augmenti | snsd; a swift goodbye {tiffany/jessica}

A Swift Goodbye
Tiffany says goodbye the only way she knows how.
past Jessica/Tiffany; 825 words.
• a/n: written for the

unniefic challenge.

In the end, the break up is swift. Tiffany sits at the foot of her bed, surrounded by things of different colors and shapes and sizes. She packs all of her pictures of all the good times past into a wheeled suitcase at her feet. Each thing reveals a memory that she isn’t sure if she wants to remember or not. She packs away the skirt she wore the first time they met, and the bracelet that she broke on their first date when she snagged it on the corner of a table. She packs away the lyrics that she’d scribbled down and added the lists of all the things she wanted to do together.

She picks up a photograph of nine girls, sitting all together, and lets her gaze linger over one smile, a small face with brown hair curled artfully over her shoulder. Jessica’s hand lingers on Tiffany’s waist, and she can almost feel her fingers sliding into the loop of her belt and pressing comfortingly through the thin fabric of her shirt.

Tiffany revels in the thought for a moment and tucks the photograph into her pocket. She can keep this one thing, this one tiny thing. There are eight girls in her heart and she loves each one of them. The time she’s had with them has been a time that she doesn’t want to forget. She wants to remember the photographs that she’s tucked away into the folds of her suitcase and the smell of jasmine that still sticks to the jean jacket she let Jessica borrow once.

But even though there are all of these things she wants to bring with her, she know’s she can’t anymore, not if she’s going to move on like the rest of the girls that she loves so much. And especially not if she’s going to leave Jessica, with an iron tongue and eager, nimble fingers, and her memory of them slipping up her cold thigh with warm fingers.

In the hallway, Taeyeon stops her in the hallway with her arms full of boxes. “We’re having a goodbye dinner, are you coming?”

Tiffany gives her a little smile she once gave to her dad, and Taeyeon’s eyes widen a fraction. She gets over her shock with good grace, because she’s known Tiffany longer and knows her perhaps better than anyone.

“Take care of yourself,” she whispers in her ear as they hug, and Tiffany gives her a squeeze, feeling her bones through her shirt.

“You too,” she says as they pull apart, and it’s surprising that she hasn’t cried yet – she’ll miss her girls so much, how could she ever leave – how could they ever break up?

She pulls the suitcase along the train tracks until she finds a bridge covered with graffiti and that’s where she does it – burns it all with her lighter and a bit of gasoline to the pile.

She burns away many years of happiness and many years of hardship. She burns away the candy bar that she wasn’t allowed to eat when she was on tour, and she burns away the ankle cast she used to wear. She burns away the cardigan she bought in Japan, and she burns all of the ‘good fortune’ pendants she picked up on New Years.

But more than that, she burns away a journal stuffed with photographs and notes of her - Jessica. Goodbyes are hard when you know you’ll never see the other person again, but they’re even harder when you know you will, when you’re so afraid of the truth that you’d do anything to stay away from it.

As she turns away, Tiffany places her hand against hear heart, over the photograph of nine young girls, eight of which are her best friends, one of which was the girl she’d loved more than she’d ever loved before. They made it through storms and hardships. They’d all crashed and burned multiple times and they all had days when they didn’t want to do it anymore. They all had moments of keeping together, too.

Tiffany laughs as she leaves all those memories behind, just like she’d done before she left California. It’s liberating, a fresh start. It’s nice and she feeling like the entire world is ahead of her. She has an endless amount of unused free travel miles in her back pocket and a new future to find and she can taste the excitement on her tongue and an aftertaste of mint gum and cherry chapstick. But she doesn’t mind it too much, and as she reaches the highway she giggles and hails a taxi.

It doesn’t matter, because in the end that little plume of smoke that trails up to the sky carries all of the baggage ahead of her and she’ll deal with it when she’s ready to move on again. This is how she’s always done it and how she always will – leaving suddenly and happily.

snsd; a swift goodbye {tiffany/jessica}

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