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There is nothing quite like the single-minded devotion of waking up and needing her blood underneath her fingertips, Bok-su knows. It is worse today, when she slips on her gloves and swears to memorize every atom of Choi Da-jeong's being before she personally obliterates that perfect life of hers; it is worse still when she looks at that stupid invitation from the groom, pastel pink and perfumed.
So she's gone soft. Bok-su grins.
What is coming is all she will ever need.
.
Sometime in university, Da-jeong made it a habit to drag her out for weekly study sessions with people who would soon slip her mind, talking avidly over things Bok-su hardly knew as she picked at her food. Even back then, Da-jeong had a way of melding conversations to suit her needs, weaving between subtle undertones with a single-minded drive that Bok-su never cared to keep up with. Perhaps it’s how she managed to win Bok-su over. Bok-su, who preferred almost anything over these pointless meetings with people whose names she would not remember after they were no longer classmates.
Bok-su, who rushed to her side at the first sign of trouble. Even in stupid, inconceivable mistakes.
There is a way to hold a knife without sharpening it or pointing it at others. Da-jeong, in her recklessly arresting nature, knows neither. Da-jeong, with surgical precision she lacked when it mattered most, is adept at leaving gaps in a life she once resided quite comfortably in. With uncomfortable salience, Bok-su can recall the desperate voicemails she’d left Da-jeong in the weeks leading up to her trial before it finally got through her head that she’d left her to drown.
How naive she was. Rather than a knife, Da-jeong is a whetstone. A deceptively flat surface with more grit and pushback than anyone would know what to do with.
Bok-su would know.
She would know.
.
The groom is foolish. No cameras or security, a perfect invitation for a woman his wife-to-be has not seen in years? His death is pragmatic, the artery she slices matching Da-jeong’s from years and years ago, and perhaps this little thing could rend them together after all this time.
It can’t be helped that it isn’t her blood. She still must have her atonement.
Bok-su could laugh if the disgust hadn’t boiled it out of her.
None of these people, with their idiotic luxury leaving the seams of their soft insides open, know just who they have allowed into their midst. Into their houses, arms, hearts, there walks the sharpened teeth of a woman who wears a wedding dress the way she wore scrubs: with conviction that wavered so completely that it disgusts her. No one on these grounds, not her own husband-to-be lying in a pile of his own dried blood and naivety, knows Choi Da-jeong the way she does. No one could even dare breach the unremarkably static fragments of that unspoken scalpel lying between them, within them, buried in the other's spine if Bok-su were kinder. The uniquely alienating thread that strangles Bok-su by the throat every time she clocks into her convenience store job only gives paper cuts to just one other, after all.
Bok-su is not kinder. Bok-su needs to see the look on her face when her dearest Da-jeong thunders down the aisle, the curve of her lips a trembling, beautiful thing.
And when she does get to see it, when Da-jeong turns, dress stained horribly in her husband’s blood, the fear clinging to her skin evaporates as their eyes meet and do you ever think they wouldn’t have have died if it were me sits between them, cloying, clogging her throat—Bok-su meets her gaze evenly. Someone is calling the police. Distant sobbing rings through the courtyard. Da-jeong’s bitten her lip so hard it’s begun to bleed.
“You—” she gasps, her voice tattered. The voice of crumbling pride. The voice of a woman who, even now, couldn’t give her a single, meaningful syllable from that mouth of hers.
Bok-su grins with teeth.
"I'm sorry," Da-jeong spits out, sitting on the right end of the prison bars, and Bok-su laughs as the world splits open.
What glorious words dyed in such disgusting falsehood. Truly. But nothing less from her dearest, right?