Throughout high school, Jisoo had heard the horror stories of the faculty and past graduates of the personal hell known as midterms. At YG, while some teachers had set midterm exams for their students, there was usually class time dedicated to review, and Jisoo had the company of the delinquents to get her through the few tests she had. She hadn't believed the magnitude of which midterms hailed death and destruction.
She'd come into her first year of college expecting pretty much the same amount of pre-exam panic as YG.
She had been very, very wrong.
Jisoo set up camp in a relatively sheltered corner of the library with Chanyeol, the two of them hunched over a collection of art history books and other review material, half-consumed cups of coffee and crushed cans of energy drinks scattered around them, casualties of sleep-deprived, panicked last-minute preparation.
Chanyeol glared at a portrait of Van Gogh as though, if he stared hard enough, the book would catch fire and engulf the entirety of the library in flames, sparing the two of them the pain and suffering that midterms had wrought upon them.
"I'm going to die," Jisoo groaned, sinking into the table. There were dark bags under her eyes, funnily reminiscent of Jennie's warpaint. Oh, what she wouldn't do to take a nap curled up next to her girlfriend right about now. That would be bliss.
"If you die, Kim will kill me," Chanyeol snipped, finally relenting his attempts to beat a painting in a staring contest, "and I'll have to suffer the presence of pretty boy on my own, so you're living whether you like it or not, Kim."
Despite her exhaustion, Jisoo couldn't help but laugh.
"I still don't understand why you hate Ilian so much," she said after a jaw-stretching yawn. In the distance, somewhere else in the library, someone screamed, and Jisoo couldn't help but nod. The noise of distress really resonated with her on a deep and personal level.
The librarians, who she could spy out of the corner of her eye, didn't move. Any other day, their eyes would have narrowed and they would have made quick work of kicking the offender out of the book-filled aisles, but midterm season seemed to be the exception to their usually strict demeanors.
"Nobody should be that self-absorbed," Chanyeol muttered, squinting down at a paragraph of text he'd been struggling to comprehend for the past half hour or so, "he made us paint shirtless portraits of him, Jisoo. Not even Kim has done that."
Jisoo, privately, considered the merit of painting a nude portrait of Jennie, but quickly cast the idea aside. She wouldn't be able to focus on painting when her very gorgeous, naked girlfriend was in front of her, anyways.
"Speaking of Kim," Chanyeol blinked owlishly, as though the thought had just come to him, "wasn't she here earlier? I could've sworn she was here. Where'd she go?"
"She left to go work a shift at her internship while you were passed out on Rivera," Jisoo recounted after a moment trying to remember exactly when her girlfriend had left, "about six hours ago? I think?"
"She went to work?" Chanyeol gaped, sleep deprived mind too hazed to comprehend it. "On like, what, three hours of sleep?"
"I think she only got two," Jisoo frowned, rubbing at her tired eyes.
"Your girlfriend is insane, Kim."
"She's just..." Jisoo trailed off, unsure of how to defend Jennie in this situation. Quite frankly, it was insane, as Chanyeol had said. Jennie was inhuman. "...driven?"
"Insane," Chanyeol repeated, slowly, before his head fell back in his textbook, and within a few minutes Jisoo could hear soft snores coming from his general direction.
