Chapter Text
“Caelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.” – Horace
(“They change the sky [above them] and not their souls, those who rush across the sea.”)
The sky above Los Angeles is clouded tonight, an impenetrable bluish hue of gray wraps around it and conceals the multitude of stars that usually light up the endless velvet cloak. Even the artificial twinkle of planes got lost in the matte mantle, blurred like her thoughts.
A turbid sense of mystery envelops and permeates the city, serving as a mirror for all of those wandering thoughts the lusterless veil keeps from turning into dreams.
Inside the comfort of the rented car, a liminal space morphs into a cage—one in which the banal absence of glitter is enough to unearth an unspoked discomfort.
As her eyes roam the dark expanse above her head, Jennie cannot keep a foreign feeling of surprise from blooming and decaying in her chest as she recognizes flashes of Seoul in a city that doesn’t feel as cold, doesn’t look as dull, doesn’t carry the eco of all of what is expected of her.
With her head leaned against the car door, she tries not to let her mind go there, to the flight she is going to catch in a few days, to the lump that climbs up her throat at the idea of returning to a place she calls home only because of a resilient force of habit—one stemmed from a routine that was drilled into her brain so subtly that sometimes she wonders if it wasn’t her own all along.
And yet, Seoul used to feel like home. It felt like home when her mom shipped her away to New Zealand with a bag full of polaroid pictures and a one-way ticket in hand. It did when she eventually got the meaning of a poem about nostalgia she had to read for English class. It did whenever her heart felt a little heavier around Christmas. It still did when she eventually came back with her pockets filled with self-awareness, and even more so when she was the one who decided to stay and gamble her youth on a dream which felt liquid and slippery until it turned to concrete. Actual, rigid, heavy, sweetly oppressive concrete.
Somewhere in-between the girl she was and the woman she turned out to be, Jennie knows something solidified. Whether that happened around or inside her, though, she was never able to tell.
“Does the draft bother you, Miss?”
The warm voice of the driver snatches her away from her thoughts.
“I’m sorry?”
“The draft of air, does it bother you?” He reiterates, his green eyes meeting hers in the rearview mirror as his hand brings her attention to the lowered window.
She has goosebumps all over her arms and exposed shoulders, but the cool air feels good against her skin. It reminds her of that only part of Seoul she misses terribly, the one that darns a hole in her soul with a thread that is the color of melancholy. It makes her feel alive in the way her wandering fingertips do.
Doe eyes, soft lips, warm hands, loving touches, hushed words.
Jennie shakes her head, wishing the bitterness away.
“Oh no, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
He nods and reverts his attention to the road, his back readjusting and relaxing in the leather of the comfy-looking seat. The metallic voice of the navigator informs them of the heavy traffic ahead, and where she instinctively anticipates a reaction, Jennie finds none.
She closely watches him for a moment then, ever avid to learn more about other people than what they willingly disclose in conversation. If there’s one thing she has learned by living in a reality where honesty is just the wrapping of an artificial box, it’s how to read those around her—how to look for realness behind mirrors that only reflect blinding brightness.
She studies his profile and searches for some telling micro-movements that could give his true feelings away, but nothing ever changes. His leisurely drumming fingers keep reproducing the bassline of an R&B song that’s playing on the radio, and his forest green eyes keep glancing out of the window in a way she could only describe as wistful.
There is no trace of Seoul in him—no trace of the typical impatience of the company’s drivers, of the hard lines of their faces, or those frowns which get deeper and deeper with each extra minute spent in the city’s bustle.
“The traffic’s heavy tonight,” he says then—anything but frustration permeating his voice. “Hope you weren’t expecting to make it back in fifteen minutes.” If anything, he sounds amused.
An overwhelmingly light feeling fills her stomach, and she feels herself deflate.
“I don’t have anywhere else to be.” Do I want to be anywhere else?
Seoul used to feel like home—until it started suffocating her.
“First time in LA?” The driver asks after a moment, and something in the tilt of his voice sounds so familiar that she doesn’t question his attempt at making conversation.
“No, I—”
‘I played at Coachella with my group two years ago,’ her brain automatically suggests, probably out of the same habit that belongs to her artificial box. She swallows the words before the reality in which her name is a verdict can catch up with her.
“I’ve been here before,” she says, at last, determined to taste every drop of this pretense of normalcy Los Angeles has been giving her (a silent kind of recognition). “Only once—but it was enough, somehow. I’ve been dreaming to come back for the past couple of years,” she adds, surprised to realize she would have much more to say.
It’s odd, feeling safe enough to share more. She knows it’s risky, too.
“It feels like I’ve been living here my whole life—if that makes sense.”
‘Almost feels like home’, is what rings in her ears.
“I know what you mean.”
“Were you born here?”
“Oh,” he laughs lightly, his green eyes lighting up in a way that makes him look younger. “I wasn’t. Very few of those who live here are.”
He doesn’t add anything else, but something in his voice tells her that he only stopped talking to be polite, rather than for lack of content.
“What made you stay?”
“That’s a tricky one,” he begins, the mirth in his voice not giving Jennie the chance to feel intrusive. “What made you want to come back?”
“Nuh-uh, I asked first.”
“Alright, alright,” he says, holding his hands up in surrender. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
“Wanted to copy-paste my answer?”
“You’d be surprised to know how many times customers don’t notice I do that. If they’re familiar with what you’re saying, they feel less guilty when they eventually stop listening.”
“That sounds…”
“Lonely?” He asks, looking at her for the briefest moment. “It does.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“Not anymore.”
Outside, someone angrily honks. The driver doesn’t seem to notice—or care.
“See, LA taught me more about myself than any other city or any other person ever did. When I first came here I was very young, very lost. I had traveled, lived here and there, met many people, fell in love a couple of times but—all of that hadn’t been enough, not to find that something I thought I was desperately looking for,” he says, emphasizing the word ‘something’ with his hands in a way that’s theatrically comical and meant to diminish a forlornness that’s too big to be put into words.
Jennie giggles quietly, only because, paradoxically, laughing seems the most adequate response in the face of a lack of somethingthat stretches too far to not be everything.
“Turns out, running away is kinda useless if you keep bringing along the thing you’re running away from.”
The thing.
“I don’t know what it is about LA, but I know here I felt free to look at myself and actually see what I was looking at—a lost man, standing still in the middle of a sidewalk, soaking in the sun.”
The purposefully dramatic way in which he adds soaking in the sun makes her laugh.
“Quite the poet, aren’t you?”
“Pablo Neruda in the flesh, ma’am.”
I felt free.
“Freedom,” she whispers, trying to estimate how sharp such a word is as it lies on the tender tissue of her tongue.
“Yes, freedom,” he repeats. “Freedom to acknowledge and embrace that lost man, standing still in the middle of a sidewalk.”
“And what does that feel like to you?”
“Peace, recognition,” he says, pensively. “Oh, you know what tastes a lot like freedom? Love,” he adds after a moment. “That’s the closest thing.”
Love.
This time, Jennie doesn’t repeat it out loud. She knows she’d cut her tongue with it.
She hums in response, gifts her driver half a smile when he looks away and turns up the volume of the stereo, hiding behind a see-through wall that gives Jennie the impression of being the only occupant of the car.
You know what tastes a lot like freedom?
Doe eyes, soft lips, warm hands, loving touches, hushed words.
That’s the closest thing.
She wonders what happens when you seem to have never really known the first, and lost the second.
“Anyone you fancy tonight, Kim?” Hoyeon asks, tired of listening to the classical music playing in the background as an endless stream of people keeps taking the stage to deliver an ever-rearranged version of the same old speech.
Jennie looks up from her empty porcelain plate.
“What do you mean?”
“Anyone you wanna bring to your hotel room after this boring-ass gala?”
“No, I—I don’t think so,” Jennie says, her absent gaze briefly wandering around the room, only to finally return to the table they’re sitting at.
Hoyeon slightly tilts her head to the left. She is sure she could abduct her and Jennie wouldn’t even notice the change in environment.
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“You know, It’d be flattering if I could say Jennie Kim was so invested in me that her eyes never looked at anyone else tonight, but I guess I can’t hold a candle to the tablecloth, huh?”
Jennie’s composed expression falters, a small giggle echoing in her throat. “Sorry, I’m feeling a bit out of it tonight.”
“Yeah, you’re kind of a lousy plus-one.”
“Hey!”
When Jennie goes to smack her arm, Hoyeon dodges the hit.
“Nuh-huh, find someone else to use as your punching bag tonight, Kim. I’m sure there are plenty of people in this room who would be into that,” the taller girl says, suggestively wiggling her eyebrows.
“Too bad I only have eyes for you, then.”
“Please, the guy I went out with last week sounded more convincing.”
“The one who wouldn’t stop raving about his alleged ‘best friend’? You’re kinda hurting my ego here, Hoyeon.”
“Serves you right,” she says, pouring herself a glass of water and searching for Jennie’s eyes. “You are aware the invitation to this gala includes more than the fancy champagne we were promised, right?” Hoyeon asks then, balancing her elbow on the edge of the table as she rests her chin on her edgy knuckles.
“Well, they did bring us olives, too.”
“How about the hundreds of hot people we’re surrounded by? You can’t possibly expect me to believe none of them caught your attention, Jen.”
Jennie stays silent, her mind suddenly drifting to a pair of wide doe eyes and gentle hands which she wishes she didn’t miss as much as she does. Not now, at least—not when she’s surrounded by prying eyes and is supposed to be having plenty of fun.
Focused on the nameless emotion that is climbing her esophagus, she doesn’t hear Hoyeon when she adds: “Unless there is someone else who is occupying your thoughts and you haven’t told me about?”
What her eardrums catch instead is a high-pitched: “Damn, Kim,” followed by a: “I can’t believe this!” which successfully snatches her away from her thoughts.
“Excuse me?”
“There is someone, isn’t there?”
“What are you talking about?” She asks, that same emotion now impatiently knocking at her throat’s door.
“Oh, believe me, dear friend, I recognize that look you have on your face. Your eyes have longing written all over them.”
“There isn’t anyone, Hoyeon,” Jennie says, wishing her voice was as firm as her hold on the glass of wine.
“Hold on, let me see,” Hoyeon says as she pushes her chair closer to Jennie’s and puts both of her hands around her face. “If I squinch just enough I might be able to read their name too.”
“Whose name? What are you—Ugh, stop it,” Jennie alarmedly whispers—her hands trying to push the model off of her.
“Alright, sorry,” Hoyeon says, raising her hands in surrender. She pushes her chair back a tiny bit, only because now she can clearly see the shadow of a strong emotion lurking in Jennie’s dark eyes, and she does not want to further overwhelm her increasingly upset friend.
“What’s wrong, Jen?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she says, but her voice trembles.
“Is it a girl again?”
And just like that, Jennie breaks.
“Will you lower your voice?” she hisses as she grabs hold of Hoyeon’s wrist—her voice strangled as it gets stuck in her throat. She throws a quick panicked look behind her back and then beyond the other girl’s shoulders—her eyes scanning the room for anyone who might have heard.
“I’ve already done enough damage for a lifetime over the week I’ve been here. I don’t need another scandal to break,” Jennie carries on as her thumbs come to smoothen out invisible lines on her forehead.
Hoyeon stops for a moment then and takes some time to analyze the evidence of the distraught demeanor that has suddenly replaced Jennie’s previously calm aura. The other girl looks drained, but in a subtle, somehow composed way. She must’ve learned to cover it up well, Hoyeon thinks, because her eyes are the only feature in her body to betray her stoic façade.
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t recognize that look, though. She knows what fear looks like, no matter how good the other girl is at covering it up.
It’s odd, to see such emotion on Jennie’s face. Unsettling, even.
“It was just a stupid video, Jennie,” Hoyeon says in the gentlest way possible. As she lowers her hand and rests it on top of the other girl’s, she adds: “Everything’s gonna be fine.”
“I don’t know, Hoyeon. You should’ve seen my manager this morning—he was furious,” she mumbles as she downs the glass of champagne in one go, her features contorting in a grimace. “It was so mortifying—and I couldn’t even defend myself! Anyone could tell I was wasted. I should’ve noticed she was taking a video of me, should’ve known she was gonna—”
“Jen, breathe,” Hoyeon says, her thumb moving in small circles on the other girl’s wrist, right above her pulse-point.
“Look at me,” she adds after a silent moment, looking for the Jennie she knows in the deep end of a pair of walled-up, glossy pupils. “You told me how bad things can get with your company, so I get why you might be worried—but they got nothing on you. Yes, that video shouldn’t have been posted, but you weren’t the one who shared it. You were just having fun, Jennie. You can’t be held responsible for what others do.”
“I would have noticed, had I been sober.”
“But you don’t know that, Jen. You’re blaming yourself for something you didn’t have control over,” she says, before specifying: “They—are blaming you for something you didn’t have control over.”
Jennie’s shoulders deflate and the sudden movement seems to release a timid flash of energy that reverberates along her spine, up to her neck. Nobody could probably tell she’s nodding, but with the way Hoyeon is looking at her, it’d be impossible for her not to see the slight movement of the girl’s head under the hands she has now buried in her dark tresses.
“I’m tired, Hoyeon,” Jennie mumbles as she keeps her eyes closed—her figure slightly hunched over the table. “I’ve been having such a great time here, so much so that at some point I think—I think I got high on the idea of freedom, you know? The same freedom they kept hidden from me, from us—trying to make us believe there is no better reality than the one we’re living in.”
Seeing how upset she looks, Hoyeon almost wants to put a stop to Jennie’s rant, but the other girl seems to be finally confessing something that’s covered in years’ worth of dust, so she doesn’t interrupt her.
“And do you wanna know what the funny thing is?”
“What is it?”
“The funny thing is that that reality is anything but real. It is fake, artificial, the farthest away from the truth. There are people out there who claim to know everything about me, when not even I know who I am. The only thing I’m sure of is that the Kim Jennie that lives out there looks almost nothing like the girl I see in the mirror.”
Jennie’s eyes are closed, but her broken voice and laboured breath alone give away how worked up she is. Hoyeon’s heart breaks for her friend, and even though her first instinct is to do something about it, to try and fix a broken system, she knows there’s nothing they can do, not tonight at least—certainly not when Jennie is at her sixth glass of champagne.
What she knows she can do, though, is redirect Jennie’s attention.
“I bet they both look smoking hot, though. And I’m sure the cute blonde over there would agree,” she says as she playfully hits Jennie’s elbow with her own, her chin pointing towards a girl who’s standing a few feet away from them, back leaned against a pillar.
A cute blonde, Jennie repeats in her head as her eyes snap open and she looks over her shoulder to locate the girl her friend is talking about—her buzzy and unfocused mind slipping as she inadvertently looks for someone in particular, someone who, she knows, doesn’t belong here.
Doe eyes, soft lips, warm hands, loving touches, hushed words.
“She has been eyeing you all night.”
Jennie searches for her, wistfully wondering whether that blonde could be her blonde girl, standing just a few feet away. But the moment she meets the girl’s awaiting gaze and finds a pair of ice-blue eyes where warm, impossibly dark ones should be, she turns around and flags the waiter for another glass of champagne.
“She’s probably just a fan.”
“Yup, a fan of your body out of this tight dress. What is it—Mugler?”
“Hoyeon!”
“It’s the LACMA gala, Jen—nothing gets out of here if your manager doesn’t want it to. What’s keeping you at this table?”
“I just—I… I can’t, alright?”
Hoyeon looks at her some more, her eyes searching for the reason for Jennie’s troubles in the way her shoulders tense and relax continuously, the way she wrinkles her nose, the way she seems to pay no mind to the glass of champagne the waiter has just refilled for her.
They haven’t been close for long and Jennie has always done a great job of hiding her deepest and most troubling thoughts under the façade of the girl who seemingly doesn’t fear lamenting anything that bugs her, but Hoyeon soon figured that Jennie loves to redirect other people’s attention to the chaos she creates, rather than have them look at her.
She pushes the glass into Jennie’s visual field and closer to the tiny hand that’s mindlessly playing with the tablecloth.
She can tell the other girl is a thousand miles away, no matter how close they’re sitting.
“So… About the girl who’s occupying your thoughts.”
That snaps Jennie out of her reverie, but in an almost unperceivable way that has Hoyeon wondering whether her friend was already thinking of that.
“What about her?”
“So you admit there is a girl, huh?”
Jennie doesn’t answer. What she does, instead, is chugging the champagne.
“Tell me about her?”
“We shouldn’t be talking about this here. Anyone could be listening.”
“Yeah, I know,” Hoyeon says, almost chastised by Jennie’s sharp tone. “Can’t blame me for trying, though.”
“She seems so far away lately,” Jennie defeatedly murmurs after a span of time which, to Hoyeon, almost felt like an eternity.
“Is she… Is she in the industry?”
Jennie nods slowly. Hoyeon gulps.
“YG?”
“Yeah,” Jennie says, bitterness coating her voice.
And if right now Hoyeon dared assume anything, she’d say the glint her friend had in her eyes when she mentioned the presence of a blonde girl earlier might have something to do with a certain world-record breaker soloist she has heard lots about.
But Hoyeon hates assuming, although that might be all she can do tonight.
“When we first met—Do you remember what you said when I asked what being an idol feels like?”
Jennie thinks about their very first meeting, but cannot recall much besides mixed up images of a room as packed with people as the one they are currently in, lots of cold hands shaking hers, and curtains that matched the golden color of the warm liquid that kept sliding down her throat throughout the night.
She shakes her head, anxiety creeping in at the thought of what she might have spilled, other than the wine that she remembers running down her glass and falling on her velvet shoes—staining them.
“Overwhelming, that’s all you said.”
There’s a question burning in Jennie’s eyes, a glint of wonder which trembles under a veil of fear that the shorter girl seems unable to shake off her shoulders.
“All I’m trying to say is… This girl—she’ll come around,” Hoyeon says, her hand coming to rest on Jennie’s shoulder.
“I know she will, Jen. What you two have must be special, given how mopey you are tonight,” she adds, looking into a pair of amused feline eyes. “It’s a lot, what you do. And you know far better than me how the industry is—how chaotic it gets, how it sucks you into this never-ending whirlwind of events and emotions.”
“You said it yourself, remember? When your solo promotions ended—you said something about feeling like you had lost your balance.”
“Yeah, I remember. And you said—”
“Something stupid, probably,” Hoyeon says, happy when Jennie’s small laugh reaches her eardrums.
“But what I’m trying to say now is that—balance and gravity are two different things, Jen. No matter how little equilibrium we have in our lives, the gravity pull won’t ever fail us. And that’s why she will come around—You just have to give it a little time and faith, yeah?”
Hoyeon knows she is blindly walking on eggshells. She has no idea whether her assumptions might be accurate or the farthest away from the reality of facts, but the moment Jennie’s eyes turn impossibly soft is when she knows that, regardless of what is going on in her friend’s life, she must’ve said something right.
And for tonight, Hoyeon decides, that is more than enough.
“I think I need to go,” she says then, grumpily eyeing her now insistently chiming phone. “I have a shooting early in the morning, and apparently my stylist is planning on keeping me up all night for fittings. Do you need a lift back to your hotel?”
“No, don’t worry. My manager made sure to have that covered,” Jennie says, sharp irony falling from her lips. “But thank you anyways. And thank you for everything else as well, Hoyeon—I mean it. I’m sorry I wasn’t the life of the party.”
“It’s alright, at least you’re nice to look at,” Hoyeon says with a playful wink and a soft smile as she gets up—purse in hand and jacket on her arm. “Try not to do anything illegal while I’m away—I’ll need to try those pancakes of yours when I go back to Seoul, see if they’re still as good.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is mouthwatering.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Hoyeon rolls her eyes in faux annoyance, the twitching corners of her lips betraying her. “Good night, heart-stealer. I’ll see you soon” she whispers close to Jennie’s ear before straightening her back and moving in the direction of the back door, balancing on her high heels with the effortless elegance only a model could have.
A model—or Lisa, Jennie’s mind echoes, her attention suddenly running away from her surroundings.
Doe eyes, soft lips, warm hands, loving touches, hushed words.
A moment later, when the fog lifts and Jennie goes to greet her goodnight, Hoyeon is already gone.
The sound of the car door sliding open swallows up the memories of the night replaying in her head.
“We’re here. You have a good night, Miss—”
“Kim. Jennie Kim,” she says, only because she needs to say her name to feel more real and less like a character in someone else’s story.
“Yeah, I know,” he says, kind in the way he keeps the door open for her and does not ask any questions when he notices the mist veiling her eyes.
But do you really know?
“You have a good night too...”
“Colin,” he says firmly—his eyes shining with a desire to be recognized for who he knows he is, to cease being nameless for one more person on this lonely planet. “A lost man, standing still in the middle of a sidewalk, soaking in the sun.”
Freedom.
“Colin,” Jennie repeats, unable to keep a smile from blooming on her face. I see you.
She gives him her hand when he extends his own, slightly bows in a sign of farewell, and then walks towards the hotel’s stairway—the familiarity of his warm, welcoming expression making a chill run down her spine.
She wonders what it is that people see when they look at her.
“Don’t forget to soak in the sun, yeah?”
She stops mid-step and looks up at the impossibly dark sky—the loud silence of her thoughts echoing in the night.
Standing still in the middle of a stairway, Jennie Kim takes a deep breath, and then keeps climbing.