Meet Me in the Afterglow (Purinz/Chaewon x Yunjin)

Wedding Dress

NOW.

Things are good.

It's taken a month or two to properly readjust to this new chapter of her life, but she's managed to fall into a comfortable routine. Monday to Friday she spends her days in the lab with the others, and some evenings she'll go for dinner with Sakura and Minjeong or invite herself over to Yujin's to binge watch Netflix and eat all the test pastries she brings home from the bakery, and every other Friday she lets Lily sweet-talk her and the other three into post-work drinks at the nearest bar to the university that isn't overrun by drunk students with zero alcohol tolerance.

It's rare that all twelve of them — thirteen, if she's begrudgingly including Minju, who still hasn't exactly warmed up to Yunjin but she no longer spends the entire time they're in the same room staring suspiciously at Yunjin — have an overlapping evening off unless it's someone's birthday, but her weekends are usually spent in much the same way; with some combination of the rest of the group, going out for dinner or drinks or staying in and ordering food to eat while watching a movie.

It's taken a while, but things are good, even with Chaewon.

Yunjin isn't really sure how they manage to go from not saying a single word to each other for five years to seeing each other a couple of times a week, but they do, and somehow it works.

Admittedly, there's still a faint undercurrent of awkwardness that probably isn't going to go away anytime soon. Neither of them bring up the break up and as a result they sometimes have to dance around certain topics, and every so often there's an abrupt pause in the conversation or one of them will stop halfway through saying when we were— and change it to a few years ago or before.

But still. Chaewon seems pretty committed to the whole friends thing, and Yunjin has never been able to deny Chaewon and her particularly devastating pout anything regardless of how many years have passed, so she goes along with it. She sits next to Chaewon at a Korean barbecue restaurant when they're all out for Yujin's birthday and exchanges amused are you seeing this looks with her while Aeri and Ningning flirt shamelessly right under an oblivious Minjeong's nose. She takes an interest in Chaewon's fairly impressive career as the South Korean entertainment industry's new favorite photographer and demands to know if Han Sohee really is that pretty in real life. (Prettier, apparently.)

Being around Chaewon gets easier as time goes by, but the strange sharp feeling plucking at her heartstrings never quite goes away.

So yeah, things are good. Not effortless, not easy, but they're good.

December arrives with perpetually grey skies and the winter chill starting to set in. Yunjin buys three new beanies, starts doubling up on fuzzy socks inside her boots and never leaves her apartment without at least two layers underneath her favorite fur-lined peacoat that comes out of hibernation the second there's a cool breeze in the air.

Which unfortunately does absolutely nothing to stop her from getting sick.

Less than a week into the month, Yunjin wakes up in the morning feeling like she's been run over by a train. Her entire body aches, weighed down with a horrible fever. She's sweating and shivering and her head feels like it's stuffed full with cotton.

Yunjin hates being sick. Even the most minor of colds tend to render her incapacitated and unable to do much other than sleep and suffer for a solid few days, and unfortunately this one seems to be a little more than just minor.

Smacking weakly at her alarm to switch it off, Yunjin drags herself out of bed and staggers towards the bathroom in search of the max strength medicine she bought last week for when this inevitably happens. Each movement of her heavy limbs feels like trying to swim through molasses, her throat burning as she swallows down two flu pills with a glass of water.