apparently, the scent of chlorine sticks to whatever surface it can. never before has she had to think about it, but ever since she started ‘meeting’ sang like this, it’s been too intrusive to go unnoticed. made worse by the way hannam’s illustrious swim team parades around school, wearing it like a personalised cologne that only they can afford. it’s probably the worst, the saddest, gimmick she’s ever had to deal with: a bunch of speedo-clad teenage boys thinking they’re top shit for flailing about in a pool that hasn’t raised an olympian since... well, ever.
in fairness, sang had the decency to try and wash it away. always doused himself in something that nearly covered the sterile smell. still, it lingered. like an unwanted, unseen, third wheel. she’s almost used to it now. the way it clings to his knit sweaters and stains her sheets for a night or two after he visits. sensory reminders of things like that are a bit like feelings to her. yes, dylan’s sense memory has become interchangeable with her emotions (for efficiency’s sake). how else could she look so put together with an entire empire beneath her?
these minutia all pass her by as she waits for him to get changed. waits. usually, she’s the one waited on, but in this instance she makes a sacrifice. to seem like a dutiful friend, and to have a moment to collect her day’s thoughts. if she’s going to fill his ears with complaints and borderline-bullying, she ought to do it in a sensible manner. after all, dylan is a woman of grace.
“oi aquamarine, the day isn’t getting any longer!” she shouts it through the open passage to his changing room, happy to embarrass him if it speeds things up.
her stomach rumbles at the thought of a caffeine fix enjoyed over light conversation about who ruined her day the most. usually, it will fall to the actions of her two best friends. sang will try to reply with a quip about it and she will immediately shut it down, reminding him of his place in her well planned out life. his place as a secret, and confidant, but most of all, his place as a supporting character.
a recurring rebound that was never supposed to end up in her storybook, but will remain well hidden until he leaves.
“i’m certainly not getting any younger. hurry up, sang!”
below cut tw: mentions of prescribed medication, injury
omg i have been here two secs and am already becoming mr struggle. ok anyways i broke my leg yesterday and am on pretty hardcore pain meds right now, so it’s gonna take me a few days to get back to the lovely plotting messages you’ve all sent! my sincerest apologies, but i do hope yall understand hehe ill be back and compos mentus in a bit <3
“Sorry, that’s kind of presumptuous, isn’t it? But is it something similar to that, though? Maybe? It doesn’t have to be, actually. I’d still think the same regardless: That it’s very pretty, very detailed and that you’re very talented. I’ve never really tried painting something like that before.”
@thdylan / 2014.
life has felt like a constant rough patch lately. her mind feels split between a thousand different tasks, none of which mean anything to her, as winter approaches. the school year has felt so beige thus far. just different shades of brown, orange, and black shrouding the school gardens in the season’s inevitability. she can’t remember an autumn she’s ever enjoyed. it’s such a medial time. neither here nor there in its weather or mood. just a mess of soggy leaves and overdressing for a chill that never comes.
but there’s no time to dwell on her distaste. her myriad of daily duties includes parading around the school just to be seen by as many students as possible. with the newfound identity of rough-and-ready queen bee, dylan has found a lot more pleasure in this part of the job. being seen and, by proxy, admired, is one of her favourite indulgences. when she can’t eat chocolate for fear of her mother’s diet plans, or her love of shopping sprees becomes a chore, this never feels old. after all, the last week had been spent hermitting in the art block. slaving over her art made for the perfect excuse to bathe in her empire.
for every greeting so far, she was surprised most by this one. and not only because they bumped into one another. because dylan knew this boy. before she can even begin to smile cordially, the metaphorical flood gates burst and suddenly she’s being overwhelmed with information. funny - she’d never seen him as so much of a talker. well clearly, he’s excited. and for some reason it doesn’t bother her. it’s not that nobody had tried to sweet talk her about her art before, they definitely had, but not with as much gusto as this (admittedly adorable) kid.
she waits for him to finish, lips pulled slightly upward in amusement as he stumbles over his own words. once he does, she takes a silent in breath and gestures for him to do the same - in jest, but also just to make sure he doesn’t pass out from exasperation.
“i’m not sure if we’ve been properly introduced; i’m dylan, or yoona, whichever you prefer. i tend to answer to both.” she shakes his hand firmly, assuringly. “i get very... immersed when i paint, so i haven’t noticed. likely for the better. i can be stand offish when i feel watched. its a reflex more than a choice.”
thats not an exaggeration. she had rained hellfire on a senior who’d been looking over shoulder the entire year before, tearing his final project’s canvas in half and forcing his teacher to fail him. nobody knew about that, though, so best to keep her anecdote vague.
“well observed. it’s going to be a landscape of a clearing near my home back in switzerland. holiday home. it’s up in the alps, and around march time, it’s like eden. a paradise. i don’t know if i’m going to paint flowers, because in truth, the conditions can often be too harsh for something so dainty to thrive up there. but it’s also not going to be an exact image. it’s more of an inspiration. the theme for my portfolio this year is fae. a big part of portraying something fantastical in art is the detail, whether to make it more or less realistic. figuring that out is a skill that took lots of practice to acquire.” strangely, she’s shared more with this strange underclassman about her work in these few minutes than she has her best friends over the past 6 months. best not to think about it.
I CAN GO ANYWHERE I WANT, ANYWHERE I WANT (JUST NOT HOME).
there’s nothing like the smell of sea salt to stiffen her upper lip. she stands toward the widening horizon, cheeks pulled high and teeth bared in a childlike smile. the sounds of a storm echo before her, bare feet flush against the pebbled pier, covered in water and frozen still.
the island is not a particularly beautiful place. it’s kept by a village of fishers and their wives, flaunting the affairs of their children that left long ago. the streets are narrow and every home smells like smoked fish, washing hung out on the line at all hours of the day. a decade ago, her father brought her here to meet lee bul (an artist whose exhibition they’d visited a year before).
they stumbled upon her work by mistake — in a small museum in bern that happens upon their itinerary. but once dylan reads that placard about studying in europe and establishing her studio back home... well, any hopes of making an academic career out of her brilliance was lost.
in hindsight, organising the holiday was an impressive feat. he had to wait a whole ten months for her mother to jet off on a business trip, practically rowing them out to some obscure island off the coast himself.
expectedly, the 14 year old city girl is unimpressed.
until she spends a week reclining into boat seats and leaning over bul’s shoulder, sprite in her left hand as she learns to greet the locals in dialect. feeling the weight of a charcoal pencil between her thumb and forefinger or chucking acrylic paint at the walls, calling it art.
she laughs more in those 7 days than the rest of her lifetime; sits out in the black sand and lets the sun caress her skin, pretending to gag while her father fishes, breaking her first pair of flip-flops and fixing them with super glue. and perhaps all that joy is thanks to the connections their money allowed them. perhaps, deep down, its just as superficial as her. but living life ignorant to that, even if just for a moment... it was magnificent.
even now, she has no idea how he managed to pull it off. and how, when they came home, he managed to cover it up completely. in fact, now she’s thinking about it, dylan can’t remember if she ever shared those memories with anyone. sure, it filled several entries in her diary, but even then, she had to keep it so well hidden her mother wouldn’t find it on one of her ‘treasure hunts’.
so here she is, standing in the same spot she did back then. 2011, the year of party rock anthem and a dolphin tale. when she wore pink ribbons in her plaits and drank diluted cider at the senior’s house parties, networking like her life depended on it. she was fourteen. already acting like an adult. she can’t think about it too much, or she’ll literally be sick.
bul is gone now.
she moved her studio to seoul a while ago, looking out onto a metropolis of inspiration. maybe she chose it because the world is more tangible there. after all, places like this are not reflections of real life, but hideaways from reality. and as she looks out onto the ocean swallowing up everything in its throw, she can only hear the sound of stillness. the impulsions that come to haunt her just pass by like sailboats.
the rain soaks her sweater soon enough. once it’s wet through, she turns to walk back inside.
his ashes are pulled away by the sea, on their way to meet the sun.
༉‧₊˚✧ the bitch is back ! it is i, jane, and this is my devil spawn baby dylan. you might remember me as stalker-turned-beekeeper-jaehyun’s writer, or the general menace i was on the dash. now i serve you cheshire cat and misandry on main! anieway... below the cut you can find an abridged bg on the hills’ queen bee — trigger warning for mentions of death and physical/psychological abuse. please like this post for a msg about plotting <3
missus bae yoona, aka dylan, 25, choleric, class of ‘14
profile. background. plots.
a painter by profession and man hater by fate
family comes from generational wealth on her father’s side, mother scammed her way up the social ladder and is the model of nouveau riche weaselling into old money -- a true force of nature who cut down any barrier to attain more status.
like artificial intelligence, dylan sort of just... stood idle by her mom’s side for the first few years of her life. watching, absorbing, replicating; being sculpted into the perfect daughter
and by perfect, she means perfect. she is destined for magnificence, and anything less would be a plague on both family’s houses
she first picks up on how her father is manipulated by his wife; threatened out of divorce and financial independence, out of his basic autonomy. he is the exemplary expression of how power is best won.
ironically, her only relief from the pressure is him. a pushover in every sense, but kind and empathetic where her mom seemed empty of any compassion. he was a baker who studied in europe and shared all his consequent passions about it with her. their time together, however restricted, is formative in teaching her that happiness is not a self-indulgent crime.
truthfully, she doesn’t remember much else about him other than that. being there for his murder has created too many issues for her not to compartmentalise that time of her life into bite-size pieces.
but, it makes pity her best friend coming into the social sphere of high school. it provides an immediate pedestal to public recognition and respect
she’s beautiful, clever, sociable, and most of all, deadset on leaving a legacy. popularity was written in her destiny. in truth, the caste system that she creates is the culmination of a lifetime being controlled and finally having something to herself. as such, she spends all 4 years at hannam preserving it by any means possible.
like mother, like daughter: dylan is a master of manipulation. projection, gaslighting, devaluation, smear campaigns, triangulation--you name it, she used it to establish herself as the unquestioned queen bee. your muse either got in line or was subject to one of the above.
the only thing she couldn’t have was golden boy. however that played out, everyone knew it was messy and shifted something once sanguine in her. in junior year, her status took a dip when she broke down in the west wing bathrooms about it every second week, and this is likely the only time she made real friends with people in considerably different caste brackets
so, naturally, she came back in senior year a much more refined version of herself. stiffened, sharpened-a severeness in her tone even her mother flinches at
the primary reason for this change was not more about the fallout of this behaviour. after months of arguing over her arranged marriage, she and her mother got into a physical altercation and dylan was stabbed with a kitchen knife in her thigh. she spent a few weeks in hospital after surgery and has been living in debilitating fear of her ever since. #newfound relationship status
studying abroad is the best solution for this. she fucks off to europe for 5 years and clears the path of competitors more ruthlessly than ever before as a result of misplaced anger. ie. framing her fellow valedictorian nominee for 20,000€ worth of school property theft. slashed a couple tires, sabotaged a few projects. her methods of madness have definitely... escalated
but she’s wiser now. the importance of her actions from here on out is of greater concern. lily was the bane and blessing of her high school career - something, someone, as obsessive as that doesn’t just disappear. her imminent comeback is why dylan eventually returns to seoul.
it’s the most threatened she’s ever felt. no one has as much control over her as this anonymous figurehead. its driving her crazy and she has been manically digging through her peers’ dirty laundry to collect an arsenal of her own. tldr this paranoia has inspired an all new level of crazy ahaha she is nearing a Point
she was once trusted with every on campus secret, so who’s to say she can’t be now? whatever facade of kindness she has sold your muse is now more nuanced than ever before.
this is so much information and for what.... anyway if u read this far kissy kissy pls plot with dyl~
