i was only a girl when i wore those clothes Who: Taeja & Jin-ae. What: Tae's trying to study and Jin-ae gives no fucks. Where: Tae's room. When: After school, late evening. Warnings: None, unless you think cute is gross. Status: Gdoc, complete.
A boy was bent over his desk, large, can-sized earphones over his ears. At first glance, a viewer might wonder why he was wearing such an obstruction while attempting to absorb his studies, but upon first listen, the reason why became quite clear.
A TV sitting on a nearby stand, facing a large, four-poster bed, was turned up glaringly loud. A young Asian girl in a teal blue dress tossed a slightly older and otherwise much larger boy over her shoulder without issue. The only person actually watching this drama unfold was a slightly transparent girl hanging upside down in the middle of the room. Her long, dark locks brushed the floor, and though she found her choice of television perfectly entertaining, every so often she glanced in the boy's direction. Clearly the loud sound had been intended to make him do something, but that outcome had left the girl ghost displeased.
Jin-ae flipped, turning right side up, her hair moving like water over her incorporeal form. Looping her arms over her chest, she moved in Taeja's direction, hovering over him. If she'd had a lower half, it would have been right up against him, but as it was, her midsection came neatly to just the back of his neck.
Taeja could feel her behind him, though he continued to quite pointedly ignore her. Moszkowski flowed through his headphones, a flurry of piano-playing that actually drowned out the majority of the K-drama playing at top volume behind him. He had not quite reached the point of threatening to unplug the television, but he had come very close, and was getting closer by the moment. For now he held his silence, and set his pen scribbling across the page in rapid notes to match the pace of the concerto pouring in his ears.
A transparently pink tongue slid across her lips as Jin-ae glanced at the TV, lowering the volume to a quiet roar as she sank down enough to wind her arms around Taeja's shoulders and neck. She peeked around the side of his head, reading what he was writing; her brows drew together in confusion, words muttering in an attempt at mimicry of what she saw written in front of her.
"Beloved acts as a mode of 'intervention' in the novel as she...interrupts the cyclical nature of...the pain and unwillingness...to face...memory and history... ... Taeja, what are you reading?" She turned her head toward him, remembering his headphones, and gently tugged one off of his ear so that he could hear her. She pointed to the line of text she'd just read aloud. "You're reading about a ghost?"
He blinked, as though clearing his vision might clear the raucous music from his head as well. Noting the television's lowered volume, he reached up to his phone where it lay on the desk, and turned off the music with a swipe of his finger. For one fleeting moment he felt embarrassed; he had not connected the subject matter to his resident spirit, had not once considered it would be of any interest to her. With slow deliberation he removed his headphones, setting them aside on the desk.
"I am," he said. "It's called Beloved. You've literally been hovering over me before while I've read it. Why are you interested now?" The question might have seemed pointed but for his tone; it was softer than it had been of late, with a note of sincere curiosity.
Jin-ae shrugged, pulling her arm back across his chest to curl with its mate. She liked this position, even when she was too light to be noticeable. She could see Taeja's shirt through her arms, and the softest touch of her head against his was enough to send her temple inside of his. Pulling herself together, she could feel the warmth of his skin where she had none, and one long, dark tendril of hair flowed over his shoulder.
"I didn't understand what you were reading about, and it sounded boring, which was why I wanted to watch Strong Woman Do Bong-Soon instead," she said. "I didn't know she was a ghost. She wasn't called that in the novel, was she? It sounded more... like she was something else. I don't know the word for it." Downcast eyes nearly set a fringe of lashes against her cheek as she perused the rest of his notes, trying to make sense of what she was sure he was too annoyed to explain.
His finger slid over the sharp scrawl of his notes until he found a particular word. He underlined it with one elegant, tapered digit. "She's a metaphor," he said. "She symbolizes something else. In this case, the legacy of slavery in America. How it affects people, how they cope, how they grieve…" His slight shrug moved him closer to her; he leaned in until he felt the cold coil of her hair on his shoulder. "She's a ghost, too, if you ask me. 'Literalize the metaphor,' they say, and I think Morrison did exactly that."
He turned black eyes up to her, studying her porcelain-tinted translucence. "Even ghosts can be complex. More than one thing. Can't they?"
Her nose had wrinkled at the discussion of the book's topic; not out of disgust at the content itself, but over why people would want to spend so much time and effort on such a thing. It made her stomach twist.
"Of course they can," she replied, somewhat indignant as though he'd presented her with an obvious notion, glad for the conversation to latch onto, attempting to pull herself out of her thoughts. It didn't work; she'd been mired in painful memory and unrelenting anguish for too long to dispel such things at a whim.
"But why? Why would anyone want to... I thought books were meant to entertain." Her cheek dipped unconsciously close to his, the cool touch sliding against his warm, smooth skin. Fingers rolled against his shirt, collecting a small handful of it as her body made clear her unvoiced discomfort.
Taeja reached out to touch her, but of course he failed. His hand slipped straight through hers, but he adjusted, his fingers curving just above her own as though he held her hand. It was not the reassuring caress he wanted to offer, but it was as close as he could manage.
"They can," he said, "but they can be challenging, too. Provocative. Like Nabokov's Lolita, or Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Sure, some people found them titillating or scandalous -- entertaining, I mean -- but they're more than that, too. Literature is supposed to push you a little, I think. For better or worse."
Tae was pleased with his explanation, and he believed every word. But he knew he had yet to get to the heart of what truly troubled her; that knowledge nagged at him, nipping at the back of his mind until at last he had to speak. "Tell me what you're thinking, Jin-ae."
She wanted to ask about the books he named, see if he had copies; she liked the idea of getting back into old habits, as if she were to resume her life without the 400 year interruption. But his question caught her off guard, her mouth open to speak her questions but paused before it could complete its act. Her eyes went to his hand, floating above hers, and she lifted her own to watch transparently white fingers slide easily through his living flesh.
"When I was alive," she would never get used to that sentence, neither its form or its contents, "I was a gisaeng at Changdeokgung court." For a minute, she wondered if there was anything left of the old palace. All she could recall was a cavernous ruin, burned like an eggshell from the inside out. "We were...toys. Well kept and cared for, but toys. It's just... If I had realized sooner, or I had known... Now I wish I hadn't asked, but you spend so much time studying. I wanted to see what you were so interested in." She was not used to not talking, to not entertaining, to not have something asked of her. Rather than feeling shelved, as she had inside her pen, she felt untethered.
Taeja's frown was small and faint, but it was there. His fingers toyed with hers, passing over and through the chill of her translucence. "I'm glad you asked," he said. "And I know it's macabre, but I am interested in the book, and in your reaction to it, too." He gestured to his notes. "You can learn a lot from someone by how they respond to work like this.
"I apologize if I've made you uncomfortable. But I am glad you shared this with me." He looked up to her. A quick smile flashed over his lips, gone in an instant. "You should read more with me. I promise these books are at least as interesting as your dramas. You just have to know how to read them."
With me. Jin-ae wasn't certain if he'd purposefully said it, or if the words had simply slipped into the sentence errantly. Either way, she found herself smiling and nodding.
"I'd like that," she said. Her arms tightened around his shoulders, for all the good it would do her. "What are the other ones about? The ones you mentioned -- this Lolita, and Misteo Gray?"
If he concentrated enough, it almost seemed he could feel her arms around him. He enjoyed the sensation -- false though it was -- more than he had anticipated. He cleared his throat, forcing down that unexpected pleasure. "Lolita is about a man infatuated with a young girl. He thinks they're in love and that she's seducing him, but obviously she isn't. She's just a child. And Dorian Gray is about… well, corruption and morality. What someone can do when they face no consequences for their actions."
Her smile tempered; had he picked the books for a reason? As much as she wanted to, she wanted to forget her past and pretend she was part of this present day, when she so clearly wasn't. She pulled back, her arms drifting through Tae's throat as she moved to hover halfway inside his desk, one hand curled into a fist for her chin to rest on as her other fiddled with the pens he had set in a nearby cup for easy access.
"Don't you have anything nicer?" She wrinkled her nose, glancing up from the desk to his face, then shook her head. "No, wait. I want to try something you like; you let me," and this was spoken with no small amount of sarcasm, albeit flirtingly, "watch my shows, and I know you watch them too, sometimes, when you think I'm not looking," she finished, teasingly. Taeja tried and failed to look indignant at this assertion. Her smile tempered. "So let's... Let's try Lolita. It does sound like it would be interesting."
Taeja nodded. "All right. We'll read the book together. It really is well written. Very… poetic, or at least lush, I'd say. Then we can watch a couple of the film adaptations, if you want. They aren't nearly as good as the book, though."
He did not smile, though his expression softened in a way that was a clear approximation of such a look. He watched her where she hovered over the desk; studied her hands where they moved over his belongings as though they were her own. "If you get all the way through it without complaining of boredom, I'll even watch an episode of that awful show with you."
She did smile, wide enough for the both of them. "Really? And it is not awful, it just means you haven't been paying close enough attention; you're just going off of glances, if you watched the whole thing, it's really very good..." That small promise, however uncertain it seemed, was enough to have her off on her own little tear again; she started babbling about the drama, talking about the show in much the same way as Tae had his book, albeit in a less elegant manner due to her excitement.
For the first time, Tae listened to her K-drama ramblings with genuine interest. Her enthusiasm might not be enough to carry him through an entire episode, but he had made a promise, and he would keep it. Soon she had him truly smiling, and his homework was forgotten.