Chapter Text
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟
The bunny has one eye.
It has had one eye since Yuna was four years old and pulled the other one off during a fever, some delirious act of toddler surgery she doesn't remember performing but that her mother described once with the exasperation of someone who has told a story so many times it has become mythology. "You just pulled it right off", her mother had said. "Like it offended you."
The remaining eye is black and slightly loose, secured by a single thread that has been re-stitched so many times the fabric around it is puckered and soft. The bunny's fur is the color of something that was once white and has become, over fifteen years of being held, the color of being held. Flattened in some places. Matted in others. The left ear bent at an angle that no amount of straightening has ever corrected.
She has had it her entire life. It has been in every dorm room, every practice room bag, every suitcase she has packed since she was old enough to pack her own. She used to hide it. At twelve, at thirteen, the embarrassment of a comfort object in a building full of girls trying to seem older than they were, trying to seem ready for things they were not ready for. She stopped hiding it when she turned fourteen and understood that there were worse things than being seen with a stuffed animal. That the things worth being ashamed of were not the things she had been taught to be ashamed of.
She picks it up from the bed. Holds it for a moment.
It smells like the dorm. Like the combination of six girls in close quarters : competing perfumes and someone's shampoo and stale air that circulates through a building that does not open its windows enough. It smells like the last three years of her life. Like everything she came here wanting and everything she found instead and the specific education of understanding that those two things are not the same and may never have been.
She had told Hyeki once, ( the new girl, the youngest one, thirteen years old with eyes that took up half her face and hair that curled, and an accent that mixed Jeju dialect with something American and warm), she had told her that she wanted to give the bunny to her daughter someday. They had been on the practice room floor, late, the way the real conversations always happened late on floors. Hyeki had looked at her with those eyes and said, "she'll love it."
Not that's sweet. Not you'll be a wonderful mother. Just the fact of it. Certain and specific and given without decoration.
Yuna had known then. Not consciously. But somewhere underneath the conscious, in the place where the real knowing lives.
She had known.
She crosses the room to Hyeki's bed.
She is so young.
This is the thought that arrives when Yuna looks at her sleeping. Not for the first time, she has had this thought before, has had it every time she watches this girl navigate something that would have flattened someone with twice her years and twice her armor. Thirteen years old and already she has learned to sleep facing the door. Already she has learned to read rooms before entering them, to calibrate what she shows against what she holds, to make herself useful so that no one looks too closely at what she costs.
Yuna had recognized instantly the unfortunate inevitably of girl who has decided that being extraordinary is safer than being ordinary, that talent is armor, that if you are exceptional enough no one will notice what you are protecting underneath the exception.
She had recognized her because she had been her. Before she understood what the recognition was for. What it cost, and what she had become due to it.
She tucks the bunny beside Hyeki's face. Carefully. The bent ear visible against the pillow, the single black eye catching the thin light from under the door. Close enough to find. Close enough that it will be the first thing she sees.
The note is folded small inside, tucked through the seam she opened along the back and re-stitched last night with the small sewing kit she's kept in her drawer since her mother pressed it into her hands the day she left home. For buttons, her mother had said. Practical. Her mother is always practical. It is the thing Yuna loves most about her and the thing that has made certain conversations impossible, the practicality, the way her mother approaches problems as things to be solved rather than things to be felt. She could not have told her mother. This is not a criticism. It is just true.
She watches Hyeki breathe for a moment.
미안해, she thinks. I'm sorry.
Not for this. Never this. For leaving her here. For the things she knows that Hyeki doesn't know yet, the things she has tried to shield her from, the architecture of what this place is and what it does and what it has already done. For the fact that she came into this building and found this girl and loved her immediately but was not able to love her into safety, which is not how love works but is what she wanted anyway.
잘 살아, she thinks. Not yet. Not out loud.
She stands up straight.
The hallway is quiet.
She moves through it the way she has moved through it for three years. She had the geography of it memorized past the level of thought, the loose floorboard outside the bathroom, the light that flickers slightly outside room four, the distance between doors measured in footsteps she no longer counts consciously. She knows this hallway in the dark. She has walked it at every hour. She knows the sound the building makes at 5:30 AM, which is different from the sound it makes at 3 AM and different again from the sound of it at midnight when she can hear, sometimes, from behind Jiwon's door, the specific quality of someone else also not sleeping.
Jiwon.
She stops outside her door.
Jiwon is not in there. Jiwon went out last night. Yuna knows this, had heard her leaving, had lain in bed and listened to the sound of her going and thought: good. Be somewhere else tonight. Be far from here. Because she has understood for some time that Jiwon sees things. That Jiwon, who came from a different company and carries the knowledge of a girl who has already been through the machinery once and survived it, watches Yuna, watches all of them carefully hoping to be wrong about what they see.
She does not want Jiwon to be in there tonight. Does not want to walk past this door and feel her on the other side of it.
The door is silent.
She puts her hand flat against it for a moment. Just a moment. The wood cool under her palm.
잘 있어, she thinks. Take care of yourself. And then, because Jiwon would say it was insufficient — take care of her too. You're already doing it. Keep doing it.
She takes her hand away.
Sooah's door.
The tender quality of Sooah's sleeping, which Yuna knows the sound of the way you know the sounds of people you have lived beside for years — the slight catch in her breathing, the way she turns twice before settling. Sooah who laughs at everything. Who had been the first to talk to Yuna when she arrived, nervous and fourteen and trying not to show it, who had appeared in the doorway of her room and said you have too many hair products with such cheerful certainty that Yuna had laughed before she could perform composure.
She does not open the door. Does not want to see her face in sleep.
안녕, she thinks. Goodbye.
Miyeon's door. Chaerin's. Each one she passes, each one she carries with her. She carries the weight of each girl, each face, each voice she knows so completely that she can hear them without them speaking. They came here wanting the same thing. They were told they were exceptional. They were told the exceptional were chosen. They are still here, still exceptional, still trying to understand what the choosing cost.
안녕. 안녕. 안녕.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
She hopes they leave, has actually hoped this for some time. That they find the courage she could not. The courage of walking away from what you wanted because wanting it is killing you. She hopes they find the door.
She really hopes Hyeki finds the door.
She doesn't know yet that she will. That she already had one foot out the door, as strange as it seems.
She won't know a lot of things.
The kitchen is empty.
The danishes are on the counter under a cloth. She lifts it and the smell reaches her first — butter and cream cheese and the warmth of something made from scratch at midnight by a thirteen year old girl who learned cooking as love before she learned it as a skill. Yuna stands in the kitchen at 5:30 in the morning and lets the smell be what it is.
She takes one.
She eats it standing at the counter in the yellow honesty of the kitchen light and she lets herself be someone who is hungry, who wants something, who takes it. She lets herself have the full taste of it, the cream cheese filling exactly right, the pastry giving exactly as it should, the thing she asked for made exactly as she asked for it because that is how Hyeki says the things she doesn't say, because that is how she loves, with her hands, with precision, with the care of someone who has learned that showing up is the vocabulary and everything else is just punctuation.
She thinks about her mother's kitchen. Morning light through the window above the sink. Her mother moving through the early hours with the confidence of someone who has inhabited a space for twenty years, who knows every drawer, every cupboard, every idiosyncrasy of a stove that runs slightly hot. She thinks about her father's voice in the mornings — low, unhurried, the warmth of a man who does not perform happiness but simply has it, who wakes up and the happiness is there waiting for him, reliable, unchanged.
She had called them last week. Not to say anything specific. Just to hear them. Her mother had talked about the garden, about the neighbor's dog, about her cousin's wedding in the spring. Her father had asked if she was eating enough, which is what he always asks, which is what she had said yes to, which is the answer she always gives, which is not always true but has never mattered to her as much as the asking. The fact that he asks. That it is the first thing.
She sets down the last of the danish.
Looks at her hands.
She thinks about him. The boy with the deep voice who found things beautiful, truly found them beautiful, not as performance but as genuine response, the way certain people move through the world with their capacity for beauty fully intact, refusing to let the world's difficulty harden them into people who have stopped noticing. He had looked at her and found her beautiful. Not the trainee, not the idol, not the exceptional girl who was chosen. Just Yuna. She had not let herself have it fully. Had kept them at the distance of something she understood she could not afford in this building, under this management, inside this contract, maybe even in this lifetime.
She wishes she had let herself have it fully.
She hopes he finds someone whose life is not this. Someone he can look at without the complications of what looking costs inside the machinery. They'd both been in it three years. A cog in a machine that stretched you so thin you began developing hairline fractures in your sanity, waiting for the pressure to finally shatter you into pieces small enough to be swept away.
She hopes he is happy. She believes he will be, as he is someone happiness tends to find, the way water finds low ground, not because his life has been easy but because something in him insists on it.
She had wanted to write him a note too. Had tried three times. Could not find the language that was true and also fair to what they were and weren't. In the end she decided he would understand without the note. He is someone who understands things he hasn't been told. It is one of the things she loved about him.
She loved him.
She can say that now, at 5:30 in the morning in an empty kitchen, the danish finished, the cloth back over the remaining ones. She loved him. It was real. It was one of the real things.
Outside, Seoul is the specific grey of early morning. Not dark, not light. The color of a city that has not yet decided. She can hear traffic from somewhere distant. One bird, doing the work of being the first.
She walks.
She knows where she is going. Has known the way you know things you have been trying not to know. Not as decision but as recognition. Oh, she had thought, when it finally arrived fully formed. It's this. The knowing had settled into her body gradually, the way all the important things settle. Not violently. Just... there. Present. Done.
She is fifteen years old.
She has been fifteen years old for four months and before that she was fourteen and before that thirteen and she has been in this building since she was twelve, which means she has been in this building for three years, which means she came here when she was a child and has been a child inside it the entire time and nobody, she thinks — not even herself until recently — has fully reckoned with that. The exceptional girl. The chosen one. The one who arrived at twelve with a voice and a face and a willingness to work that the industry read as readiness.
She had not been ready. She pretended to know the world but her body wasn't ready.
She does not think anyone told her she had the option of not being ready.
The building is not far. Her feet know the route without her. She is thinking about the kitchen. About the danish. About Hyeki's face lighting up when she'd requested them the night before, because Hyeki had been the first one to acknowledge that they were both fading, turning into ghosts in the gearwork, and that hot kindness was the only thing keeping them tethered to the world outside those walls. This was the way her friend expressed love: in bread and sugar, in the quiet refusal to let the other go completely hollow
She thought about her safe in sleep and the bunny settling into the space beside her. She is thinking about the note — whether it says what it needs to say, whether there is language sufficient for what she wanted to give the daughter she thought of as a girl though she doesn't know, couldn't know, just the idea of her. The crushing weight of an imagined child she would have loved completely. 사랑해, the note begins. I love you. She had not been able to start it any other way.
She is thinking about her mother's garden.
About Jiwon's hand flat against the wall outside her door in the dark — she hadn't seen it, doesn't know it happened, but Jiwon's hand will be there within the hour, when Jiwon comes home and finds the hallway wrong in a way she can't account for and stands outside her door without her in it. Jiwon will press her palm against the plaster, searching for a resonance, a vibration, anything to prove that the silence inside isn't just the absence of a roommate, but the absence of a person who is, for all intents and purposes, already becoming a ghost.
About Sooah's laugh.
About the boy with the deep voice who found things beautiful.
About a thirteen year old girl with bare feet and eyes that see everything who is supposed to be asleep right now with a one-eyed bunny beside her face and who does not know, and has no way of knowing, what she is about to be asked to carry.
I'm sorry, Yuna thinks, in English this time. The language of Hyeki's mother's side, the language that arrived to Yuna secondhand through music and films and terrible jokes and the clumsy way Hyeki would try to translate her feelings, making it the only language Yuna felt worthy of using to explain the impossible weight of her own disappearing.
I'm sorry
She is not talking to the daughter.
She is not talking to the boy.
She is talking to the girl with bare feet. The girl she found endearing before she knew why. The girl she told Taehyung to watch over because she could see, even then, even that early what the specific shape what building was building toward, and who it was building toward it with, and the way that Eunwoo said her name, and the fact that Hyeki, who was thirteen and exceptional and newly arrived and already sleeping facing the door — Hyeki was going to need someone watching when Yuna could no longer watch.
She had given the bunny.
She had written the note.
She had told the boy.
It is not enough. It's an itch she would never be able to scratch, tingling at perimeter of her own skin. She knows it is not enough. But it is what she has and she has given all of it and the rest she has to trust to the girl herself, to those eyes that see everything, to the specific stubbornness of someone who came from volcanic ground and has not yet fully understood what that means — what it means to be made from something that survives its own destruction.
Hyeki will understand. Not yet. But eventually.
잘 살아, Yuna thinks. Live well.
The light is gathering.
The city is deciding.
She feels, before she hears anything. Before the footstep, before the breath, before the sound of bare feet on cold pavement. She feels her.
The specific warmth of her. The weight of her presence, which has always been larger than her physical size, which has always arrived in a room before she does and remained after she left.
Hyeki.
She is here.
She was never supposed to be here.
Yuna turns.
And Hyeki is there, three paces in front of the egress door. Thirteen years old, bare feet on the cold pavement of a Seoul morning, the oversized sweatshirt she sleeps in, her hair loose, those eyes wide and completely awake and already, even now, even at this hour in this grey morning in this impossible moment — already seeing. Already knowing. The way she always knows before she has been told, the way the knowing lives in her body before it lives in her mind.
Her mouth is forming a word. A name. A sound that is trying to be language and has not made it yet.
Yuna looks at her then looks away.
This girl. This thirteen year old girl with bare feet on cold pavement who followed her out of the dorms in the dark because something in her sleep-body understood that something was wrong and got up anyway. Who made danishes at midnight and covered them carefully with a cloth. Who sleeps facing the door. Who will carry this — all of this, everything Yuna is about to leave her — and will be crushed by it and will not be crushed by it and will find, in some city years from now, some kitchen, some person, some ordinary morning, and will understand what it means to be made from ground that survived its own fire.
She is going to be okay.
Not now.
Not for a long time.
But eventually. In the way of people who come from volcanic islands and know, in their bodies, that destruction is not the end of the story. That what forms in the aftermath can be — is sometimes, against all reason — beautiful.
미안해, Yuna says. Out loud. Her voice steady in the morning air, steadier than she expected, the steadiness of something that has already been decided. I'm sorry.
Hyeki takes a step forward.
Her bare feet on the cold pavement. On a rooftop so high it felt like the very end of the assembly line, the place where the machine finally spit you out into the void.
And Yuna, who is fifteen years old and has been in this machine, in JUA, since she was twelve and came here wanting something real and found it — found it in the kitchen and on the practice room floor and in the specific warmth of girls who chose each other before the industry could teach them to compete — Yuna looks at this girl one last time, and she takes a step back.
잘 살아, she says.
Live well.
The light comes.
⊹ ࣪ ﹏𓊝﹏𓂁﹏⊹ ࣪ ˖
DOCUMENTARY INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT — KIM HYEKI Recorded for Wings: The Film — Official BTS Documentary Location: Seoul, South Korea Date: Redacted
INTERVIEWER: When did you first understand that something was wrong?
KIM HYEKI: (long pause)
KIM HYEKI: I was thirteen.
(pause)
I was standing on a rooftop with my bare feet and I didn't have a coat and it was cold and I remember thinking — I should have put on shoes. I should have put on shoes and a coat and I didn't and my feet were cold and —
(stops)
INTERVIEWER: Take your time.
KIM HYEKI: (quietly) I couldn't have stopped it. I know that. My therapist tells me that. I know it's true.
(pause)
It doesn't feel true.
(pause)
It feels like if I had been faster. If I had woken up sooner. If I had put on my shoes. If I had known.
(long pause)
She left me her bunny. I didn't know what it meant until later. I still sleep with it.
(looks directly at camera for the first time)
I don't think I'm supposed to say that.