misstep.
ft. @idjinwoo // isac.
there’s an overlarge mirror in the makeshift dressing rooms that have been outfitted for each team, segregated by gender, of course. ( as if they aren’t about to turn them all loose on each other. at least then, of course, they’ll have the fans to be their eyes. to find any transgression, any mistakes. with fans like that, who needs enemies, right? ) in this mirror she faces her new role with stark and uncomfortable clarity. there is no way around this.
the thin paper reads it out clearly, adhered to front and back alike.
suran.
jawbreaker.
she remembers last year, with the girls. she remembers cheering yujin on with embarrassing vigor. she remembers sneaking away with jaekyu, remembers, stolen moments of fun between the endless hours of filming. she remembers the exhaustion and the heat, of course.
and she remembers the name on the tag.
suran.
her.oine.
it still doesn’t feel real. it still seems like a joke, a trick, some kind of bizarre lie that would turn out to be the world’s worst hidden camera prank. but it’s not, and each moment makes that more and more true, more and more solid. somehow this feels like the nail in the coffin.
her.oine is dead.
it casts a strange pall over the beginning of her day, leaves her distracted as she adjusts her training set. she looks good in white, at least. she’s still adjusting to the whole thing, the atmosphere of the stadium, the crush of people, the distant sound of fans.
so she doesn’t notice him, right away.
she doesn’t notice him at all, actually, until she’s stepping on his foot, ducking her head in an awkward apology and then - she blinks hard, clears her throat. awkward. “ah - yeah - uhh, hey.” she clears her throat, finds now they’ve ended up alone in this stupid little hallway, while she’s in the middle of a freak out about her future, and that’s not the ideal time for her to be running into him again, when she’s been pointedly avoiding him for so long, mostly out of shame for the way she handled things. or more specifically, did not handle them and instead disappeared without warning. really classy. “long time no see.”