we got married. / ❝ hye&yura. ❞
Her brown eyes had scoured and mentally memorized the map as many times as she possibly could. If there was one thing she could completely flop in; it was reading a map. She didn't know how they expected her to do this with a high success rate, but figured that her failure would provide the kind of entertainment viewers sitting comfortably on their couch looked for. ''Eh..'' she struggled, turning the map horizontally and then vertical back to back until she came to a realization. Hyeri didn't know what made a city map and a diagram of a school building so hard. Most likely that it consisted of the entire world on one sheet compared to having to remember classrooms back to the time she was a high school president. ''A right at Hoegiro and then.. turn.'' she muttered to herself, her feet taking off as if she was under the danger of a ticking clock; glad that she wore flats this particular day. Eventually, Hyeri pulled into a nearby cafe that held a neat image both in and out. Nothing less than what she expected a game show would pick for her, though. By just simply looking at the nearly empty shop, with the presence of one to three individuals (all interested in their own business), she received the idea that Hyeri had arrived before her mystery ''fiance''. She pulled out a chair in the center of the small cafe and took a seat, patiently waiting with her eyes glued to the door and window, moving back to back. The brunette couldn't shake off this nervous feeling, however. Her bones were literally shaking and aching to jump out of her skin right now. She would call a friend and give them the details of her current situation, but no. She could do this on her own.
All thoughts instantly vanished when her eyes landed on a familiar female with recognizable beautifully black hair. Almost long as her own used to be. Her thoughts and feelings began to race at this part, but felt herself suffocating more the moment she stepped in and Hyeri knew this couldn't be a coincidence. There was vague hints of Yura being offered the same deal, but pairing up with her? She didn't mean it venom, but this girl was someone she was already well accustomed to on a specific level of friendship. She was only slightly disappointed that her partner wasn't anybody she had never spoken to a day in her life with, or perhaps a member from a boy-band she admired. This was okay, though. Slightly uncomfortable, but fine.
Yura was a special case, mostly because she and Hyeri were the closest amongst their sisters. Hyeri tried her best to be there for everyone, but at the end of the day, she went home. Kim Ah-young went out of her way to show a cheery, happy personality. Sure, that was part of the game. Everyone in the “business” the girls were in knew that. They paid for you at your best. So part of “the game” for the girls was tweaking their own personalities for when they were in public, putting on a happy face even if inside it didn’t reflect you. Hyeri knew though, from spending so much time with Yura, that it wasn’t the real her. That the “real her” was somewhere buried under what the fans and management wanted, and it had a tendency to bubble to the surface even when Kim didn’t want it to. Because, for all the smiles, all the laughter that the duo shared, Yura just wasn’t happy. But then again, neither was Hyeri.
If there was one thing being in the group had taught her, it was that being the an progressive exemplar of society was hard. It wasn’t the fans or the media, although they drained energy from Hyeri as well, but rather it was her groupmates. Her friends. Her sisters. From the outside looking in, the position of a ''leader'' in a group like this is mostly irrelevant. These girls are all old enough to know right from wrong; they don’t need parents anymore, for the most part. Or so it would seem, anyway. But in truth they did. For the “Korean Musical Industrial Complex” had swooped them up (mostly willingly) and swept them away from the life they knew. Each girl handled that differently. No amount of training could make up for the lack of social awareness she had. She just happened to wake up in a world where millions of people knew her before she so much as stepped into the room. And so on and so forth Hyeri went, as she itemized her fellow groupmates as though she were organizing clothes in the laundry room of her brain. She stopped as she got to herself and Yura. ''..Yura-unnie? ..You're my, uh, ..fiance?''