“baby.” sobriety is ugly. makes things indefinitely difficult for yeonju to function. for one, all things repressed (demons, ghosts, skeletons held at bay) returns with a vengeance. washes up against her thin frame like unrelenting waves threatening to pull her in, have her lost at sea. for two, the sun is brighter, the sounds of girls gabbing is grating. her head is pounding and no abundance of iced americano would service to ease her of this very unfortunate hangover.
not even the smaller girl, whom she’s completely pressed her weight onto, arms hanging off her shoulders, could ease this.
in fact, yua only further spoiled her mood. if anything, she’s the reason why she’s stuck in this fucking bookstore.
“do you have to do this today?” the whine in her tone is evident, chin resting on the girl’s shoulder. something as mundane as returning textbooks can’t be the reason why she’s stayed sober for so long. “can’t we go?” before i lose my goddamn patience?
D.O.B. 29 November 2027 (20)
I.D. Civilian, Part-timer
ikeda yua’s life begins with tragedy and misfortune; her parents, who immigrated from japan, are members of a cult, worshipping nothing but everything at the same time. they name her ‘leah’.
it’s a large cult, one full of the disillusioned and misguided. it doesn’t take long for yua to realise how wrong everything is.
at the age of seven, her parents pass away, leaving her behind to throw a fistful of dirt into their graves behind the old and rickety church.
she grows up with many siblings, none of them are blood-related but that didn’t matter to her. they were the only ones she really considered as family.
hardly any of those siblings make it out in the end. there’s only so many of them left when death finally knocks on the cult leader’s door, coming for him instead of anyone else.
there’s finally an opportunity to start fresh, to leave everything in the past, to become a girl who was never involved in a cult. someone normal.
at the age of sixteen, she seizes that opportunity with eager hands and starts her new life in seoul with a new name, yua. until she’s eighteen, she lives with her brother, jude, before finally setting off on her own.
she starts off small, working the late night shift at a convenience store and in her free time, directing her energy towards studying whatever she can get her hands on, her mind thirsting for knowledge she was deprived of since childhood.
of course, as much as she wants to forget her past, she can’t bring herself to sever her connections with her siblings. that would be too selfish of her.
to those who make her acquaintance, she is ikeda yua, an orphan girl raised by her grandmother in osaka who moved to seoul for a taste of something different called freedom. that part is true.
it’s somewhere past two in the morning and yua sits behind the counter, bent over a book with a single earphone in her left ear, the other dangling in the air just in case a customer comes in. it’s been a month or so since she started and she’s come to learn that customers that come in this late don’t particularly care about whether you’re paying attention to them, so long as the transaction is quick and silent.
she takes a sip from her tea as she reads, occasionally popping in a cluster of granola into her mouth. usually, she gets an average of around ten customers from midnight to five in the morning, most appearing earlier on their way home from bars looking for something non-alcoholic to quench their thirst, or alternatively, some good ol’ junk food.
tonight, she’s had three.
as it nears three o’ clock, the doorbell chimes and she looks up from her book when a group of teenagers come stumbling in, loud and vibrant and complaining about the cold. she doesn’t particularly care about that, since they aren’t being rowdy or rude.
they take their time with picking out their snacks of the early morning, so yua resumes reading only to be interrupted by one of the girls grinning at her. she raises an eyebrow, not too sure what the girl wants, and takes out the other earbud, bunching the wires into her pocket.
“uh, if you want cigarettes then i’m definitely gonna need to see your i.d because you do not look of age at all.” she finally says, which the girl laughs at. yua smiles a little, thankful that her joke doesn’t fly above the girl’s head.
“sorry! my mouth is a little frozen from walking outside. but anyway - you’re new, right? there used to be this scrawny dude that worked here who’d always fall asleep whenever we got here.” the girl’s still smiling. “but you don’t look like him at all.”
“i’m… glad.” yua laughs a bit, folding the top corner of the page and closing the book. she has a feeling this conversation will drag on for a bit. “so your name is…” the girl squints at the name tag pinned to the tacky blue vest yua has to throw on over her turtleneck. “yua! you mustn’t be from here then.”
“yeah, i’m from japan, born and mostly raised there.” the first lie of many more to come. she doesn’t even speak her mother tongue as fluently as she speaks korean, it would take a while before she could.
“i moved here a couple years ago.” another one. the girl’s eyes widen and she’s practically leaning over the counter. “really? but your korean is so good,” she leans back, laughing and shoving her hands into her pockets. “you’re probably a lot better than i am.”
yua can only laugh bashfully, quieting down when the rest of the group comes up and dumps a questionable amount of snacks on the counter. she stands there in shock for a moment, then looks up at the girl she was talking to, who just laughs at her reaction.
“better get used to this, yua, because - oh right,” the girl turns to face her friends. “guys, this is yua.” there’s a chorus of greetings that follows and yua gingerly waves, before proceeding to scan the items and bag them.
“anyway, what’s your number?” yua pauses and looks up at the girl, who’s smiling at her. “let’s stay in touch, even though we’ll probably be bothering you a few times a week. but we should totally hang out when you aren’t working.”
yua blinks.
this is probably the only interesting interaction she’s had since she started working here, aside from a short conversation about the difference between nectarines and peaches with a drunk lady at one in the morning.
did she just make a new friend? and judging by the expressions of the rest of the group, a couple more?
she smiles and takes the girl’s phone, keying in her number and saving herself in her contacts.
