Before Her Very Eyes

Chapter 25

Arin's old friends and extended family members were looking for her. From their perspective, she just disappeared off the face of the Earth the same day her idol, lover, and mother died.

Everyone assumed she was so troubled by what took place that she just ended her life, but they were still carefully watching her old social media accounts for any activity indicating that she was still alive somewhere. However, Arin was careful to stay away from every aspect of her old life. No matter how much she missed her friends and family, she didn't want to be found.

After all, she knew all their names.

For fangirling purposes, she had to create new accounts with a completely new persona. Her name on the Internet was scoups4eva, and people called her Eva for short. It was through that identity that she was able to participate in her fandom community and be part of the rest of the world digitally, even if she couldn't do it physically because of her curse.

Eva was very different from Arin. Arin was anxious and depressed, but Eva was always in the clouds, happy. Arin was weak-hearted, but Eva was strong. Arin was lonely, but Eva had thousands of followers who respected her dedication to Chilli and to S.Coups.

They also loved to read the stories she wrote.

It started when Arin developed a crush on the cute boy who worked at the convenience store. She often imagined scenarios between them in her head, and one day, she typed those stories down and called the boy Mingyu, Vernon, Wonwoo, or even S.Coups. She eventually posted these stories as fanfics.

Those fanfics made her happy, made her imagine love and feel it in ways she knew was not possible for her. They gave her a space to experience love in her head, as she couldn't in real life. As she wrote and more of these fanfics, she gradually explored different kinds of passions. She explored the sweet kind, the deeply romantic kind, the sensual kind...

The fanfic-writing phase only lasted a few months though, because Arin had accidentally sent ~ a link to one of them, which meant that ~ could read all of them. Arin was so mortified and embarrassed, she stopped writing altogether.

-

As soon as her phone opened again after being charged, it began to spasm with all the new messages and notifications of missed calls from everyone that had tried to reach that day: ~, Jeonghan, and Woozi. Even Jun had already sent her a message.

She ignored them all; they overwhelmed her and she was already burnt out from all the human interaction she had that day. Instead, she checked for Chilli updates.

It had been nearly an entire day since her phone ran out of charge, so she had so much to catch up on, especially since Chilli had released more teasers for the upcoming comeback. She smiled as she stared at the released concept photo of Vernon. He looked amazing, and this would definitely be his era, she thought. S.Coups would be so proud to see how much his members have grown and improved, and how well they carried Chilli's legacy in his memory.

The fangirl emotions overcame her, and she began to cry, but they were not tears of pain. They were tears of pride and maybe even happiness.

She then chuckled at the absurdity of it all. Her life was falling apart, her boss was hospitalized, she quit her job, and she nearly committed suicide, but there she was was on her phone fangirling over Chilli. It was silly, but a good kind of silly, she thought. It made her determined to live long enough to at least listen to the album that her Chilli worked so hard to create. That meant two weeks. Two weeks of pain seemed bearable enough, and worth the bliss of listening to her boys' voices singing new songs again.