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you • kim taeyeon

prompt: She comes to you as if she were an angel spending her first day on this planet, notepad in hand, pink lips pulled tightly into a forced smile out of habit. And when she turns to leave, she seems to take the sunlight with her.

Inspired by Taeyeon's music video for "I"

pairing: kim taeyeon x male reader.

genre: light angst, light fluff

word count: 1268

You see her when the sunrays spill through the spaces between dusty window grills, seep into every crack of the aging floorboards, and fill the restaurant with an ethereal ocean of light.

She comes to you as if she were an angel spending her first day on this planet, notepad in hand, pink lips pulled tightly into a forced smile out of habit. You liken the locks of her blonde hair to the cascading sunrays themselves, and find it a shame they are tucked away into a tight bun, hidden from the world, just as she is.

"What can I get for you?"

It takes you a second to speak because you are absently admiring the roundness of her eyes, the glowing beauty of youth she has captured and holds so brutally in her nimble grasp. You wonder about the sadness she also holds deep inside her eyes, if she tucks it far, far away when she starts her day, and if she only allows it to come flowing out in the form of endless tears in the latest hours of the night.

She waits patiently in her cover of simple, devastating beauty, urging you to push away the pity brewing in your chest for a girl you haven't even yet spoken a word to, and give your order with a hasty clearing of your throat.

She jots it down with impossible grace, lips pulling into another smile to tell you the food will be ready soon. When she turns to leave, she seems to take the sunlight with her.

You finish your meal and leave without a word that day, but find yourself coming back the next day, and the next, ordering the same exact thing from that menu as if it is the only thing that keeps your heart beating. She is surprised at first, but figures, probably, that you are quickly becoming a regular, that you are coming back again for the food that is too good and not, of course, for her.

But only you know the truth, and you find your eyes fixated on her instead of your food most days. You memorize her schedule, like how she takes a few orders with the same forced smile and disappears into the kitchen to whisk forth steaming food arranged in ivory platters with the grace of a goddess. She sets them down in front of hungry, thankful customers before allowing herself a break. It is never too long, though, not when her boss is demanding she work every aching bone of hers into numbness.

But when she does manage to find an ounce of freedom, she sighs heavily and rolls her shoulders as if she has been balancing mountains on them for days, and finally allows some of her weariness to show through her eyes. She disappears off to the bathroom then, to emerge fresh-faced, but seems to have failed in scrubbing away the tiredness set deep within her features, no matter how hard she's tried. She looks as if she is fighting a battle everyday in a war she has no faith in.

It is then that you seat yourself upon one of the empty bar stools beside her, utterly drawing her attention like a breath out of lungs, and allow her ears to hear the only question you've been wondering since the first day you met her.

"Why don't you quit?"

She takes the image of a deer in headlights, and allows only for a beat of silence to pass before speaking.

"What?"

Your fingers drum against the darkened wood of the counter. "You are unhappy," you say, hand waving through the air to find the exact words you are looking for. "A free spirit trapped in its cage."

She blinks once, twice, three times with an expression of surprise and confusion that you find utterly adorable, before your heart is stopping entirely in your chest at the way her lips tilt into the smallest smile, albeit a disbelieving one.

"I think you're a bit too poetic."

You entertain her with a laugh. "Come on, isn't there something you've always wanted to do?" Your words melt her smile. "An entire world is waiting for you outside of these doors. What do you want to show it?"

She watches you with guarded eyes, you, someone who is asking to be let inside of her walls or, perhaps, to destroy them completely. But you see a glimmer of hope tucked away deep inside her irises at the chance to let someone know of all her desires, of what dreams she indulges in in the latest hours inside her small apartment, and what she thinks of when she gazes out the window with such longing she didn't think she could ever have.

Then, the guards are put back up when her eyes dart around the restaurant on the look out for her boss, you presume, maybe the only monster that she fears will steal everything away. Then, she speaks, and you find yourself falling, drowning in every word that her lips shape and her pretty voice colors life into.

"I've wanted to travel, to just get lost somewhere, and maybe never get found. To touch the grain of endless rye fields, or sit on the rocks by an ocean and hope to become one myself so I can live there forever."

She breathes with a glimmer of light kindling deep within her eyes and you find yourself exhaling, because this is what you've been searching for. She is then speaking again, and you're pushing all thoughts far, far to the back of your mind, because she is speakingagain.

"I want to taste the scent of flowers and spend so much time under the sky that I memorize all of its hues," she speaks with a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were in a land that only she could see at this moment, and you find yourself desperately wishing you are there with her. "To be free and happy and find myself in the nature that seems to stare at me everyday, but which I am not free enough to explore."

You smile as she breathes quietly, eyelids fluttering and senses returning from whatever world she has disappeared off to. The lightest shade of pink dusts her cheeks when she realizes what she has professed, and you find it hopelessly endearing.

"You should leave this place and do exactly that. No one can stop you."

She blinks again as if you have said something ground breaking, but you find your eyes lingering on the strands of her hair. "And let your hair out," you suggest, slipping from the stool to learn the hardness of the floor with you feet that are now distancing from her.

"And the next time I come here, I better not see you."

And she looks at you with the slightest furrow of her eyebrows, in a silent question of who are you to tell her to do anything, but you can easily see the hesitance and contemplation churning in her mind and, by the time she makes her decision, you are already out of the door.

And when you come in the next day, the girl of the softest sunrays was not there, and seems to have taken all of the sunlight with her.