Chapter Text
Today’s barista must be new. Jessica watches her fumble with the register, fingers darting uncertainly over the screen, and tries to arrange her expression into a more patient one. The girl behind the counter can’t be much older than eighteen, after all, fresh-faced but carrying shadows under her eyes in the way only a cram school student could. But what would Jessica know about that. Her own youth is a decade past, and one of such enviable normalcy farther still. She’d have an easier time relating to whatever boy group is currently serenading them through the ceiling speakers than to this girl standing in front of her.
The final strident chord of that song is fading out when the barista finishes her tapping and asks, “And a name for the order?”
“Right,” Jessica says. “Let’s see...”
Jessica had forgone a mask today, wearing only a pair of Blanc-patented sunglasses to conceal her eyes. If the barista hasn’t recognized her yet, it’s unlikely any buried memories will be unearthed by her name alone. Even still—
Overhead, the next song on the playlist starts up. Not a group this time, and not a melody Jessica knows either, but the voice...
“This song,” she says abruptly. “Do you know it?”
“Oh!” The barista glances up at her. “You mean ‘Four Seasons’? Yes, it came out a few months ago. It’s—”
“Kim Taeyeon,” Jessica murmurs, understanding at once. “Of course.”
The barista nods enthusiastically, leaning forward on the counter. It’s the most attentive she’s been during their whole exchange. “I was just talking to my friends about getting concert tickets! Are you a fan?”
“Well,” Jessica starts. She flounders for a second, then tries for a carefully neutral answer. “I haven’t listened to her music much lately, to be honest.”
A gross understatement. To be honest, she’s spent years avoiding every one of her old groupmates’ music, but it’s as if Taeyeon’s voice is determined to haunt her any time she sets foot in Seoul. Taxicab radios, DJ booths, and the latest: here, through the sound system in a back-alley coffee shop that she’d never normally step into, were it not for today's distinct lack of an accompanying manager.
“Oh,” says the barista, decidedly less excited this time. Whatever brief interest Jessica might have piqued earlier has clearly dissipated at that bland response. She goes to hand Jessica the receipt and pauses. “Sorry, I don’t think I ended up getting your name?”
“It’s Jessica.”
She’s probably imagining the spark of recognition in the barista’s eyes.
Jessica takes the receipt and heads to one of the tables to wait, weighing her options. The music around her is starting to crescendo. There’s a pair of Airpods somewhere in her purse. How rude would it be to put them in?
“In those hot and cold seasons,” Taeyeon croons, her words plaintive and dismissive at once, “did I even really love you? ”
Her hand is just closing around the case when the barista calls her name.
//
Jessica buys a ticket to Berlin.
The proper thing to do would be to discuss this with Tyler beforehand, but wasting another week haggling over details with him isn’t a particularly appealing prospect, especially since her mind’s already made up. She does have the self-preservation to at least text him afterward, like: oh and could you clear my schedule for next week? I’m going on vacation.
Her phone is buzzing within seconds. Where to, with who, that sort of thing. He even throws in a sharp what on earth are you thinking? for good measure. There was a time when he might have bothered to call and ask her why, but that ship sailed long ago.
Regardless of Tyler's personal feelings on the matter, Blanc has proven itself more than capable of surviving a week without her. And Jessica deserves a break; even he couldn’t argue that. Spending any amount of time in Seoul exhausts her, without fail, yet something always pulls her back—business at the flagship store, or family, or the latest brief stint on a television show. Like an anchor, holding her in place and weighing her down.
Tyler’s dissatisfaction will have to endure.
//
Europe is a breath of fresh air. Jessica will never tire of walking down the streets so brazenly, without the trailing entourage of managers or security, or even the friends that usually accompany her on trips like these. Years of spending half her days outside Korea and she still hasn’t grown accustomed to the freedom of relative anonymity.
Jessica’s only been in Berlin once, for a photoshoot, and the plane rides there and back had taken more time than the slim hours she’d been allocated in the city. Frankly, she’d bought this ticket on a whim; scrolling through the available next-day departures from Incheon, it had been the first to catch her eye.
She spends the first half of the week exploring all of the Google-recommended sightseeing locations—most are historical landmarks, old buildings filled with museums, paintings and war memorabilia. By the fourth day, Jessica’s had her fill of stale indoor air and crowds of tourists, half of whom are feigning their curiosity poorly at best. The city, apart from its history, has its own appeal—and she always did do better without an itinerary.
A day devoted to meandering down the riverbank. One morning lazing by the hotel pool, drinking her fill of Berlin’s abundant June sunlight. That evening hopping bars, laughing with some stranger over the counter. Jessica sleeps in late and spends the afternoon wandering red-brick plazas and bustling markets further downtown.
On the second to last morning of her stay, Jessica’s sprawled herself across the green slopes of the park by her hotel, attempting to coax a squirrel into approaching her by laying out a trail of nuts and staying very, very still. It’s precisely three walnuts away when she spots something strange out of the corner of her eye.
A crowd is gathered around the island of grass at the other end of the park. From her vantage point, head-level with a squirrel, Jessica can’t see what it is that they’re all looking at—but is that a camera crew?
Jessica sits up abruptly. The squirrel scampers away to the safety of a tree, giving her what must be a deeply offended look from halfway up its trunk.
It’s only idle curiosity that draws her in, at first, but she’s crossed half the distance when she hears the guitar. It’s nothing more than a nimble assortment of notes that rings through the air to a smattering of cheers and applause, and not an instrumental she recognizes. It really shouldn’t mean anything to her, except that it does; familiar in a way she can’t place, like a voice she’d heard in passing once, or maybe in a distant dream.
Or, as it turns out, in the shitty tin-can speakers of a back-alley Seoul coffee shop. Because when Jessica steps close enough to see, peering over the shoulders of the couple in front of her, the one at the center of it all is none other than a newly-blonde, coolly-striking Kim Taeyeon, lifting a microphone to her lips.
//
“You saw who?”
“You heard me,” says Jessica grimly. “I told you, I wouldn’t call at this time if it wasn’t important.”
She hears the sound of fabric rustling and pictures Irene Kim, halfway across the world, rolling over in bed and staring down at her phone in stunned sympathy. “Jessi...”
“What is she even doing in Berlin?” Jessica bursts out, before Irene can continue. She flings an arm over her eyes, struck down by disbelief, flabbergasted by the sheer improbability of the whole situation. Even knowing the answer to her own question—
Apparently, Kim Taeyeon has spent the last month traveling through Europe for the filming of the latest season of JTBC’s Begin Again. Jessica would know this, had she not spent the last five years studiously scrolling past any Taeyeon-related headlines that popped up on her feed. But she had, and now it came to this: Taeyeon, arriving in the city exactly one day before Jessica’s fateful stroll through Manuer Park, Berlin.
—it is, without a doubt, the most ridiculous coincidence in the history of coincidences. She can picture tomorrow's trending topics on Naver already: JESSICA JUNG, NOT SATISFIED BY CASH-GRAB BOOK DEAL, CAUGHT STALKING EX-BANDMATE TAEYEON ACROSS THE GLOBE.
Even Jessica would have some trouble scrolling past that headline.
“I mean,” Irene starts hesitantly, when it becomes clear that Jessica is incapable of further speech for the moment, “it could be worse, right? You said she didn’t notice you?”
“I’m not sure,” Jessica admits. “She might have. Hopefully she didn’t.” She tips her head back into the couch cushions until she’s staring up at the ceiling and breathes out slowly, until it no longer sounds shaky at the edges. “It shouldn’t matter this much,” she says, frustrated at herself. “She isn’t even—it’s not like I—well. I don’t know.”
Irene processes this for a moment, then hums, appropriately sympathetic. “When was the last time you two talked?”
That Irene has to ask is a reminder she hadn’t grown close with Jessica until years after the initial implosion, by which time Jessica was already working through the last of the fallout. She can’t have known that in the end, there was no more talking to be done. Jessica deleted a dozen numbers and changed her own, ignored the few that managed to find her anyway, and only recently managed to find it in herself to respond to their occasional holiday well-wishes. Taeyeon was not one of them. The idea of speaking to her, of all people, is one that Jessica has only entertained when very, very drunk, and even then she kept it on a leash so tight it could never slip into reality.
Jessica’s still trying to find the least pathetic way to say never, but clearly Irene has already taken her silence as its own answer. Jessica doesn’t have to imagine the sympathy in her friend’s voice this time when she says, “Jessi, that’s...”
“I know it is,” Jessica says, sharpness leaking into her tone despite her best efforts. Frustrated, she rubs a hand across her face and sits up. “Look, I’m sorry. This whole thing has me on edge. I just can’t seem to get away from any of it recently.”
“No, I get it,” says Irene, as charitable as ever. They lapse into silence for a moment, until she breaks it with a sudden, “Hey, I never finished telling you about what happened at that club in Paris, did I? You wouldn’t believe the nerve of this guy...”
Jessica recognizes a lifeline when it’s thrown at her, and she’s more than happy to accept this one. She sinks back into the couch and tries her best to relax, letting Irene’s voice fade to a comforting murmur in the background. Her whole body is simultaneously flooded with exhaustion and humming with energy, the sort of post-encounter adrenaline of a hare that has narrowly escaped a starving wolf. Ready to bolt at any moment.
Five years of silence and a chance encounter in the park still sets her off like this. Perhaps it’s a small mercy that Taeyeon had never reached out earlier.
//
Tyler’s already in the backseat when she steps out of the airport and into the waiting car, wearing an unnecessarily pretentious suit and an even graver expression.
“I have to ask,” he begins, before the car door has even fully shut behind her, “whether this was your intention from the start.”
Jessica carefully directs her attention towards slotting her seat belt into its buckle as slowly as she can manage. “Hello to you too,” she says flatly. “I thought we were dropping the idol-manager buddy system these days?”
She looks up just in time to catch his frown deepening. “Don’t stall, Sooyeon. Did you know Kim Taeyeon would be filming in Berlin when you booked your trip?”
Jessica chances a glance at the driver and is grateful to find that the privacy divider is already rolled up. As always, Tyler rarely wastes time mincing words. It’s a quality she’d found far from endearing during the course of their ill-fated relationship, but at least she can appreciate the efficiency when it comes to matters of business.
“No, I didn’t,” she says. “And honestly, Tyler, it’s been a long flight. I would really rather not talk about this right now.”
“Trust me, I feel the same.” Tyler drums his fingers against the knee of his ridiculous suit. “Unfortunately we don’t have that choice. Even if you didn’t know she would be there, Jessica, surely you should’ve been aware of the possible ramifications of standing around and watching her.”
“I just happened to be passing by,” says Jessica, slowly. Comments like these are out of the ordinary for Tyler, who has a tendency to be patronizing but not to dramatize. Bumping into Kim Taeyeon in Berlin of all places is an absurd coincidence, but it’s far from the worst of Jessica’s long list of PR disasters. “I didn’t think it mattered if I stopped to listen. I don’t even know if she recognized me. In fact, how did you even hear about...”
The car jerks to a sudden stop. Red light. The driver looks over his shoulder and mumbles what must be an apology, though it isn’t really audible through the plastic screen; face-up on the seat beside her, Jessica’s phone lights up with a notification. All at once, several things click into place.
//
Jessica really should have seen this coming.
#OT9_COMEBACK
30.8K Tweets
jessica jung
60.5K Tweets
#taengsic
43.2K Tweets
At first glance the teaser clip doesn’t seem incriminating in the slightest. Just an overlay of Taeyeon’s voice along with the rest of the band, cutting from a shot of the musicians to a brief pan-out over the audience members. It had to have been quick, after all, to pass through what must have been several rounds of editing at JTBC.
As always, it’s a fan account that finds it first, captures the frame and puts it up for everyone to see. Look, there—right there, among the rows of captivated faces—!
Hey, isn’t that Jessica Jung?
//
She really hadn’t meant to stay for so long.
Watching her raise that microphone, Jessica had been ready to go. Had already begun to back out of the circle surrounding Taeyeon, murmuring apologies to the people she would have to squeeze past. Jessica knew very well the motions of leaving. It shouldn’t have been difficult to do it one more time, to turn away from Taeyeon again.
If only she hadn’t started to sing.
Taeyeon’s voice at the coffee shop had been one thing. Here, in front of her, it was another entirely. Nothing about it had changed, not really; not the effortless gravity she lent each syllable, or the careful way she drew out every higher note. And not, least of all, the way it tugged at something in Jessica’s chest, some tendril of feeling she thought she’d tucked away long ago, unfurling itself at last.
She stayed for the rest of that song and through the next. Then, when Kim Taeyeon finally set down the mic and waved to the audience, laughing in that half-nervous, half-pleased, still-familiar way, her gaze passed through the crowd and might have, might have caught on Jessica. Only a split second. In the next she was looking away—or maybe Taeyeon hadn’t seen her at all. It was impossible to tell, behind those huge sunglasses she wore.
Jessica took one step away, then another. Another still, until the music had faded from range. Forced herself not to break into a sprint, all the way back to the hotel.
//
So this is how things are. Jessica can leave Korea behind, can escape to China, to Hong Kong, to New York—never slowing down, never even glancing over her shoulder. Even then, halfway through Europe, Taeyeon finds her.