Work Text:
Taeha Gyeon is a great lover of many things. She loves peach gum. She loves Orive Young. She loves her Meu Meu bags, all ten of them. She loves Tsubaki. She’s a sweet, smart (beautiful) girl, and she knows that everyone who’s ever interacted with her feels the same.
Taeha Gyeon also hates. She hates weak coffee and humid weather. She hates people who walk too slowly in front of her. She hates chipped nails, ugly shoes, and ugly loungewear. She hates losing arguments even more than she hates being wrong.
Most of all, Taeha Gyeon hates Sayeon Lee.
It’s no secret. Both of their cells can tell the extent of Taeha’s fury, which would be significantly less inconvenient if the dislike were not mutual.
She hates her stupid choppy haircut, her stupid wire-frame glasses, the way she speaks like every sentence has been teacher-reviewed before leaving her mouth. She hates that Sayeon never seems rushed, never seems embarrassed, never seems to give a shit what anyone thinks of her.
Most infuriatingly, she hates the way Sayeon looks at her, like she's a lower specimen. She should be admired, not observed!
Everyone likes Taeha. That is simply how the world works. Normal people would follow the status quo.
Normal people would get offended when Taeha insults them, normal people probably get intimidated. Lee just looks at her, like how one would observe an especially loud and obnoxious animal at the zoo. It's kinda like she’s lived through every interaction twice beforehand and is immune.
Taeha Gyeon hates passionately, beautifully, completely. As eerily competent as Lee is, there was no chance she would stand a chance against the wrath of the Gyeon clan.
Just you wait, bitch, Taeha muses. It’s become a recurring staple in her thoughts whenever she catches sight of Lee’s obnoxiously straight posture.
—
Beauty is important; beauty is power. Beauty is a social currency, psychological warfare, divine blessing and biological advantage all wrapped into one. Pretty people get things handed to them every day of their lives, and Taeha, being both generous, clever, and observant, has decided from a young age to fully take advantage of that fact.
Which is probably why Sayeon Lee is so deeply irritating. She clearly has no idea what she looks like, or worse, simply doesn’t care enough.
Both possibilities infuriate Taeha equally.
“Lee,” Taeha says one afternoon, leaning halfway across the table, “have you ever considered doing literally anything with your face?”
Sayeon looks up from her notes slowly.
“What does that mean.”
“It means,” Taeha gestures vaguely, “the raw materials are there, but the execution is tragic.”
Across the room, Ryujin snorts loud enough to almost choke, and both Dahee and Tsubaki gape.
Sayeon blinks once behind those awful glasses of hers. “I wash my face morning and night. I also use sunscreen, and that has worked adequately this far. Skin cancer is a real thing, you know. Maybe read a book?”
This girl is going to make her violent.
The thing is, Sayeon is already okay-looking. She’s the kind of pretty that sneaks up on you gradually, and all at once. Clear skin, and she doesn’t even try! She just pulls up in the morning looking incredibly neat and composed and faintly sleepy because she stayed up all night training with Woo and somehow those horrifying dark circles look good on her and—
Anyway. The point is, if Sayeon ever discovered eyeliner, Taeha genuinely believes that society would collapse. Which is why Taeha has taken it upon herself to ensure it never happens.
Sayeon looks at her, her terrifyingly intelligent eyes narrowing slightly behind her glasses, expression unreadable in that awful way, the one that screams she’s already solved a problem nobody else realised existed. She continues to scrutinise her notes, as if nothing ever happened, acting like she’s finished with entertaining a small, annoying child.
Now that those freaky blue eyes aren’t trained disdainfully at her face, Taeha feels a mixture of smugness and another unfamiliar, unwelcome emotion. She refuses to acknowledge the feeling as disappointment.
—
She’s got a nice, symmetrical face, Taeha supposes. If Taeha were to take a meat cleaver down the centre of her skull, she would be left with two matching halves of Sayeon Lee’s head.
Her eyes, she supposes, aren’t nearly half as creepy when they're not trained disdainfully at her pink hair clips or carefully varnished nails.
Her hair drives Taeha insane, but she’s caught herself on multiple occasions appreciating how shiny and soft it looks. If you looked past the atrocious, uneven locks.
Seriously, how dare she?
Her lips have a nice shape, objectively speaking. Again, if you looked past the lack of lipgloss.
She bites her own lower lip, peach lip tint catching in her teeth. What would happen if she were to lean across the table now and press their mouths together?
Would Lee reciprocate, kiss her back gently, and look at her with wonder? Or would she bite her skin until it bled, and run her fingers roughly through Taeha’s hair, yank on it a little?
An involuntary shiver rolls down her spine.
Horror strikes.
She yelps in her seat, and claps her hands to her mouth. Was she just fantasising about another girl, in a definitely sexual manner? Fuck that. Was she just fantasising about Sayeon fucking Lee, in an undeniably sexual manner??
Across the table, the star of her fantasising tilts her head, the fluorescent artificial light reflecting off her glasses and making Taeha feel like a target locked in a sniper’s scope.
She squeezes her eyes shut. A traitorous flush is most likely climbing up her neck and staining her ears pink. Suddenly, someone's hand brushes the right side of her hair. Peeling open her eyes, she is greeted by Sayeon, who has planted an elbow on the table in order to get closer. It takes everything in Taeha not to scream.
“....Your hairclip was slipping. I didn’t want you to lose it. If somebody else picked it up, they would think a five-year-old girl was skipping around HQ.”
Not letting her finish, Taeha jumps up at the speed of light.
“I-I gotta go! Tsubaki’s waiting for me so we can… um…. Spar! Yep!! I’ll see you hopefully never!!”
She practically leaps from her seat, making a mad grab for her purse. It’s only when she’s back in the dorm pressed against Tsubaki’s side that she realises the insult. By then, she’s way too embarrassed and angry at herself to care.
No matter. She would make that bitch pay tomorrow, possibly through grievous actions like smacking her gum as loudly as she could, or increasing the amount of jabs towards her haircut. The possibilities are endless. Sometimes it really is difficult being as smart and clever as herself.
She tries not to feel too excited and fails abominably.