#rnaim

enter: yang taeri, a pep in her step and a caramel frappuccino clutched within a hand, swiveling her way into tutoring. despite the way blonde tendrils bounce against her oversized cardigan, the sprightly disposition she always carried on her person, she actually felt more ambivalent about having to take tutoring classes for korean. as if her mother and step-father didn't teach her well enough. as if her actual father, one that remained absent during all of her formative years, mysteriously knew better. as if her american accent was some sort of an embarrassment, despite the man being a some foreign american who assimilated due to his wealth and political status.

so it's easy to draw conclusions as to why she holds a deeply unserious approach to these classes. it's entirely more gratifying to watch the way yeonwoo's brows furrow and his expression twist and turn with her every quip, leading to the area being more combative than instructive. she should give him a break, taeri thinks, and not project her fucked up family dynamics onto a man just trying to do what he was hired to ⏤ and the notion is convincing for a couple of seconds. but then she concludes that is reserved for something outside of the classroom when he is just yeonwoo the stick in the mud, and not yeonwoo the stick in the mud who is also her tutor.

all of this to say: she doesn't want to be here.

so today, technically taeri is but technically she isn't. it's the clone who makes herself home in her seat the exact same way she would, who also takes a look at the board and almost instantaneously thinks i'm not reading that and makes a face in the same way she would. it is her, so she's not breaking any rules. kinda sorta. "how about," the woman starts, twirling the drink within her palm with a gleam within her eyes that openly state that she's about to be on some bullshit, "we don't do this today and like, go out instead or something. teach me what the korean words mean on the movie theater board. go over conjunctive adverbs at the mall. it's almost christmas! don't you have someone you need to shop for, or something?" her gaze doesn't leave him as she takes a sip from her drink afterward, even when knowing that her efforts will be futile in the end.