CHAELISA One-shots

Coming Home

**

Lisa had never been one to take chances.

She was pragmatic, she was cautious, she stayed safe.

She had set up parameters, insurances to make sure she couldn't be hurt, not again. She had a comfortable life, and she didn't want anything to jeopardize that. She'd worked too hard to get to where she was.

And then she met Roseanne Park.

Roseanne, too, was safe and cautious, but there was something so electric between them, pure energy that pulled them together again and again and again. So Lisa decided to throw caution to the wind. She thought that maybe for once she didn't need a safety net, because there's no way she would fall.

She was safe until she wasn't. And then she was more hurt than she had ever been before. The walls went back up and the caution tape she wrapped around herself felt permanent. She cut ties with Rosie, with the life she had built in Seoul, and she returned to Busan, knowing that even though she may not find the same sort of happiness ever again, maybe she could find some sort of peace instead.

So when she's called in to help with a case back at the SGPS, she's scared. Because she knows she's bound to see Rosie again and she doesn't know if she could survive that. She almost turns it down.

Almost.

But now she's pulling on her leather jacket and making sure her hotel room is just clean enough that the maids won't judge her. She wonders if that small coffee shop near the headquarters is still open, praying that she'll be able to get her extra strong extra large black coffee before she has to report in.

And then, about a half hour later, she finds herself, giant coffee in hand, making small talk with the coworkers she left behind all those months ago. She's only twenty minutes into her day, and she's exhausted of the inane drabble and pretending like everything's exactly as it was when she left.

But she was different now, and she felt it. She was a sergeant now, she was busy re-erecting the walls she had let down for Rosie. She felt like a different person compared to the one who started at the SGPS all those years before, like an outsider to the life she had left behind.

When her old boss - and the head of the case she's working on - tells her to head over to the Kim's Office for an inter departmental meeting about the case, she regrets coming back. The churning nerves in her gut turn to cement and she feels like maybe she's going to be sick. The thought of Roseanne Park sitting in the same room as her is terrifying, and the thought of having to work with Rosie is even scarier.

"Any questions?" Captain Hyung asked.

Yeah, Lisa wanted to say. How do you casually say hello to the woman who was supposed to be the love of your life? How do you pretend like everything's okay when you still want to angry cry at the smallest reminder of them? How the fuck do you solve a case of espionage when the only thing you can think about is the way her hands used to feel as they roamed your body, the way her breath felt on your neck?

"No, sir," Lisa replies instead.

And then she's waiting for Rosie in a Kim's briefing room and she thinks she might hyperventilate or pass out or maybe both. When Taehyung walks into the room, Lisa forgets about her nerves for just a moment. Instead, she feels inexplicably sad, as though she were seeing the photo of a lost loved one for the first time. She forgets sometimes, how she lost more than just Rosie when they broke up. She lost a multitude of friends, the first family she had been a part of in a long time.