Watch me burn series
Chapter One
Na Jaemin as Jake.
Six years is enough time to make a stranger family.
That was what they told her, anyway — her father, when he introduced the woman standing beside him in the hallway with her hand resting proprietarily on his arm, fingers pale against the dark wool of his suit; the woman herself, later, smiling with all her teeth when she told YN to call her Mother now, wasn't that nice, wasn't she lucky to have someone to take care of her. YN was ten and newly motherless and old enough to know a performance when she saw one, even if she didn't yet have the words for it. She remembered the exact weight of that woman's hand landing on her shoulder that first day — not gentle, not cruel either, just proprietary, like she was testing the give of new furniture.
She learned the words over time. She learned them the way you learn a language out of necessity — fast, silent, alone.
She learned that if she cried at dinner, she'd be sent to bed without it. She learned that if she asked why her father never looked at her the way he looked at the boy the woman had brought with her — a boy two years older, quiet-eyed, who'd lost something too even if nobody in that house seemed to care what — her father would simply leave the room, and the silence he left behind would somehow become her punishment to sit in, heavier with every second nobody filled it. She learned that the house had rules that were never written down and always enforced, and that the only person who ever seemed to notice when she went two days without a warm meal was the boy she'd decided, early and permanently, to hate.
Jeno never did anything to deserve it. That was the unfair part, and she knew it even then. He'd leave food outside her door like she wouldn't notice, like it wasn't obvious — a rice ball wrapped carelessly in tissue, still warm enough that she knew he'd taken it straight from the kitchen and walked fast. She never thanked him for it. She'd eat it sitting on the floor with her back against the door so nobody in the hallway could see, and some nights her chest would ache in a way she didn't have a name for yet, something caught between gratitude and fury, and she'd hate him a little more for making her feel both at once.
There was a day — she must have been twelve, thirteen — when they collided in the hallway outside the kitchen, her shoulder catching his hard enough that she stumbled, and he caught her elbow before she hit the wall, and for one unbearable second they were standing close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, could hear her own pulse jump once, sharp, before she yanked her arm free and told him to watch where he was going. He hadn't said anything. He'd just watched her walk away, and she'd felt his eyes on her back the whole length of the hallway, and hated that she'd noticed.
Every time she let that hatred show — a slammed door, a refusal to come down, a sentence she wasn't supposed to say out loud about the woman who'd been standing at the bottom of a staircase fourteen years ago — the punishment came fast; and it always, always had her father's signature on it somewhere, even when he wasn't the one who said the words.
She stopped asking why. She started planning instead. It just took her a long time to understand that's what she'd been doing.
—
Fourteen years is enough time to build someone new.
The woman getting out of the car in front of her father's company on a Tuesday morning in early summer was not the ten-year-old who used to count stairs, and she was not, if you looked closely — and almost no one did — the sixteen-year-old who'd once begged an aunt with tears in her eyes to take her anywhere else, please, anywhere, even if it meant leaving the only person in that house who'd ever been kind to her.
She was twenty-four. Her hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders instead of the flat, ignored ponytail she used to yank it into as a teenager. Her lashes were long and deliberate, her makeup the kind that looked like none at all, the kind you only learn after years of practicing in front of mirrors in countries where nobody knew your name yet. She'd learned to walk like she belonged in rooms. She'd learned, more usefully, to walk like she'd never once belonged in this one. Her hand didn't shake when she pushed through the revolving glass doors. She'd practiced that too, in a way — the stillness of her own hands had become a kind of armor over eight years, something she'd built the same way she'd built the rest of herself, one deliberate choice at a time.
The employee badge in her bag said a name that wasn't hers. The internship offer had gone through three different filters and none of them had blinked. Her father's company was large enough now that a new intern in the strategy division didn't raise a single eyebrow — not even his own, when she passed him once in the lobby and he glanced at her the way you glance at anyone attractive and unfamiliar, and then looked away. Her heart had been hammering so hard in that moment she'd been half-certain he'd hear it. He didn't. He just kept walking, already reaching for his phone, already forgetting her face.
He didn't know his own daughter's face anymore. She'd expected that to hurt more than it did. Instead it just settled into her chest like something cold and useful, a confirmation of exactly how much room she had to work with.
Jeno was the one who almost undid her, and it happened in the first week.
She'd turned a corner near the executive floor's coffee station, badge swinging against her hip, mind already three steps ahead on the excuse she'd give for being on that floor at all — and there he was. Twenty-six now, sharper around the jaw, dressed like a man who'd spent six years being groomed for a chair he'd never asked to sit in. Their shoulders nearly collided in the narrow space between the counter and the wall, and she felt the near-miss of it low in her stomach, an old, unwelcome flicker of the same jolt she'd felt as a thirteen-year-old catching her elbow on him in a hallway. He stepped back to let her pass, the way anyone would for a stranger. And then his eyes caught on her face and stopped.
Lee Jeno as Cole
"...YN?"
She let the silence sit exactly as long as it needed to, counting it the way she used to count stairs — one, two, three — feeling her own heart pick up speed despite every hour she'd spent training herself not to react. Then she blinked at him, polite and faintly puzzled, the way you'd blink at a stranger who'd mistaken you for someone else on the street.
"I'm sorry?"
He stared at her for a beat too long. Close enough now that she could see the small furrow between his brows, the way his eyes moved over her face like he was trying to place a word on the tip of his tongue. She watched him search — for a scar, a mannerism, the particular way she used to bite the inside of her cheek when she was trying not to cry — and watched him not find it, because she'd spent eight years making sure nobody would. Her pulse was loud in her own ears, a small, private betrayal that no one else in that hallway could hear. She kept her face perfectly, carefully still.
"...Sorry," he said finally, stepping back, something unreadable crossing his expression before he shut it down. "You look like someone I used to know."
Used to. Not do. Somewhere in that tense was a door she filed away to open later.
"Happens a lot, apparently," she said lightly, and walked past him toward the elevators, close enough that her shoulder brushed his sleeve, the barest contact, gone in a second — and she felt it anyway, a small electric awareness she hated herself for, and did not let herself breathe out until the elevator doors had closed and the number was climbing and she was alone with her own reflection in the brushed steel, watching her own chest rise and fall too fast for someone who'd just had an ordinary, forgettable conversation.
Fourteen years since the staircase. Eight years since she'd left this city swearing she'd only come back when she was ready to burn it down.
She was ready. She told herself she was ready.
She did not yet know that the boy who used to leave food outside her door was going to be the hardest part of the plan to survive.
Watch me burn is on Wattpad as well!
Username is pixiedustofmisfit <3
that's me.
