***volcanic, still is a work of literary fiction dealing with the entertainment industry, specifically K-pop's, treatment of its artists. The characters and events are fictional. the conditions that make those events possible are not. it contains depictions of grooming, sexual abuse , institutional complicity, suicide, trauma and its aftermath, disordered eating, and alcohol use. these themes are handled with care but they are not handled lightly. please read accordingly.
this story was written, in part, to heal. if it finds you at a moment when you need the same thing, i hope it helps.
hyeki's story is not a comfortable one. it is not meant to be.
if you need to step away at any point, please do. ***
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The water around Jeju is clearest before the fishermen go out. Before the haenyeo surface with their catch, before the tourist boats leave the harbor, before the island remembers it has obligations to the living. In that hour the ocean holds so still it looks like something is holding its breath.
Hyeki used to think it was waiting for her.
She knows now it was never waiting for anything.
It was just water.
It had no idea what was coming.
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I. The Color of Being Held
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 had told the story so many times it had became it's own 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.
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 seven girls in close quarters β 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 β 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 β 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 crosses the room to Hyeki's bed.
This is the thought that arrives when Yuna looks at her sleeping. Not for the first time β 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 inevitability of a 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.
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. She could not have told her mother. This is not a criticism. It is just true.
She watches Hyeki breathe for a moment.
λ―Έμν΄, she thinks. I'm sorry.
Not for this. Never for this. For leaving her here. For the things she knows that Hyeki doesn't know yet, 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.
She moves through it the way she has moved through it for three years, the geography memorized past the level of thought β the loose floorboard outside the bathroom, the light that flickers 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 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 wear something pretty and be 21 and not a robot. Because 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 over all the girls hoping to be wrong about what she sees. She does not want Jiwon to be in there tonight.
The door is silent. She puts her hand flat against it for a moment. The wood cool under her palm.
μ μμ΄, she thinks. Take care of yourself. And then, because Jiwon would say that was insufficient β take care of her too. You're already doing it. Keep doing it.
Sooah's door. Miyeon's. Chaerin's. Each one she passes, each one she carries with her β each face she knows so completely she can hear it without it 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 trying to understand what the choosing cost.
She really hopes Hyeki finds the door. She doesn't know yet that she will, that she already has one foot outside it. She won't know a lot of things.
The danishes are on the counter under a cloth. She lifts it and the smell reaches her first β butter and cream cheese and the warmth of something made from scratch at midnight by a 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 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 β 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. 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 father's voice β low, unhurried, the warmth of a man who does not perform happiness but simply has it. She had called them last week. Not to say anything specific. Just to hear them. Her father had asked if she was eating enough, which is what he always asks, which is the answer she always says yes to. 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 in the building next door, the one with the deep voice who moved through the world with his capacity for beauty fully intact β who looked at things and genuinely found them beautiful, not as performance but as response, who had looked at her the same way. 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, in this life. 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. He is someone happiness tends to find β the way water finds low ground, not because his life has been easy but because something in him insists on it. She believes this. She holds it like something warm.
She loved him. She can say that now, at 5:30 in the morning in an empty kitchen. She loved him. It was real. It was one of the real things.
She had tried to write him a note. 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 it. He is someone who understands things he hasn't been told. It is one of the things she loved about him.
Outside, Seoul is the specific grey of early morning. Not dark, not light. The color of a city that has not yet decided. One bird, doing the work of being the first.
She is fifteen years old.
She has been fifteen for four months, and before that fourteen, and before that thirteen, and she has been in this building since she was twelve β which means she came here when she was a child and has been a child inside it the entire time, and nobody, not even herself until recently, has fully reckoned with that. The exceptional girl. The chosen one. She had 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 was not ready. She does not think anyone told her she had the option.
The building is not far. Her feet know the route without her. She is thinking about the kitchen. About Hyeki's face the night before when she'd requested the danishes β that particular lighting of her, quiet and warm, the way she received being asked for something like it was a gift. She is thinking about the bunny beside her face. About the note β μ¬λν΄, she'd written at the top, because she could not start it any other way.
About the boy with the deep voice, who will come home tonight and find the hallway wrong in a way he can't account for. Who will understand without being told, because that is how he is. Who will carry it the way he carries everything beautiful and difficult β fully, quietly, without putting it down.
I'm sorry, Yuna thinks β in English this time. The language of Hyeki's mother's side, the language that arrived secondhand through music and films and Hyeki's clumsy translations of her own feelings, making it the only language that felt wide enough for this.
I'm sorry.
Not to the daughter she imagined. Not to the boy.
To the girl with bare feet. The girl she told him to watch over, because she could see, even that early, the specific shape of what this building was building toward, and who it was building toward it with. The way Eunwoo said her name. The fact that Hyeki was thirteen and exceptional and newly arrived and already sleeping facing the door β she 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. 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 β to those eyes that see everything, to the stubbornness of someone who came from volcanic ground and has not yet fully understood what that means.
The light is gathering. The city is deciding.
She feels her before she hears her. Before the footstep, before the breath, before the sound of bare feet on cold pavement.
Hyeki.
She was never supposed to be here.
Yuna turns.
And Hyeki is there β three paces from the egress door. Thirteen years old, bare feet on cold pavement, the oversized sweatshirt she sleeps in, her hair loose, those eyes wide and completely awake and already, even now, already seeing. Already knowing. The way she always knows before she has been told, the way the knowing lives in her body before it reaches her mind.
Her mouth is forming a word. A name. A sound that is trying to be language and hasn't made it yet.
Yuna looks at her.
This girl. This thirteen-year-old girl with bare feet on cold pavement who followed her out of a building 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 β all of this, everything Yuna is about to leave her β 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 ordinary morning, and will understand what it means to be made from ground that survived its own fire.
Not now. Not for a long time.
λ―Έμν΄, Yuna says. Out loud. Her voice steadier than she expected β the steadiness of something that has already been decided. I'm sorry.
Hyeki takes a step forward.
And Yuna, who is fifteen years old and has been in this machine since she was twelve and came here wanting something real and found it β found it in the kitchen and on the practice room floor and in the warmth of girls who chose each other before the industry could teach them to compete β Yuna looks at this girl one last time.
