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Sayeon Lee has plans for everything. She carries an umbrella on days with 10% chance of rain, swallows down algorithms like they’re printed onto the backs of her eyelids, crafts a ten-year plan to get into the top law school in the country, penciled down to the minute. She wears the same skirt and collared-shirt the first three days of the week–stains notwithstanding–runs the laundry on Wednesday evenings when her sister’s out of the house doing god knows what and wears them again on the last two. She washes them again on Saturdays during the even weeks and Sundays on the odd–perfectly in sync with her sister’s secret schedule.
Sayeon Lee has plans for everything until a god takes up residence in her head, her best friend dies and the whole world ripples quietly over his disappearance and a girl takes her oh-so-carefully-crafted logic by the horns and knocks it over like a house of cards.
New environments beget new rules beget new plans.
Fights are formulas–the sum of calculated attacks. She’s used to playing with higher stakes–there were no do-overs in exams–and her gift only levels the playing field, if anything. It’s a luxury she wasn’t afforded in the past.
She practices the motions until her bones creak, until her muscles tear in two and stitch themselves back together and every cell bends and screams from the pain.
She practices mostly with Min, sometimes with Iseul. Never with Ryujin.
“What you wouldn’t do for power, right?” Sayeon says on a day where they’re up until the line between morning and night starts to blur.
The moon is playing tricks in the light, casting warped shadows onto the hardwood.
Ryujin straddles the line between disgust and concern masterfully. Both twist and contort the line of her mouth into a snarl.
“A whole fucking lot, that’s what,” she spits. She’s always spitting–so much fire and energy and passion trapped in the confines of such a small body. It’s laughable, really, and a smile plays at the end of Sayeon’s lips.
Ryujin paces around with all the anger of a mouse caught in a trap. The noose is already wrapped around her neck and she’s just waiting for it to tighten.
She must be feeling especially courageous tonight–venturing cautiously into the trap that Sayeon’s set. She’s wary as she steps but it’s much too late to backtrack now, one foot already tangled up in the ropes.
“Let me guess–there’s nothing you wouldn’t do?”
Sayeon rewards the question with a smile, baring two shiny rows of teeth.
“For my goals, I’d do anything . ” The words are hollow as they leave her mouth and the admission sits heavy on her tongue. Ryujin’s expression only sours the taste.
“Your goals ? What even are they?” she snarls. “Reach level 10 and get so much power until you’re drunk on it? Rid the whole world of every criminal and petty thief?”
The phrasing rings bitterly nostalgic. Caught between a lie and a litany, Sayeon smiles back wordlessly.
There’s blood dripping from her nose, staining the sheets a rusty red. She thought she’d closed it all up with her essence after she went a round with Min but the blood is bright on her fingers, a clear indicator of her failure. It’s too much and it’s not enough all at once.
“Are you alright?” Dahee asks because she’s still playing by the old rules, still bound by things like pity and concern and sympathy. Concepts that Sayeon has long-forgotten, broken shackles that trail after her like the edges of a forgotten dream. Dahee holds her head back and Tsubaki materializes shortly after, holding onto a box of tissues for dear life.
Sayeon looks down at her hand and for the first time sees red and not teal. She rubs at her skin until the color smears and blurs.
“I will be,” she says, uncharacteristically truthful.
She meets a god and the line between fiction and reality blurs beyond recognition. Time travel is real, she spends miraculous do-overs like pocket change and the scariest monsters don’t live in the shadows. The fairy tales of her past meet the logical steps of her would-be future like two crashing, burning stars colliding into one another.
In her head, nothing is clear. Her stone-cold reasoning, her best weapon on the field, molds like clay between her hands.
What do you want? the god asks her and her mouth flaps open and closed wordlessly, even after two decades of pondering the thought. What do you want?
In the early moments of the dawn, she laughs at her own delusions. The quiet sound slips out of her effortlessly, her cheeks wet. What would Jaeil say if he saw her like this– her , of all people, daydreaming into eternity?
A god in your head and saving the whole fucking world–both of them look like utter crap in the daylight.
“You say the wrong name sometimes,” Sayeon says, gaze fixed on the broken stitches in the cloth. Ryujin doesn’t sew, Iseul might and Min definitely does but Ryujin would rather die than display vulnerability.
It’s part of why she’s such a difficult case to crack. But all problems have their solutions, written in 8-point font at the back of a hefty textbook. Sayeon’s just working her way through the pages.
“When we’re in danger, real danger sometimes,” she continues. “Who is she? Is she why you’re hell-bent on destroying the Corps?”
Ryujin’s nostrils flare–the only sign that her questions are stirring her boiling anger. Her mouth settles into a hard line, the steam rising, but she doesn’t budge.
Sayeon studies her carefully, the line of her secrets settled onto her shoulders like a coat. She’ll peel the layers off yet.
After all, secrets are only walls that erode with time.
Ryujin studies her in silence for a while, each of them waiting in turn for the other to crack. It’s a fool’s errand. Neither of them is built of such malleable things.
Ryujin’s breathing is even, her gaze level when she finally speaks.
“You do too.”
The question follows her where the memories don’t. Her steps become riddled with purpose–she overturns each word to find its intention, picks at the bones of every action to find its meaning.
What do you want? Her fist meets bone in a sickening crunch. Teal explodes in her vision and she sees green and orange flying off in bursts around her. She waves one arm and Min is by her side in seconds, blade cutting silently as he swings.
The sound of metal on bone rings out in the room and Ryujin crashes into the wall by her side, swinging a fucking crowbar in true Ryujin fashion. She brandishes the makeshift weapon like it’s a well-forged sword, thrashing left and right and down the criminals go.
Ryujin fights like an animal possessed–none of it for show, all of it for power. She basks in the limelight of her victory once she’s finished, metal drawn tight across her shoulders.
What do you want?
“The fuck you looking at?” she spits out when she feels her gaze, shoulders hunched in and over herself. Sayeon blinks back in reply.
Ryujin is the one to break first–tipping her head away, which is as good as defeat. Sayeon grins and tucks the admission close to her chest like gold.
She kisses her under the benediction of the 3AM street lights, high off the adrenaline of a mission. There’s a clear rip in her suit from where the knife had gone through and excess essence is still rolling off of her in waves. Blood is caked onto both of their fingers and she’s not even sure whose it is.
It’s nothing like how the movies promised–but then again, is anything ever? Their teeth clack together, Ryujin’s upper two digging into the meat of her lip, and she can barely even breathe and there’s saliva everywhere.
Ryujin kisses like she does everything else in her life–with little finesse and reckless abandon.
She digs her nails into the meat of her cheek, manhandles her into a better angle. She doesn’t pause in the face of Sayeon’s inexperience, doesn’t wait for her to catch up as she pushes her towards the brick of an abandoned building.
Can I use this? Sayeon wonders as her back slams against the wall.
Almost immediately, Ryujin pulls back like the thought’s electrocuted her. Like she’s been blessed with a second gift to read minds. Abhorrence doesn’t do her expression justice but routine has dulled the blade of it.
“You’re fucking sick,” she spits and Sayeon has no clue which one of them she’s addressing.
In the way that she truly can ever do around Ryujin, she offers a smile of the damned, raw and wide and beautiful.
Ryujin’s the one who draws her attention to her moving fingers, gaze snapping to them like a whip.
“Don’t you dare –”
She wants and wants and wants and the desire splits her open and laps up her remains.
She’s in hell–or heaven–again, the never-ending expanse of a field rolling out behind her. She always remembers once she gets here and she always forgets once she remembers.
Impatience doesn’t apply to an emotionless god but maybe some of humanity has rubbed off on it because there’s something like an edge of testiness to its voice.
“What do you want, Sayeon Lee?” it asks again. She can’t remember how many times she’s been asked this question, if there’s any scenario where she ever finds the end of it.
What do you want? What do you want?
The paper-thin dream of world peace shrivels in the daylight. In the end, she is left only with a gaping hole in her chest and an all-consuming hunger that drives her to the edge of her sanity.
She thinks belatedly of brick walls and sharp teeth and the memory dredges up a razor-sharp smile on her lips.
“I want–”
“You,” Ryujin spits and it’s only with the looseness of half a bottle of soju that the admission comes. “Are such a fucking idiot !”
“Thank you for your honesty,” Sayeon says as her mind races a mile a minute. Of course I’m not an idiot, my decisions are bound by nothing if not logic, dictated by rules from a careful and calculated study–
“I can see your fucking gears grinding,” Ryujin interrupts, leaning in close to jab her in the chest. There’s alcohol on her breath, staining her words, tainting her actions. Sayeon’s drowning in the smell and sharp taste of it. “Smiling and nodding, all the while reasoning to yourself about how every reckless thing you do is for your oh-so-perfect goal.”
Iseul watches them uneasily, slowly edging back towards Min. At least he looks unfazed, the ring his shot glass has dug into the table the only mark of his progress. He stares at the bottom of his drink listlessly.
“Let me tell you this,” Ryujin continues, unsteady on her feet, steady in her words. “You are worse than a fucking idiot and you want to know why?”
Every instinct in Sayeon tells her to run. Every piece of common sense tells her not to rise to the taunt.
“Why?”
Ryujin smiles in the dark.
“Because you are a fucking liar and you know it.”
The words leave her panting for breath, red-faced from the admission. Ryujin shifts in her seat in the oncoming silence.
Sayeon blinks once, long and slow. There’s too much alcohol pumping through her system–even for her–dulling her thoughts. The words bubble up from somewhere inside her and she pushes them out with an unforeseen recklessness. Maybe Ryujin really is rubbing off on her.
“Better a liar than a coward.”
That night, Ryujin lets her get a second kiss in before she shoves her off, repulsion and arousal twisting in her gut.
“You’re fucking–”
“Sick,” Sayeon finishes dully. “I know,” she admits, for the first time to anyone, for the first time to herself. Her conscience comes tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.
Ryujin shoves her shoulder hard and it always shocks her how much essence, how much life is trapped behind her eyes.
“Do you?”
Sayeon smiles, blissfully silent in response and Ryujin scoffs.
When her back is turned, she snaps her fingers.
“It’s time travel, isn’t it?”
The words stop her in her tracks and Sayeon moves robotically, craning her neck to face her.
Slowly, calmly, she tells herself but she’s never been a good gambler. No need to bluff when you hold all the cards. Move like nothing’s wrong.
Her silence is her downfall though, the admission in her lack of words. (Or maybe that’s just Ryujin. Always Ryujin, able to read the guilt in her lining.)
“Super instinct, my ass,” she spits. “It took us meeting another teal gift to get it. It was always like you had more than just a hunch. Like you knew what would happen next. It makes perfect fucking sense now.”
Sayeon moves her fingers like she’s loading a gun. Ryujin watches her carefully, chin propped up on her knees.
“How many times have we had this conversation?” she asks wearily, like she’s the one who’s lived this scenario a dozen times, chased it down to every ending. Sayeon’s lackluster life has little replayability.
“Many,” she decides on and snaps her fingers.
In the end, she only realizes what she wants once she’s lost it. She holds the paling skin between her fingers as the life drains out of it, every forgotten conversation, every secret admission, every stolen kiss rippling through her all at once.
“The fuck is that look for?” Ryujin’s voice is rough as it tumbles out of her and Sayeon wants to take the words and shove them back down your throat. Save your strength , she thinks and Ryujin smiles at her like she can read her thoughts. She always can.
If only she had two more minutes–no, just one would have been enough . If only she was a little faster. If only–
For the first time, she lands in the dreamspace with little dread and limitless purpose.
“Give me the power to save them,” she says. She thinks of a boy with band-aids who never got the chance to grow up, of a girl who grew up too fast, her childhood stained with blood.
If she had power, she could spare them all the suffering. If she had the strength of a god, she could bear it all.
“Give me the power to save her,” she says. Her voice shakes but her hand is steady as she holds it out in a business deal, in a prayer, in a plea.
In turn, the god smiles with no teeth.
“As you wish.”
Water pools on her glasses and she rubs at her eyes but her fingertips come away dry. Not tears then.
She looks up and the heavens look back down at her, gray clouds clumping in the sky above. Ah, fuck. She can’t exactly waltz back in after throwing a tantrum, after making a mess of things, boiling over the rim of her usual, carefully-composed self-control.
The rain is coming down in torrents now, perfectly in beat with her thoughts. And she really should have just rewinded–it’s so fucking simple, a literal snap of her fingers and that’s it, done–but the exhaustion had caught up to her, overrun her mind, and the solution had only struck her after the deadline had passed.
The rain stops as suddenly as it started. Red, worn leather stares back at her and she follows the line of the rod.
“The fuck you doing, Glasses?” Ryujin asks, one hand slung casually in her pocket. There’s rain dripping on the ends of her hair. “You’ll catch a cold standing out here like this.”
Sayeon’s jaw goes slack as the seconds tick by in silence.
“N-Not that I care or anything!” she finishes hastily. In true Ryujin fashion, she’s got her arms folded across her chest and the umbrella held above Sayeon’s head.
The whole situation is ridiculous. Ryujin, of all people, lecturing her about health and safety and concern. Ryujin, fuck-off-and-die Ryujin, telling her to take care of herself while growling and groveling about the weather. And yet, for all her contradictions, she’s still standing in the rain next to her.
Sayeon laughs and for the first time in a while, the sound is light and free.