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ohmygirlexchange2017-01-12 03:08 pm
omgexchangemod) wrote in ohmygirlexchange2017-01-12 03:08 pm
Entry tags:
[Binnie/Jiho] Satellite (for fairyminseok)
Title: Satellite (for fairyminseok)
Prompt: Binnie is a genetically and technologically engineered genius, but now that the war on her planet is over she's just damaged technology, unable to function emotionally and filled with issues due to her lack of an attainable mission. B, (whatever species you want?) shows her how to express and love and understand life without war.
Author's note: I took some significant liberties with this prompt and would also like to apologize in advance for the simplistic way some ideas are presented!
Warnings: discussions of war, very brief implication of suicide
Rating: PG-13
Pairing(s)/Characters: Binnie/Jiho, Mimi, Yooa
Word count: 2142
Yoobin throws the covers off her legs and steps out of bed, stumbling towards the bathroom.
Excluding the one minute and twenty-four seconds it’ll take to brush her teeth and change, she could reach the cafe in seven minutes and thirty-five seconds without bypassing significant stretches of open spaces or dead-ends. That is, of course, if she runs just fast enough to keep her heart rate under 140 beats per minute, short of the range that might lead to sudden and inconvenient heart failure.
She walks.
There's a boy sitting on the steps outside the cafe when she arrives. He's eating the last croissant -- Yoobin knows because it's a little smaller than the rest and packed with care, the sleeves of the brown wrapper tucked carefully into their pockets.
"Is that good?" She doesn't know why she asks it, but the boy looks up with a smile.
Both of them have all the time in the world to make conversation. He has bright eyes, crescent-shaped ones that curve downwards at the sides. Yoobin remembers, abruptly, a photo from her youth, stuffed somewhere in her drawer at HQ. She feels dizzy.
He smiles and nods, raising his arm and offering a bite to her.
This is how everyone is now.
✂
Mihyun comes by on a Wednesday. She's brought a box of snakes and ladders and Yoobin stares at the pieces on the board, her brain going into overdrive.
"Relax," Mihyun says, biting into a small, green carrot. They've only started re-growing it a few months ago and haven't gotten the formula exactly right. Mihyun has assessed that it tastes surprisingly good ("the texture is nice"), but Yoobin hasn't worked up the courage to take a bite. It isn't necessary, in any case. She has plenty of sustenance.
"Let's do something else," Yoobin says, quietly, tearing her eyes away from the squares.
Mihyun cocks her head, breaking into a small smile. Yoobin has always liked her smile -- it takes her mind away from things, was helpful when they sat waiting for the missiles to bloom across the surface of the planet. Mihyun hadn't stopped smiling and squeezed Yoobin's hand a little tighter. She'd let out brief puffs of air, just enough to stay conscious, before the screen turned orange.
"I chose one that doesn't involve strategy," Mihyun explains, and Yoobin snaps back to reality. Mihyun's voice is light and her tone cavalier -- Mihyun has never judged Yoobin for choosing what she did, and it hasn't changed after the war, even if they don't know how to reverse it.
"How's Shiah?" Yoobin says. It's a clunky change of topic that Yoobin regrets, because Mihyun's face falls at this. She sandwiches her carrot between her teeth and pulls her blonde hair into a ponytail, her gaze dropping to Yoobin's fingers and the numbers she's tracing subconsciously onto the carpet.
"She's... recovering." Mihyun says the word quickly like it's taboo. Shiah has a dud leg she'd picked up when her plane crashed. She used to love dancing before the war and it's been taken away from her now. Mihyun can still draw, but Shiah can't draw with her limbs the way she wants to.
What's happening to Shiah isn't special, but Shiah is special to Mihyun, so Yoobin swallows whatever she'd thought to say.
They don't play snakes and ladders in the end. Yoobin stumbles over her words and ties her tongue as she tries to tell a joke, but Mihyun laughs anyway, and places a hand on the square of Yoobin's back, and all Yoobin feels is empty.
When Mihyun leaves, she forgets her coat, wedged somewhere in the back of Yoobin's couch.
Yoobin admires the stitching on Mihyun's jacket and thinks about how she has to return it to her someday, so she closes her window and ignores the fact that she's on the 37th floor. She has thought about it, of course. Stepping out. Escaping this.
The gravity on this planet is a little heavier than where she was from, but even on Earth it would be impossible to survive the fall.
✂
Yoobin still sees herself on posters sometimes. They're trying to drum up support for the next phase of rebuilding, and celebrating whoever's survived the war is evidently something that's on their agenda.
Of course, she's obscured behind the front-line "heroes", but she's there all the same, in full holographic technicolour, the barely functional gun that they'd dug up for the photoshoot clasped between her elbow and waist. Bae Yoobin, head tactician and engineer. She's grown a little taller since then and removed the programming contacts, but it still feels like they're there sometimes when she jerks awake, sunken beneath her irises.
Sometimes -- more frequently now, hour to hour -- Yoobin wants to dig them out and forget.
✂
They've re-designed bars to be fully lit since things have gotten back to semi-normal. Yoobin knows it's really not all that beneficial to be able to see who's approaching you, but most of the patrons aren't Yoobin, so it's enough of an assurance that the clientele comes back. She wishes, sometimes, that one of the protestors would recognize her and pick a fight. She's not wasteful enough to pick one herself, and too polite to attract ire -- the bartender was surprisingly pliant when she'd rejected his advances.
She's ordering her fourth drink when a girl with dark red hair takes a seat beside her, of the 5 empty chairs to Yoobin's left and the three empty couches behind her. Yoobin's lips twitch. The girl is, on all accounts, blindingly sober, which makes her a little dangerous, by Yoobin's estimation. No other alarm bells ring, so Yoobin lets it be.
"Do you think about the people who died?"
Yoobin freezes.
There, still, is nothing threatening about the girl. There's no backup waiting outside, as far as she can tell, and she's not sitting in any way to suggest a hidden weapon.
"I prefer not to," Yoobin says, lips dry.
"I'd prefer not to if I were you, too," the girl says, and her tone is still light, almost conversational. For a moment, Yoobin considers talking to this stranger and spilling secrets that could ruin their new government. She thinks about the gun tucked behind her waistband and the girl's hands, placed lightly on her thighs.
"Bae Yoobin," the girl baits, leaning closer so her breath skates across Yoobin's cheeks. "War hero. Sent a planet into flames with the flick of a switch."
Yoobin flings a fist at her before she can understand why, and the girl goes tumbling to the floor, the tip of her tailbone abrasing as she lands on her back. She laughs a little before standing up, crooked, her right knee locking before she stumbles backward, catching herself against one of the high tables.
"Kim Jiho," she says, and Yoobin watches something like derision flash in her eyes before it disappears. "I'd prefer if you did."
✂
Effective catharsis does not involve anger or lashing out at other people. Yoobin is aware of this, but she still stares at her knuckles when she eats, and when she drinks, and when she's trying to watch television. When she's not looking at them, when the room is pitch black and the sleeping solution is lodged halfway in her throat, Kim Jiho's words are ringing in her ears.
✂
Yoobin finds her sitting in the same spot. There's a creature beside her that Yoobin doesn't recognize, purring as Jiho runs her hands through its fur.
She's fried the cameras in the bar as a precaution.
"I sabotaged it," Yoobin says. Jiho turns around and the creature turns too, staring at Yoobin with beady yellow eyes.
"Sabotaged what?"
"I created a lag and sent them a signal to run. Everyone here believed that the planet was burning up days before it did."
Jiho looks away for a moment, and Yoobin watches the heave of her chest before she turns back, face drawn into a placid smile.
"That's a nice tale."
Yoobin doesn't say anything in return, and Jiho deliberates for a moment, fingers still combing through the creature's hair. "Its name is Maodi. I used to think cats had gone extinct, but they're stronger than we thought."
"Where did you find it?"
"Where are they now?" Jiho snaps, and Yoobin registers the ghost of a smile threatening to rise on her own face. It feels foreign, almost, like a thing of her past.
"Away," Yoobin says. When they'd equipped her they wanted to keep her humane, and perhaps Yoobin had retained too much empathy for their liking. The galaxy is big enough for all of them; something Yoobin had known before she'd accepted the procedure, and something she used after she'd been equipped. It is not impossible to transport entire populations to other places.
Jiho smiles again, this time so widely and beautifully that Yoobin feels her heart thrumming behind her ribcage, her pulse travel to the tips of her fingers and threatening to break through the skin. Yoobin shouldn't feel like this -- she hasn't known how to feel like this in such a terribly long time.
"You're not lying," Jiho breathes, finally, into the silence. She caves into herself, her palm pressed to her chest, small sounds escaping her in measures. Yoobin thinks she's crying but she can't be sure.
"I don't need to lie now," Yoobin says, carefully, and Jiho's head drops onto her shoulder when Yoobin closes the distance between them, sends warmth in the form of tears spreading across her skin.
Jiho's fingers are almost tearing holes in her shirt.
The war is over.
✂
Jiho used to want to be a shoe-maker. She was sixteen too when she'd given up her dreams to join the volunteer forces. She was seventeen and three months old when she was discharged. Now she's doing odd-jobs in the city, cleaning up debris and sucking ash off the roads. Removing reminders.
She spears a longan from her drink while Yoobin waits for her to continue.
"I stopped the tank and started ramming into our own battalions," Jiho says. "I told them I'd lost control of the system."
"And they believed you?"
"I'm a smart liar," Jiho says. "I waited to use one they couldn't monitor remotely. It didn't help much in the long run, but there was a ceasefire for a week."
Yoobin doesn't probe. Jiho has told her more than she deserves to know.
Yoobin thinks she's braver than she could ever dream of being.
✂
When Jiho follows her home weeks later, she presses careful fingers against the curve of Yoobin's spine and asks how did they do it, and Yoobin doesn't speak of it until Jiho is asleep, toes curled against the soft arm of the couch.
Jiho tells her, later, fingers sunk nails-deep into Yoobin's arm, that her sister used to be in the forces too. They'd sent her off in a parade and her parents had steered her back to the house, away from the festivities. Her sister never came back.
"I'm sorry," Yoobin breathes, into her skin. Yoobin doesn't quite know what she's apologizing for. Anything. Everything.
Jiho's eyes flutter closed -- one beat, two, three, before they open again. Her eyes are beautiful, Yoobin thinks. She's always known this, but up close they are full of hope, still, after everything.
Yoobin feels it in a burst of pain through her chest before she realizes that she's crying, blubbering into Jiho's shoulder, and Jiho cradles her face gently with her hands.
She hums a song through it, a song from before, when they were both children, and Yoobin think that it's okay to shatter like this, in Jiho's arms.
Jiho is meters and lengths and breadths and a heart, tucked behind her flesh, strong enough to carry the both of them.
✂
Mihyun visits in the late evening. Shiah is there, too, hovering in the doorway. Jiho drags her in, introducing herself as Yoobin's -- whatever she wants to be, Yoobin's friend, compatriot, companion. Yoobin just nods and smiles, and Mihyun's eyes twinkle when she looks back at her.
✂
Jiho makes up stories about it, idle ones that she dreams up as she twines Yoobin's fingers with her own. Sometimes Yoobin is a ten-feet tall giant with a huge brain who inhabited her new body, other times she drank a special concoction that tasted like tofu soup. The truth is often less appealing, so Jiho never asks again, only offers.
She stays with her until she falls asleep, and Yoobin manages, sometimes, not to count the steps she takes to the kitchen, or to estimate the diameter of the birth mark dusting Jiho's forehead.
When Yoobin's eyes snap open to the darkness of the morning, Jiho is still holding her hand.
Prompt: Binnie is a genetically and technologically engineered genius, but now that the war on her planet is over she's just damaged technology, unable to function emotionally and filled with issues due to her lack of an attainable mission. B, (whatever species you want?) shows her how to express and love and understand life without war.
Author's note: I took some significant liberties with this prompt and would also like to apologize in advance for the simplistic way some ideas are presented!
Warnings: discussions of war, very brief implication of suicide
Rating: PG-13
Pairing(s)/Characters: Binnie/Jiho, Mimi, Yooa
Word count: 2142
Yoobin throws the covers off her legs and steps out of bed, stumbling towards the bathroom.
Excluding the one minute and twenty-four seconds it’ll take to brush her teeth and change, she could reach the cafe in seven minutes and thirty-five seconds without bypassing significant stretches of open spaces or dead-ends. That is, of course, if she runs just fast enough to keep her heart rate under 140 beats per minute, short of the range that might lead to sudden and inconvenient heart failure.
She walks.
There's a boy sitting on the steps outside the cafe when she arrives. He's eating the last croissant -- Yoobin knows because it's a little smaller than the rest and packed with care, the sleeves of the brown wrapper tucked carefully into their pockets.
"Is that good?" She doesn't know why she asks it, but the boy looks up with a smile.
Both of them have all the time in the world to make conversation. He has bright eyes, crescent-shaped ones that curve downwards at the sides. Yoobin remembers, abruptly, a photo from her youth, stuffed somewhere in her drawer at HQ. She feels dizzy.
He smiles and nods, raising his arm and offering a bite to her.
This is how everyone is now.
Mihyun comes by on a Wednesday. She's brought a box of snakes and ladders and Yoobin stares at the pieces on the board, her brain going into overdrive.
"Relax," Mihyun says, biting into a small, green carrot. They've only started re-growing it a few months ago and haven't gotten the formula exactly right. Mihyun has assessed that it tastes surprisingly good ("the texture is nice"), but Yoobin hasn't worked up the courage to take a bite. It isn't necessary, in any case. She has plenty of sustenance.
"Let's do something else," Yoobin says, quietly, tearing her eyes away from the squares.
Mihyun cocks her head, breaking into a small smile. Yoobin has always liked her smile -- it takes her mind away from things, was helpful when they sat waiting for the missiles to bloom across the surface of the planet. Mihyun hadn't stopped smiling and squeezed Yoobin's hand a little tighter. She'd let out brief puffs of air, just enough to stay conscious, before the screen turned orange.
"I chose one that doesn't involve strategy," Mihyun explains, and Yoobin snaps back to reality. Mihyun's voice is light and her tone cavalier -- Mihyun has never judged Yoobin for choosing what she did, and it hasn't changed after the war, even if they don't know how to reverse it.
"How's Shiah?" Yoobin says. It's a clunky change of topic that Yoobin regrets, because Mihyun's face falls at this. She sandwiches her carrot between her teeth and pulls her blonde hair into a ponytail, her gaze dropping to Yoobin's fingers and the numbers she's tracing subconsciously onto the carpet.
"She's... recovering." Mihyun says the word quickly like it's taboo. Shiah has a dud leg she'd picked up when her plane crashed. She used to love dancing before the war and it's been taken away from her now. Mihyun can still draw, but Shiah can't draw with her limbs the way she wants to.
What's happening to Shiah isn't special, but Shiah is special to Mihyun, so Yoobin swallows whatever she'd thought to say.
They don't play snakes and ladders in the end. Yoobin stumbles over her words and ties her tongue as she tries to tell a joke, but Mihyun laughs anyway, and places a hand on the square of Yoobin's back, and all Yoobin feels is empty.
When Mihyun leaves, she forgets her coat, wedged somewhere in the back of Yoobin's couch.
Yoobin admires the stitching on Mihyun's jacket and thinks about how she has to return it to her someday, so she closes her window and ignores the fact that she's on the 37th floor. She has thought about it, of course. Stepping out. Escaping this.
The gravity on this planet is a little heavier than where she was from, but even on Earth it would be impossible to survive the fall.
Yoobin still sees herself on posters sometimes. They're trying to drum up support for the next phase of rebuilding, and celebrating whoever's survived the war is evidently something that's on their agenda.
Of course, she's obscured behind the front-line "heroes", but she's there all the same, in full holographic technicolour, the barely functional gun that they'd dug up for the photoshoot clasped between her elbow and waist. Bae Yoobin, head tactician and engineer. She's grown a little taller since then and removed the programming contacts, but it still feels like they're there sometimes when she jerks awake, sunken beneath her irises.
Sometimes -- more frequently now, hour to hour -- Yoobin wants to dig them out and forget.
They've re-designed bars to be fully lit since things have gotten back to semi-normal. Yoobin knows it's really not all that beneficial to be able to see who's approaching you, but most of the patrons aren't Yoobin, so it's enough of an assurance that the clientele comes back. She wishes, sometimes, that one of the protestors would recognize her and pick a fight. She's not wasteful enough to pick one herself, and too polite to attract ire -- the bartender was surprisingly pliant when she'd rejected his advances.
She's ordering her fourth drink when a girl with dark red hair takes a seat beside her, of the 5 empty chairs to Yoobin's left and the three empty couches behind her. Yoobin's lips twitch. The girl is, on all accounts, blindingly sober, which makes her a little dangerous, by Yoobin's estimation. No other alarm bells ring, so Yoobin lets it be.
"Do you think about the people who died?"
Yoobin freezes.
There, still, is nothing threatening about the girl. There's no backup waiting outside, as far as she can tell, and she's not sitting in any way to suggest a hidden weapon.
"I prefer not to," Yoobin says, lips dry.
"I'd prefer not to if I were you, too," the girl says, and her tone is still light, almost conversational. For a moment, Yoobin considers talking to this stranger and spilling secrets that could ruin their new government. She thinks about the gun tucked behind her waistband and the girl's hands, placed lightly on her thighs.
"Bae Yoobin," the girl baits, leaning closer so her breath skates across Yoobin's cheeks. "War hero. Sent a planet into flames with the flick of a switch."
Yoobin flings a fist at her before she can understand why, and the girl goes tumbling to the floor, the tip of her tailbone abrasing as she lands on her back. She laughs a little before standing up, crooked, her right knee locking before she stumbles backward, catching herself against one of the high tables.
"Kim Jiho," she says, and Yoobin watches something like derision flash in her eyes before it disappears. "I'd prefer if you did."
Effective catharsis does not involve anger or lashing out at other people. Yoobin is aware of this, but she still stares at her knuckles when she eats, and when she drinks, and when she's trying to watch television. When she's not looking at them, when the room is pitch black and the sleeping solution is lodged halfway in her throat, Kim Jiho's words are ringing in her ears.
Yoobin finds her sitting in the same spot. There's a creature beside her that Yoobin doesn't recognize, purring as Jiho runs her hands through its fur.
She's fried the cameras in the bar as a precaution.
"I sabotaged it," Yoobin says. Jiho turns around and the creature turns too, staring at Yoobin with beady yellow eyes.
"Sabotaged what?"
"I created a lag and sent them a signal to run. Everyone here believed that the planet was burning up days before it did."
Jiho looks away for a moment, and Yoobin watches the heave of her chest before she turns back, face drawn into a placid smile.
"That's a nice tale."
Yoobin doesn't say anything in return, and Jiho deliberates for a moment, fingers still combing through the creature's hair. "Its name is Maodi. I used to think cats had gone extinct, but they're stronger than we thought."
"Where did you find it?"
"Where are they now?" Jiho snaps, and Yoobin registers the ghost of a smile threatening to rise on her own face. It feels foreign, almost, like a thing of her past.
"Away," Yoobin says. When they'd equipped her they wanted to keep her humane, and perhaps Yoobin had retained too much empathy for their liking. The galaxy is big enough for all of them; something Yoobin had known before she'd accepted the procedure, and something she used after she'd been equipped. It is not impossible to transport entire populations to other places.
Jiho smiles again, this time so widely and beautifully that Yoobin feels her heart thrumming behind her ribcage, her pulse travel to the tips of her fingers and threatening to break through the skin. Yoobin shouldn't feel like this -- she hasn't known how to feel like this in such a terribly long time.
"You're not lying," Jiho breathes, finally, into the silence. She caves into herself, her palm pressed to her chest, small sounds escaping her in measures. Yoobin thinks she's crying but she can't be sure.
"I don't need to lie now," Yoobin says, carefully, and Jiho's head drops onto her shoulder when Yoobin closes the distance between them, sends warmth in the form of tears spreading across her skin.
Jiho's fingers are almost tearing holes in her shirt.
The war is over.
Jiho used to want to be a shoe-maker. She was sixteen too when she'd given up her dreams to join the volunteer forces. She was seventeen and three months old when she was discharged. Now she's doing odd-jobs in the city, cleaning up debris and sucking ash off the roads. Removing reminders.
She spears a longan from her drink while Yoobin waits for her to continue.
"I stopped the tank and started ramming into our own battalions," Jiho says. "I told them I'd lost control of the system."
"And they believed you?"
"I'm a smart liar," Jiho says. "I waited to use one they couldn't monitor remotely. It didn't help much in the long run, but there was a ceasefire for a week."
Yoobin doesn't probe. Jiho has told her more than she deserves to know.
Yoobin thinks she's braver than she could ever dream of being.
When Jiho follows her home weeks later, she presses careful fingers against the curve of Yoobin's spine and asks how did they do it, and Yoobin doesn't speak of it until Jiho is asleep, toes curled against the soft arm of the couch.
Jiho tells her, later, fingers sunk nails-deep into Yoobin's arm, that her sister used to be in the forces too. They'd sent her off in a parade and her parents had steered her back to the house, away from the festivities. Her sister never came back.
"I'm sorry," Yoobin breathes, into her skin. Yoobin doesn't quite know what she's apologizing for. Anything. Everything.
Jiho's eyes flutter closed -- one beat, two, three, before they open again. Her eyes are beautiful, Yoobin thinks. She's always known this, but up close they are full of hope, still, after everything.
Yoobin feels it in a burst of pain through her chest before she realizes that she's crying, blubbering into Jiho's shoulder, and Jiho cradles her face gently with her hands.
She hums a song through it, a song from before, when they were both children, and Yoobin think that it's okay to shatter like this, in Jiho's arms.
Jiho is meters and lengths and breadths and a heart, tucked behind her flesh, strong enough to carry the both of them.
Mihyun visits in the late evening. Shiah is there, too, hovering in the doorway. Jiho drags her in, introducing herself as Yoobin's -- whatever she wants to be, Yoobin's friend, compatriot, companion. Yoobin just nods and smiles, and Mihyun's eyes twinkle when she looks back at her.
Jiho makes up stories about it, idle ones that she dreams up as she twines Yoobin's fingers with her own. Sometimes Yoobin is a ten-feet tall giant with a huge brain who inhabited her new body, other times she drank a special concoction that tasted like tofu soup. The truth is often less appealing, so Jiho never asks again, only offers.
She stays with her until she falls asleep, and Yoobin manages, sometimes, not to count the steps she takes to the kitchen, or to estimate the diameter of the birth mark dusting Jiho's forehead.
When Yoobin's eyes snap open to the darkness of the morning, Jiho is still holding her hand.
no subject
this is really nice and i am constantly shocked at how well these kinds of aus can resonate with me when written well! great job!
also nice world building in such a short length :0 it leaves a lot of room to the imagination but frames it well.
i apologize for the lack of depth to this comment your fic deserves better praise!
no subject
"Jiho turns around and the creature turns too, staring at Yoobin with beady yellow eyes." Why did the creature felt like Jiho's spirit animal? XD really cute.