a foreigner too—and he wouldn’t have shown her those songs if he didn’t believe they could do them, either.

“nice,” she comments in slang english. she doesn’t actually speak that language properly either, but common words everybody knows she does too. sammy speaks a lot, and yumika tries to follow while nodding her head. the word ‘sexy’ is enough to bring a bit of color to her cheeks, and for her nodding to turn into her shaking her head. that’s something she doesn’t think she’d fit very well. “sweet... is good!”

        “stay here and—”  grip tightening around the surviving mcflurry, he pushes himself up onto his feet and shoves the ice cream into her hands.  “—i’ll clean it up.  just stay here ‘til i come back, ‘kay?  and if anyone catches you … tell them sao did it, because he tripped over his shoelaces.”  his nose wrinkles at the lie, but it sounds better than tripped over air.  and with a pat to her shoulder, he ushers toward the restrooms to grab a few damp towels.

        it takes him five minutes to gather all the ice cream into a nasty little wet ball, and instead of immediately throwing it away and washing his hands as any normal person would, he turns to her.  “how do you like it?”  he asks, his eyes bright, as if he’s not holding regret in both of his hands.  “the mcflurry.”

the situation is all rushed, and she takes what he gives her. the original plan had been for them both to enjoy some type of ice cream together (she hadn't quite understood all the details), but now, one found it's way to stand upside down on the floor, and the other one she holds in her hands while sao runs off somewhere else. "shoebraces...?"

yumika understands enough and sits in place waiting for her friend to return. at some point, she tries to help the fallen ice cream, but trying to move the simple bowl it comes on proves to be an easy new tragedy to come. she stops before anything worse can happen, and rests her back against the wall. however, while the boy doesn't return, she doesn't dare touch the ice cream he's given her. it'd be impolite to do so. especially after everything sao went through to deliver it to her.

𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐀𝐘:

She half-listened to the coach’s spiel as they described angles and eye contact, eventually moving on to filming product commercials and other forms of advertising. She envisioned herself on billboards holding up a random soda with a fake smile. The whole thing just seemed so…trivial. But a necessary evil in the idol profession, she supposed. And if she got a handle on her boredom long enough she’d realize how important this information really was.  It wasn’t enough to just sell out concert tickets, albums, or brands. You had to become the brand. Jane finally gives a slight shrug, “Kind of? I’ve never done it like this before.”

She turns to Yumika, chin resting on her knuckles once again. “Did you ever model back in Japan?”

she keeps looking at jane while the other thought about her question, and then looks forward to where jane was staring. it’s the dilemma she’s always hit with. she probably should be paying attention to what the coaches have to say, but it’s too fast and hard to understand. so the girl just keeps staring and trying to understand through body language.

of course, when it comes to yumika, she had never done anything of the sorts before. she hadn’t even danced or sang before coming to legacy. every small piece of this is actually considered huge in her eyes. she likes to think it must mean she always had this secret talent inside of her, but she knows she’s still nowhere near the best. and modeling, now? only some superior force could help her.

         seriously.  

        if, hypothetically, an intruder were to invade the company grounds, he would, again hypothetically, throw himself in front of her.  and save her life.  and then he’ll be crowned as that super cool older brother side character type.  wah, what a title!

        but unfortunately, he’s not in a k-drama, so none of that happens.

        what does happen is a lot worse.

        he’s strolling back with two ovalmatine mcflurries in hand, ready to show yumika what heaven tastes like.  everything is fine until he spots her down the hallway and gets a little too excited that he trips over air and lands with a loud oof!  the right mcflurry flies out of his hands and splatters against the floor, painting it with regret.  the left one is thankfully spared, but his heart is not.  “it’s dead,”  he wheezes, looking up at yumika with such pitiful eyes that it looks like he might actually cry.  “i’m so sorry.”

she’s unsure if this sits well within the rules or not, but when sao offers her something so willingly it makes her feel like everything will be already. after all, her senior should know what he’s doing, right?

on her side of the story, there isn’t much she can do. admittedly, she forgets about it sometime later and starts doing something else within her schedule. it’s only when she sees him again that the thought returns to her head, but sao ends up on the floor.

In her eyes, Yumika is the black hole in the team. The girl has talent but not as good enough. As the saying goes, ‘patience is virtue.’ But there is not a single patient bone in her body, not at a time like this when all she can think of is to bring her team up to the top. She had been telling herself that it is fine, and that Yumika is still new so there are bound to be mistakes. However at the first two performances, she has made a decision. Yumika is the black hole of the team and needs to know where her mistake lies.

She knows that her harsh words can hurt, people told her that. Jaehwa has tried to soften her words a little but she firmly believes that beating around the bush wastes time. It can make people lift their expectations and then cause them to fall hard. Hence the blunt words, fast and straight forward. 

“I’m kind of disappointed, in the entire performance earlier.” The girl confessed, wondering if Yumika understands her. “The performance is bad, no good.” She tried again, this time in English, in case the other does not get her point. :”We should probably practice the part where most of your mistakes are.”

her expression turns into a frown. the conversation goes somewhere else from where it had started, and it takes some effort to understand exactly where it’s going. she usually tries to reconstruct the sentences people tell her in her head after they’re said. it goes slower and patiently as she translates each word by itself, then tries making sense of what they say. yumika doesn’t actually speak english, but it’s easier to understand than korean these days.

“bad?” she repeats. in her eyes, these had just been the most exciting performances of her short life. the next ones would probably be even more. but now jaehwa tells her it isn’t like that. yumika looks forward and stares at the back of the seat in front of them. her brows are still furrowed while she tries to make sense of things.

One thing that Jaehwa cannot understand is why she is being placed in the same group as a new trainee with only a month of experience. Not that she looks down on newbies but she can get rather competitive whenever she gets placed in a group. This girl just wants to stand out. So when she realized that Yumika will be in her group, she could not help but worry about how the entire performance will be like.  

The day of the performance arrives and Jaehwa is not looking forward to it. So far, Yumika has been making mistakes in her lyrics. Naturally, nobody could blame her pronunciation since Korean is not her best language. But the rhythm and timing went off sometimes and Jaehwa had to patiently remind her of the tempo. 

As the team starts performing at the first location, she notices the same mistake Yumika made and it was from the same line too. She managed to hide her irritation throughout her presence there but when they are back in the vehicle to move on to their next location, she decided to raise her concern. She plopped down to the seat beside the girl. “Hey Yumika, how do you find your performance with us?”

this all feels too exciting for yumika. she had joined the ranks of legacy only a month ago, but they had already trusted her with an original song—which she gets to perform live! she’s glad it’s a group performance, or else she’d be way too nervous to function. it’s still just as exhilarating of an experience as it’d ever be. this is only the start of much more to come, she’s sure of it.

the time in between performances isn’t a time to relax, in her books. her legs bounce up and down and move all around in adrenaline leftovers. yumika can’t help but tap her fingers against her knees, too, trying to spend all of the energy that’s contained in her body. her attention shifts from the view of the outside and the other girls with her, but the gaze never stops on one thing for too long.