The Art of the Con (???xMReader)

Chapter XIX - A Familiar Face

Days bled into weeks since the heist. Rosé and V already paid their respects to the loss of the team leader. They already fenced the diamonds and were on their way to their next job. Jennie had already taken her cut of the job and returned to beating misogynists in the gyms, probably fighting in the streets as well. It was a Pyrrhic victory for the team. Jeongyeon had taken a big blow from Y/N's death and isolated herself in their shared apartment for the meanwhile.

Out of all of them, Dahyun, unfortunately, took it the worst. She lay curled up in her bed in her apartment, crying whenever her body generated a sufficient amount of liquid to produce tears. She cried until there was nothing left inside but a raw emptiness that gnawed away at her insides like a starving rat. Her irises were threaded scarlet and her eyeballs hung heavy in their sockets. Her whole body hung limp like each limb weighed twice as much as it had before and just moving them required such a slow and painful effort from her. The pain came in waves, minutes of sobbing broken apart by short pauses for recovering breaths, before hurling her back into the outstretched arms of her grief.

The pain in the back of the mind came forward with the slightest reminder, a small token of sorrow and misery. The sun still shone in the sky, but not for her. The birds sang in bursts of melody, but not for her. The world instead had become a whirl of colors, melting into an empty gray, void of any color and beauty.

A loud knock resonated from the front of her apartment. Dahyun flinched wildly in her bed, generating a loud shuffling sound.

It was most possibly Jeongyeon coming to check in on her. Dahyun knew she had to get up. If she didn't, Jeongyeon would definitely infer that something is wrong. Dahyun rolled out of the bed and shambled out of her bedroom, grasping the door frame with a death grip.

She looked up at her dining table to see someone sitting in an outstretched chair.

"Y/N..." she muttered.

Elbow rested on the table, Y/N leaned onto his arm, smiling wide. Dahyun knelt there, hypnotized by the figure in front of her.

"Y/N..." she whispered again.

She blinked and he was gone. The very memory of Y/N haunted her every moment, awake and asleep. He would find ways to sneak into her dreams and her reality, but then the truth would always nail her in the back of the head. 

He. Is. Dead. 

Period. 

Just another hallucination to make her day even worse.

Her periods of mourning held a rawness to it like a pain of an open flesh wound. Every now and then, she would clasp onto something for support, anything, a table or the back of a chair, and then her whole body would shake. She was the image of grief, loss, devastation. It was the face of one not knowing what to do next, what the future may hold for her. As she stumbled closer to the door, her emotions collapsed behind a mask of coping. She would just wear it until everything was right again, she knew no other way.

She tossed back her hair and took a deep, shaky breath before turning the doorknob.

"Jeongyeon, you don't have to come to check up on me. I'm doing―"

It was not Jeongyeon. The person outside her door smiled widely. "Hey!~ Long time no see."

Dazed, Dahyun stood frozen in place. "But it can't be..."

She blinked, stunned from the presence of the person in front of her.

"But Sana... you're supposed to be in prison?"

Sana flashed her iconic, mischievous grin. Sporting some ripped skinny jeans, she wore an orange, button-up jumper with a v-line stretching down several inches. Her brown curls draped neatly over her shoulders. In her hands rested a long, rectangular, wooden box. For someone who supposedly broke out of prison, she smelt good like fresh cucumber-infused water with a hint of lemon.