HAN SOHEE 23 FEMALE SHE/HER — ; where do you get your inspiration, KIM MINA ? you’re so INTUITIVE , i can’t help but think of DYING ROSES , DRINKING EXPENSIVE WINE FROM THE BOTTLE AT DAWN , A MESS OF CIGARETTE BUTTS , WET BRUSHES AND CRUMBLED PIECES OF PAPER when i hear your name . your friends tell me you can be FLIGHTY sometimes . i guess it’s understandable given the circumstances. besides , i can’t even imagine how stressful PAINTING classes must be — not to mention you’re also in THE RED AND GREEN CLUB ! you’re a NEWCOMER , right ? yeah, i thought so . either way , welcome to mugunghwa !
hi all! i’m max, she/her, 21+ and super excited to be here! ♡ my new years resolution is to be active for the next 3 months so i can find out who k*lled jisoo :D anyways, this is my little manic pixie dream girl, flighty escapist painter miss kim mina! she’s still very much a wip and it’s my first time writing a character like her, so please do excuse any messiness and characterization issues thank u
(also do like this post if you would like to plot!!)
and more info about her can be found in her about page here ♡
basics
scorpio sun, cancer moon, scorpio rising
born 12 november 1999 in seoul
lived in berlin for seven years when she was eight
currently a second year painting major, specializes in oil painting & dabbles in watercolor. was previously at seoul national university
character inspirations: the white lotus s2’s daphne, nevertheless’ jae eon, looking for alaska’s alaska young, if we were villains’ meredith, industry’s yasmin
archetypes the hedonist, the hopeless romantic
associated aesthetics: dying roses, messy rooms and messier lives, running away when things get hard, cigarettes butts and wet brushes carelessly strewn into an empty bottle of expensive wine, sharing knowing smiles in crowded rooms, vintage chanel bags stained with paint
trivia
best way to describe her: sweet but incredibly unreliable. soft-spoken with an air of mystery around her. the type to give you a vague, non-descript answer.
distances herself from reality because a. she doesn’t want to confront her trauma and b. it’s more fun romanticizing and dramatizing everything anyways
the kind to pretend that bad things don’t happen (she lives by the motto: “do whatever you have to do to not feel like a victim of life.”)
morally gray compass. will always find excuses for herself whenever she does something objectively wrong.
a manic pixie dream girl because she wants to be. deep down she knows that she’s fucked up and everything’s fucked up but would rather avoid a crushing reality than face it bc she has the opportunity to choose to ignore it. she may be self-centered and an escapist, but she’s not that stupid and not that unaware. she’s just wilfully ignorant rly
desperate for love, given her lack of love during her childhood, sort of a pushover but see below: will hurt u behind your back
she would never hurt someone, she says. but she is perfectly fine with doing it behind her backs and finding some justification on why it wasn’t that wrong anyways (shes a gaslighting queen)
she’s a fucking liar - misremembers events (wanting to dramatize them? just lives in a world of her own? no one fucking knows), saying whatever it takes to incite the reaction she wants, telling one thing to one person and another to someone else, always refusing to admit that she has lied
if you ask if she loved jisoo... she wouldn’t really have an answer. but she did love the idea of jisoo - the knight in shining armor, the boy who swept her off her feet away from shitty seoul
after jisoo’s death, nothing has really changed about mina which has led to a lot of talk about her “suspicious behaviour” but in reality, mina is detaching from the situation (as with what she did with her sister)
she’s numb about it, hasn’t really allowed herself to process - instead, throws herself into painting, buying expensive shit, dying her hair, speaking about him in present tense
background (tw death)
summarising to things u need to know: parents dgaf about her, older sister died when she was six and she started building her own world, sent to berlin to study, came back to korea, cheated on her then-bf with her best friend’s boyfriend so she ran away with jisoo to mgh
youngest only child of the kim family (tbc on what they do but they are rich but they are not in art world)
family lacked love, as with most rich families. hers never even tried - mum was a socialite, too busy chasing her youth with champagne flutes and mercurial highs to give a shit about her. dad just gave a shit about work more. maybe they never wanted children? maybe it was just part of their societal duties? mina has never tried to understand it and perhaps, never wants to
had an elder sister who she was quite close to
but when she was six, her sister passed away in a freak accident
mina’s escapist tendencies intensified
made up stories about adventures of her and her deceased elder sister, started drawing and painting disturbing material to the point that her nanny, concerned over mina’s development, begged her parents to send mina for a psychological checkup
they found nothing wrong but her parents distanced themselves even further. she’s not sure whether it was because they couldn’t handle the loss of her older sister, or she scared them, or that they realized that there was no point even trying anymore
one of her parents’ friends and a teacher at her prestigious school saw that she had a gift for art, told her parents mina had potential
she was then shipped off to berlin to hone her art in a prestigious art school
when she was fifteen, her grandparents threatened to cut her parents out of their will if mina didn’t come home, and so, she was sent back to korea for her high school years, where she did struggle to fit in but it wasn’t like mina really tried. continued painting, went on frequent overseas trips to europe, stirred a lot of shit and ruined many friendships
got into seoul national uni - started sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend, even though she was taken herself (why? for the shits and giggles? for the inspiration? just because mina wanted to? because he looked at her drunk one night and said, “you’re really pretty” and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so she did it behind her best friend AND boyfriend’s back, just to get the brief affection of someone who doesn’t even matter now? who the fuck knows)
essentially fucked her entire social life over and that was when mina realized she fucked up because seoul wasn’t like berlin where she could just run away and never return
around that time as well, she’d been talking to jisoo and when he (deeply in love with her at that point, and unaware of what had transpired) suggested she transferred over to mugunghwa, mina felt that it was the best possible option given the whole dramatic mess of her life.
over at mugunghwa, no one really knows what happened in seoul or why mina transferred. there are rumours about it though
wanted connections
thank you if you made it this far! she only recently transferred to mgh during the spring semester so i don’t really have that many wanted connections!! always open to brainstorm :)
someone who has an inkling of what went down in seoul and is/was deeply suspicious of her relationship with jisoo
someone who puts her on a pedestal, and truly believes she is as great as they say her to be
someone who keeps her grounded? or as grounded as possible?
someone she does not like because they were mean to her face lol
at this point, siyeon finds herself counting down the days until the exhibition is over.
this being her first showing at mugunghwa, it makes her wonder if all the added stress is truly worth it. if all the late nights, abrupt changes, and added weight within her eye bags would all make sense come opening day ⏤ it has to. her grandfather endorses the fall exhibit during an afternoon check in call, stating that it has merits beyond an academic grade and would bolster her artistic resume to have a designated space there, but even then she's still not sure. mocha colored hues shift over to the sight of mina working on the opposite side of her, and it makes her wonder if her already stellar resume needs bolstering; if it's enough to put up with the other's presence in close proximity.
in all honestly, there has never been a point in time where siyeon has gotten along with her, nor did she ever want to. it was already enough that the two of them were lauded as some of the greatest talent to enter the school in decades, competitive spark igniting to a flame in an instant; but mina's fragile facade was the fuel that escalates it into a wildfire, leaving the ash remains of anything that comes in it's path. and as they are the only two of the red and green club working together on the memorial of jisoo at this time ⏤ using mina's idea that was accepted by the plurality of the group, siyeon not included ⏤ she's trying to make sure that the project doesn't become another victim of their ongoing discord. suck it up for the good of the project, or something like that.
the space amongst them is strained and brittle, like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point, so she remains silent and moves in a gentle manner. siyeon isn't looking for another fight since there's no other choice but to work together, but that also doesn't mean that her defenses are lowered. "pass me that tool over there," she breaks the silence, motioning over towards the tool that was left near mina before their positions changed. you can accomplish a basic task like that, right? dissolves on the tip of her tongue because it's already enough that her tone is hardly sociable, but it's the best she can muster at the moment.
at this point, siyeon finds herself counting down the days until the exhibition is over.
this being her first showing at mugunghwa, it makes her wonder if all the added stress is truly worth it. if all the late nights, abrupt changes, and added weight within her eye bags would all make sense come opening day ⏤ it has to. her grandfather endorses the fall exhibit during an afternoon check in call, stating that it has merits beyond an academic grade and would bolster her artistic resume to have a designated space there, but even then she’s still not sure. mocha colored hues shift over to the sight of mina working on the opposite side of her, and it makes her wonder if her already stellar resume needs bolstering; if it’s enough to put up with the other’s presence in close proximity.
in all honestly, there has never been a point in time where siyeon has gotten along with her, nor did she ever want to. it was already enough that the two of them were lauded as some of the greatest talent to enter the school in decades, competitive spark igniting to a flame in an instant; but mina’s fragile facade was the fuel that escalates it into a wildfire, leaving the ash remains of anything that comes in it’s path. and as they are the only two of the red and green club working together on the memorial of jisoo at this time ⏤ using mina’s idea that was accepted by the plurality of the group, siyeon not included ⏤ she’s trying to make sure that the project doesn’t become another victim of their ongoing discord. suck it up for the good of the project, or something like that.
the space amongst them is strained and brittle, like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point, so she remains silent and moves in a gentle manner. siyeon isn’t looking for another fight since there’s no other choice but to work together, but that also doesn’t mean that her defenses are lowered. “pass me that tool over there,” she breaks the silence, motioning over towards the tool that was left near mina before their positions changed. you can accomplish a basic task like that, right? dissolves on the tip of her tongue because it’s already enough that her tone is hardly sociable, but it’s the best she can muster at the moment.
in another life, one with a substantially different coalescence of circumstances, mina thinks they could’ve been friends. siyeon’s vivacity coupled with mina’s soft fragility - two talented artists, and the promise of multifarious masterpieces resting on the tips of their fingers. could’ve bonded over being the final two to infiltrate the arcane dynamics of time-hallowed friendships, could’ve cried tipsy tears over men who loved them in ways they could never understand, exchanged tales of paris and berlin. but in this life, all that they share in common metamorphizes into a monstrous, minacious rivalry.
in all honesty, mina did like siyeon the first time they’d met. then again, in all honesty, mina likes anyone and everyone (because the thought of someone harboring antithetical feelings for her is an acrid taste she refuses to swallow.) but siyeon looks at her with such derision and disdain, again and again and again, that even volitional avoidance isn’t enough to quell mina. and so, in return for the unprovoked condescending comment siyeon had made, mina tells an art teacher that she may or may not have witnessed siyeon committing a mild act of sabotage. gives siyeon a serene smile when she storms into one of their meetings, tells her something along the lines of “don’t do bad things if you don’t want to be caught.” a tacit confession packaged into a pretty little act of retaliation. they never return from that.
but in some cruel twist of fate or just the workings of a humorous god, they’re paired together for this project. score: mina - 0, siyeon - 0. still, at the very least, they’re working with her idea and this time, mina doesn’t even need to construe some demented chronicle – from the malodorous tension of the room and the barely concealed frown, she knows she’s in the lead. siyeon is unhappy, so by default, mina is happy. score: mina - 1, siyeon - 0.
they work in silence until, as always, deciding to unsettle mina yet again, siyeon speaks. the thinly-veiled annoyance is diaphanous and if mina had been in a more truculent mood, she might let an unbridled comment or two slip. an innocuous remark about minjun, a giggle about her idea being chosen, a small flame to spawn a forest fire. fortunately, for siyeon (and perhaps everyone involved), mina’s exhausted. so, all she responds is nothing but a mere spark, nothing close to triggering an inferno she could’ve otherwise.
passes her the wrong tool. “this should work, right?” she replies. “i’m sure you can do magic with this.”
he pushes up his glasses, fingers drumming on the surface of the desk absentmindedly as he fixes her with an inquisitive look. “i’m okay. how have you been?” even though he genuinely wants an answer to the question, there’s only so much he can do to conceal his stiffness, and the next sentence is a complete stab in the dark in an effort to match the jolliness she’s imbuing onto him. “did you get your assignment for next week done? i don’t want to take your attention away from the important things.”
read: what the fuck are you trying to do?
minhyuk irritates her.
it's not an immediate reaction, though. truthfully, when she’d first transferred to mugunghwa months ago, he'd been a persona non grata. just another expendable face in another historied, jejune room. she did recall him being comparatively nicer than the rest of the people at school (although the bar for that was in literal hell) - maybe she had even invited to something but it never really materialized. not her fault, though; her hands were filled to the brim, overflowing with jisoo, schoolwork and dealing with the oddities of a long-established dynamics of a new friend group. it’s not her fault, it never is. (although it’s not like any of it even holds any weight now)
no, it’s a growing sensation - like an infuriating scab, that itches and itches and itches. a scab that demands to be picked at, one that settles under her skin and one that she knows, would open the wounds from that night all over again. doesn’t matter if the palpable burn scars, outlined in shades of merlot, have gradually grown into faint traces. minhyuk is still there. minhyuk is still there with that knowing look; that fucking vexing look where his eyes narrow and he stares at her as if he knows her tongue only speaks the untruth.
sure, this isn’t a foreign look - sure, she’s received this glance from a hundred and one other incredulous strangers who doubt mina’s eccentricity. but the thing is those strangers exist as extraneous beings, gray faces with their baseless accusations. they hold nothing to refute the flighty artist living in a world of her own, nothing to thwart her from soaring into her make-believe. minhyuk does. in fact, he has every possible fragility of hers in his arsenal, could play one note and she’d be forced to face the music, despite her salient attempts at drowning any sounds out.
and so, she amplifies her act around him. ramps up the mystifying comments in their conversations, beams at him with a vivacity scarce to anyone else, lives and breathes the idiosyncrasies. he cannot see through her. he will not.
he greets her with the same fucking look that grates all her senses and she feels the itching sensation flare up again. mina wants to tear her fucking skin out mina doesn’t lose her jollity. “you know, the usual? stuck in this whole labyrinth of suffering.” rolls her dark-rimmed eyes lightheartedly, a sibylline smile on her lips.
“i haven’t yet,” she replies, gaze roaming his workspace. takes her time before eventually resting it on him. an undeclared proclamation of sorts: you are not important to me. “it must be so nice working in a library! you get to be with all this magic,” she marvels, fingers absentmindedly trailing a book left on his counter.
taylor swift ‘my tears ricochet’ / audrey niffenegger ‘the time traveler’s wife’ / richard kadrey ‘aloha from hell’ / john green ‘looking for alaska’ / louise glück ‘adult grief’ / holly warbuton
nari laughs, "then she started haunting the hills and the town, etcetera etcetera. did i scare you? i’m kidding. sorry.” for a moment, her voice falls quiet, earnest, “she really did, though. i told you, it’s why my aunt never kept any rings in her house. where are you? dorms, or?” nari pushes the door into the fire exit open. the stairs dark and empty. every breath an echo. her pulse picks up, her skin grows cold. she could use the elevators like a normal person, but that small fear, that small creeping feeling that someone’s in the shadows, watching, feels like slipping under warm covers on a rainy day. hot chocolate by the fire on a winter night, the cold side of the pillow. “i’m coming to you now,” nari pauses, the silence so empty it almost sounds honest, “what… what did you see?”
she puts nari on speaker and lets her reverberate through the room, filling the silence and the still. for the first time that evening, mina breathes. lets the air invigorate her lungs, patching together something deep that had earlier splintered shambolically. oddly enough, despite the grisly subject matter, nari’s voice imparts a sense of solace and warmth; almost like a mellow tune performed during a balmy summer sunset. perhaps, it’s the familiarity of this setting - they are not twenty-three, they are ten again and nari is the prettiest and most fascinating girl she has ever known.
inhale. nari somehow succeeds in quelling her paranoia so much that she flings away the painting that she’d been working on. the brilliant hues of scarlet disappear into the ebbs of the night, and mina pulls out a fresh canvas. this time, she paints stout lumberjacks and sulfuric yellow mountains and maroon-tinged dismembered fingers. nari transports her to a reverie, one where jisoo is nothing but a name, where men saw off fingers of women who live through the agony of unreciprocated love, where mina is nothing but a trifling messenger.
exhale. maybe if she hadn’t been so deeply fixated on blending shades of brown and red for the exact shade of crimson, or maybe decades of friendship breeds accurate predictions and she’d grown accustomed to nari’s dramatic flair, but she doesn’t jump. just allows herself the privilege to smile at the ordinariness of this all, and feels grateful that even though her world has been irreparably disoriented, nari still stands. a well-fortified unchanged penchant for the dramatics and the plethora of stories. “there are worse things in life that scare me, nari. a jump scare through a phone call? not really,” she quips, absentmindedly adding specks of paint.
“i’m at the painting studio,” she replies. there’s a slight twinge of guilt that nips at her skin; it’s the crack of dawn and there’s a sleepiness to nari’s voice - but mina rationalizes that (a) she saw jisoo and (b) nari loves a good ghost story. still, she apologizes but in the way they know best (money and helping hands) . “do you need me to send a cab there?”
there’s a silence that follows after nari’s question but for mina, it says enough. it’s are you okay? it’s i don’t know what to say but i care. it’s i’m here for you. it’s everything expressed through the act of inference, one that mina cherishes - beauty of a time-hallowed bond. any other way and mina could very easily construe it as a form of pity, and hang up the phone with vague, trite excuses. “i saw a shadow and at that time, the room literally started to smell like smoke too. the shadow moved as well, nari. i’m telling you - it has to be jisoo, it must be.”
the classroom was empty, if not for the easels and canvases messily strewn around the room. still, it looked a lot bigger than his sculpture classrooms, with the sculptures having taken up a good amount of space. he could’ve sat anywhere in the room and still be heard by her, but he chose the stool right next to her, dragging it a little too close to her side.
“what are you painting?” he asks, peering over at her easel, breath ghosting on her skin with how close their bodies were. too close for comfort, but that was exactly what he liked about her.
artists are, by nature, volatile - alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and envy and ego. heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes, you get gold. sometimes, disaster. and at this point, mina is fairly certain that the direction they are heading in is one of a catastrophe: the dead boy’s girlfriend and best friend. nothing can really end well when all that binds them together is the immortal memory of a man they can never scarper from. even in death, jisoo looms over them; after all, a fiery death isn’t enough to smother his glaring presence.
maybe not only is it in her nature to be capricious, but also to crave what she cannot have, to taste the sugary thrill of sin. and so, she bats her eyelashes with a virginal chasteness, as though she hadn’t just let her fingertips trail the outlines of his knuckles. pretends she doesn’t know that even if minjun had classes, he’d be here, at her beck and call. somehow, the purposiveness and volitional essence of their relationship stirs an insatiable hunger to probe the limits of his control. (she knows they’re both at the edge of the cliff, no return now but wonders how much more it’d take for him to plunge in.)
she returns his indifference with a serene smile - to anyone other than minjun, one that paints gratitude but it’s one that doesn’t meet her eyes, which she knows he’ll take as an unspoken dare. as intended, of course, nothing between them is ever left up to coincidence. “you’re too kind,” she replies, “i’m sure you could give any girl in my painting class your brushes. all they ever talk about is you and what a waste you switched over to sculptures instead.” (mina hasn’t spoken to her classmate in months.)
just as she anticipates, he accepts her tacit provocation. the heat of his body radiates and it feels almost corrosive, almost like he’s dripping acid onto her skin. she blames it on jisoo - the almighty, omnipresent jisoo who sends reminders from beyond the grave that their proximity is blasphemy. an insult to the love they’d shared and the friendship that he’d built with minjun. her skin prickles. heartbeat throbs faster, rhythmic as though spelling out that two-syllabus name, jisoo, jisoo. she doesn’t move.
instead, pivots to face minjun, steadies her hands on the sides of his chair, their faces mere inches apart. she’s close enough to see the sprinkle of freckles across his cheeks, breathe in the distinct scent of fresh laundry. her voice barely above a whisper, “that means you’re free then? stay and watch me, you’ll find out then.”
it makes sense why seina comes running for her when called. tonight is one of those nights ⏤ a heart racing shock overtaking pushing her away from her pillow and almost immediately onto mina’s mattress at her first wail. “mina? mina! wake up!” she yells, a palm wrapped tightly around a shoulder while it shakes lightly, while the other cups her face gently, ignoring her own tremors. “it’s me, seina! it’s not real, you’re okay! wake up, please! you’re alright!”
but she’s not. it’s been happening since the incident, and it never gets easier.
mina never slept enough.
it’d been a cause of concern when she was on the cusp of adolescence; her nanny in berlin had phoned her mother at the crack of dawn, overwrought with worry that mina preferred to roam deserted alleyways at 3am and sketch in the kebab shop down the street than to sleep. could cause developmental problems, she’d hurriedly whispered. mina had smiled politely, appeased her nanny’s distress with futile promises of taking the melatonin gummies left by her bedside nightly. (she never did. just started being better at sneaking out.)
she has penned many untruths for her willing insomnia - ranges from “there’s something romantic about being the only person awake in the world.” (said to jisoo and all her other previous romantic companions). “my best art comes when it’s just me and the darkness.” (for art teachers, who marveled at her craftmanship). “sleeping is a chore.” (to concerned parties, who pushed her to rest.) but truth is there’s no whimsical, outlandish reason. truth is mina had always felt like her dreams were an unruly force of nature - a scene she could never direct. so, why would she make the conscious decision to grant fate the power when she could, very easily, fabricate her own world of magic when awake?
jisoo’s death makes it worse. because mina knows - the moment she lets herself doze off, fate would thrust her straight into the spotlight: the main character of that one faithful night. so, mina stops sleeping. mina drinks coffee, mina paints until her fingers are calloused and her arms are throbbing, mina goes to the room only for a change of clothes. her gaze is unsteady and bloodshot, body weary - stripped to skin and bones, slurred conversations that made little sense to all parties and soundless laughter to unfunny jokes. no one says anything. mina doesn’t even have the energy to wonder why.
she goes for four days without sleep - four days before she crashes on seina’s bed. it’d been exactly what she’d feared, so desperately tried to abscond from. a replica of the night but even though she’s replayed this film a thousand and one times, the ending diverges. this time, a shadowy figure - one that should’ve been jisoo, but here, he’d been scorched to disfigurement - emerges from the flames and his fingers point accusingly at her. you should’ve died, he wails, louder and louder until mina wakes up, shrieking for a religion she’d never believed in.
seina had been there that night. and seina had held her, as though the arms of a girl could shield her from the horrors of her own mind; let her weep into her chest and hauled her back to reality. if it had been anyone else, mina would’ve most likely brushed it off as nothing, pretended like she was taken over by some possessed spirit of an art legend. but this was seina - seina with the affectionate smiles laced with warmth and care. seina with the unconditional love of a mother she used to beg god for. seina who made her tea and kissed her cheek with a tenderness she’d never allowed herself to relish in. so, she plays along - pretends that seina can save her.
tonight is the same nightmare - the same mutilated figure, the same bloodcurdling howls of agony, the same final moments of jisoo’s life. she’s relieving the same night again and again and again; a reality she’s forced to play back every night. but in the cracks of the horrific imaginations, she hears seina.
jolts awake to the sound of her frantic voice and almost immediately, the tears flow. “seina,” she sobs, the panic and fear still coursing through her veins - depriving her of the ability to form a coherent sentence. heart palpitating, body quivering, all mina can do is reach for seina, pressing her face into the older girl’s shoulder, willing the darkness to cover her sight for a false sense of security. “i can’t do this anymore, seina. i really, really can’t. i can’t sleep, i can’t do this, i can’t, i can’t, i can’t.”
vulnerability is a sin but if seina is the witness, so let her be guilty. “please don’t go. please stay.”
“hey,” he smiles. a dog finally caught up to the car, he realizes he doesn’t know what to do next. how to go about the morbid business of telling the bereaved that she’s beautiful, asking if she wouldn’t mind her pain photographed. there’s no easy way to say it, no nice way to ask. muyeol sits beside her and, from his jacket pocket, takes out a small 4x6 plastic sleeve with her picture inside. “it’s your picture from the paper. you looked… it came out nice, so i thought you might want it. the print on the paper is all blurry and pixelated. it’s…” he shakes his head, “just looks different, you know?”
much of mina’s life can be split into pre-jisoo and post-jisoo.
pre-jisoo: she meets muyeol for the first time in the heat of summer in some art exhibition - sufficiently uninspiring that mina can barely recall anything except the fact it’d been a sweltering sunny day and she’d never been so relieved for an air-conditioned room. so fucking lifeless and mechanical and pretentious that she instead finds her inspiration in kissing a cute boy she’d seen lingering around in a secluded dark room. it’d all been rather callous - they don’t exchange names, don’t exchange numbers, just a fleeting memory of a quick tryst and duplicitous giggles. nothing more, nothing less. (she’ll say it was spurred by boredom, an intrinsic need to seek out flashes of vivid shades amidst a dreary day but truth be told, it was more likely compelled by the desperate desire to subdue the hurt she’d felt after a particularly cruel outburst she’d suffered by the hands of he-who-shall-not-be-named.)
post-jisoo: they meet again when he takes a photo of her during an interview a few days after jisoo’s death. he doesn’t look at her the way the rest of the public do (pity, disdain, horror, curiosity, fear) - but with inexplicable wonderstruck. for a brief moment when she catches his gaze, mina can almost glimpse the stars in his eyes. perhaps, if it had been just any ordinary day and she’d been cognizant of anything more than the wounds tracing her arm, she might’ve taken his morbid interest as a sign of affection but at that time, there’d been nothing more she wanted to do than leave.
so, when he comes up to her in the middle of her classes, sketchbook lying precariously on her lap, thoughts wandering, it takes her two seconds to place him. (remembers their second interaction and not the first.) “hey,” she replies. greets him with warmth - although, she’s half-expecting him to whip out a camera and make her the subject of another interview she would really rather not participate in. she can already envision the headlines: deceased girlfriend, victim of the fire, what happens after.
nope - instead, he gives her a picture of herself taken from when she’d last seen him. oh. mina blinks. once. twice. oh. there’s an awkward silence that hangs over them before the understanding hits her and she gives him a benign smile (one that she hopes doesn’t come across as patronizing.) “thank you,” she says. she gets it - she really does. she, too, once painted her late grandfather on his deathbed, only to be chided away by her mother. still, she never did offer her grandmother the portrait of his passing and so, the only sensible explanation she can concoct to make sense of this slightly-baffling situation: he is in love with her.
she gives him an appreciative pat on the shoulder before asking him good-naturedly, “do you think it’d look nice framed? or would it a little narcissistic to have a photo of myself in my room?”
doesn’t ask the burning question though: are you in love with me?
it’s 4am and mina is having yet another one of her frenzied painting binges for the umpteenth time this week. the brushes streak through the canvas in a fervid haste - scintillating tints of red erupting from her fingertips, her mind unbridled on a feverish high. she won’t take a break, she can’t; one second is all it takes for jisoo to pervade her reality, for the acrid fumes to smother her airways, for the same uncontrollable panic and dread paralyze her the way it did that night.
it happens. it happens again when she looks up to swap one brush for another and she swears she sees a shadow move from the corner of her eye. “fuck,” she murmurs, shaky hands hurriedly reaching for her phone - a chain of events she is all too accustomed to. impetus fingers press the third name on her favorites, and restless ears waits for the familiar voice of one nari to cut through the dial tone.
there are many things mina calls nari for at 4am - these days, they’re primarily for mina to desperately implore nari, seeking otherworldly excuses for her evanescing sanity. but before that night, it had been a mix of invites to reckless, sybaritic adventures that only two girls with money and a penchant for drama have the privilege of indulging in and her personal favourite, nari’s bedtime stories. to be exact, nari tells tales of the undead and through her hour-long spiels, mina brings them back to life on her canvas.
(when she is eighteen, she dedicates an entire exhibition to nari and her late-night stories. it is undoubtedly one of the most romantic things mina has ever done for anyone.)
“i think i just saw jisoo,” she says when nari finally picks up. there’s never really any need for pleasantries with nari; they’ve known each other long enough to disregard it. “he’s here. remember when you told me about that one ghost when we were like ten? do you wanna come check it out?”
victim.
noun.
a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action
in every fucking sense of the word, mina knows they all perceive her as a victim – of the goddamn inferno that robbed her of what little prevailing normalcy she had of her life, the one that had razed the closest thing she had to love to ashes. it’s all she sees when she catches a glimpse of the newspapers - ones that seina doesn’t manage to hide quickly enough, when she turns on her phone and looks at her endless barrage of unread messages that she refuses to acknowledge, when she meets the eyes of those whispering around her.
okay, to be accurate, sometimes, they call her a survivor. well, the cornier articles and the cheesy strangers with their damp eyes and commiserating gazes do. mina’s not sure which is worse; both terms drive her to nauseous spells, trigger her into frenzied binges of painting raging scarlet skies and sooty figures. (she never keeps any of them. it always ends the same way at the crack of dawn - mina stares at the artwork, mina goes berserk, mina shreds and tears and pulverizes the canvas to smithereens as if it could reorient the past. the ceaseless, merciless nightmares are bad enough, god knows she doesn’t need to hold any more souvenirs from the night.)
and that’s why she avoids yoo minhyuk; refuses to go into the library under some pretext no one dares to probe at. he is a sentient reminder of june 22nd - in his eyes, she sees the frantic pleas for an ambulance, the desperate tears that stripped her life-long facade to nothing but pure vulnerability and fear, the flames that licked at her skin and the fumes that smothered her lungs. he reminds her that the truth is etched in stone, and no matter how many divergent resolutions she paints, no matter what varying colours she uses, they cannot conceal the inscription. he is reality, and one that mina refuses to concede to.
it takes her 2 weeks before she gets the resolve to see him because god, even if the entire fucking world distempers her as a victim, she won’t give him the chance to. “minhyuk!” she greets, with an enthusiasm entirely unbefitting of their relationship, “how have you been? i remember we talked about wanting to paint together.”
light, breezy smile pulling on the corner of her lips. an innocuous invite or an implicit dare to confront her on her act. “i’d love to pick your brain for ideas, let me know when you’re up for it!”
mina can count on one hand the number of times she held a proper conversation with minjun before jisoo’s death. their interactions have always been limited; exchange of waves during the rare moments she graced jisoo’s football matches with her presence, sharing shots of tequila and concerned “you sure you’re okay?” at after-parties, tipsy smiles with kiss-swollen lips whenever she crashed their dinner plans. no one can fault mina for that, really – jisoo’s presence had always felt disproportionately large, coruscating colours so vivid it reduced everyone else around him to a shadow.
sometimes, mina wonders if she was supposed to despise it - hate the way he unwittingly dulled her blaze into nothing but a mere smoulder. truthfully, it’d been quite the contrary; in fact, she’d been enamored by his mercurial highs, the kaleidoscope of impulses and affection he had in him – a capricious, blinding force of a boy.
minjun is not jisoo - not even in the slightest. maybe that’s why she doesn’t shift her gaze away when he stares at an intensity that prickles her skin (and perhaps, the intoxicating rush of how illicit these inactions are play a factor as well.) there’s something irrevocably bewitching about the tenebrosity in his eyes and the hollowness in his smile, much unlike jisoo with the fervent glint in his eyes and his self-assured grins. an ambiguity that reminds her of herself, one that she seeks to unravel. (when she looks at him, he doesn’t speak - just dares her to try.)
and so, they meet. again and again and again. sometimes under falsehoods and other times, under truths, stretched so far to the point of disbelief. jisoo left this at your house, can i come pick it up? jisoo loved eating this, i don’t think i can finish it by myself - can we grab a meal together? they don’t do anything - they never do, but the deceit that inundates their time together and the ghost of their touches is enough of a sin.
they meet again today. mina says she can’t bear to use the brushes jisoo gifted her. asks if he’s got any to spare. minjun doesn’t question her - he never does, just shows up at the studio as if it’s an order, old tools steadily clasped in his hand.
“minjun,” she greets, knowing very well that every word that leaves her lips is an entrapment for him to plummet into, a treacherous dance that they’ve both entangled themselves into. neither of them are ever truthful with each other, shades of gray amidst the black and white letters, a language only they can decipher. “thanks for making the time for me, i know you must be busy.” looks up at him through fluttering lashes, bloodshot eyes, her gaze lingering a second too long.
they don’t have to speak for her to know. it’s in flyaway specks of details they divulge; a gossamer for mina to weave her intricate tales. the look of forced concern on the dean’s face speaks of his fear - trepidation that not only have they lost a student, but now, the potential future. (”take your time to heal,” he says but mina knows otherwise.) the radio silence from her parents, barring her mother’s personal assistant who had shown up at her dorm room a day after she’d been hospitalized with a basket of fruit she didn’t even enjoy, screams disdain. disdain that their only daughter somehow manages to be entangled in yet another tragedy, forcing unwilling parties to reflect on whether this is karmaic retribution for their sins or whether the true omen was mina and her blood-soaked hands.
and of course, son jiyeon, with her crisp silence and frigid smiles; it’s the kind of cold that cuts through the bone, much unlike how it had been when it was the three of them during the summer. to a naked eye, it could easily be brushed away but god, mina knows this glacial familiarity all too well; it’s the same perennial chill she’s become acclimated to, growing up with it after her sister’s death. blame. inculpating her for being the only one to walk away that night unscathed that fiery night, that she had been the one to spark his sweltering demise, that if she hadn’t been there, neither would he.
perhaps there is a levelheaded explanation - one that logic and reason would concoct, instead of her mere wandering thoughts. such as, maybe they were never really friends in the first place, but just jisoo’s attachments willed to get along sufficiently enough. but the thought of losing another friend, after watching her boyfriend’s body escorted in some unremarkable black bag, feels a little too much. at times like this, it’s when fiction tastes better, a pill less demanding to swallow than the truth. self-devised blame is easier to shoulder than the heavy burden of reality that jisoo is dead and that jiyeon, most likely, doesn’t like her anymore. so, mina holds onto the story as gospel - son jiyeon thinks she killed her brother.
still, jiyeon is still a trace of jisoo that she can’t bear to expunge and so, when she bumps into her at the cafeteria, she doesn’t turn away. “hi,” she says, faint smile on her lips, glancing at her through the corners of her eyes, “how’s your art exhibition piece going?”
