Work Text:
Ryujin finds her at the creek; the last place she'd thought to look.
It's not a slight against Chaeryeong, who's about as far from squeamish as you can get without being a child of Ares. Which is to say, incredibly far.
When capture-the-flag rolls around, Chaeryeong likes to take up the grunt work on top of all her strategic decisions. She relishes in pulling off all aspects of the game. She enjoys her reputation as the most well-rounded warrior that camp can boast. And it helps—or hurts, depending on whose team Ryujin is on—that she has a competitive streak a mile wide.
But she's also incredibly particular about things like doing things at the right time and place. She has these lines in her head that Ryujin would hate being imposed on herself, but itches to understand, regardless.
The woods, and especially the creek, are demarcated for training and games—Chaeryeong's second love. But strategy is too precious, too important, and so is reserved for her messy, overflowing desks back in the Athena cabin, or Chiron's office at the big house.
Facts about Chaeryeong are easy enough to rifle through in Ryujin's mind, coming to the tips of her fingers at a moment's notice, very unlike anything else she's ever tried to actively learn. A lot of the time, knowing things about Chaeryeong makes her feel a little... accomplished? Smug, Jeongyeon would say.
Whatever—it's difficult to know Chaeryeong, so Ryujin takes her wins where she can, a stupid tally of smiley faces she draws into her palm, satisfied, whenever the feeling blooms warm in her chest.
Right now, though, Chaeryeong's taking those wins and turning the little smiles around into unforgiving frowns. Mindlessly, tauntingly.
She's sitting cross-legged on a mud-flecked boulder, in her stretched-out orange camp t-shirt and the same denim shorts she's been wearing for the past week. Undoubtedly neck-deep in strategy mode, with rolls of parchment spread out haphazardly around her, over the drier stretches of rock, smaller pebbles holding them down to prevent them from flying off in the wind. Her latest and most prized treasure, Daedalus' laptop, is balanced precariously in her lap. Ryujin's a few feet away from her, still, but she knows that if she got up close, those startling grey eyes would be clouded over in deep thought.
Not that she's gotten the chance to get up close, as of late.
"Hey," Ryujin says, tentatively. The creek is supposed to be her territory, kind of, so it's ridiculous that Chaeryeong's mere presence makes her feel like she's intruding. It goes to show that everything else, too, upside-down with them. "Can I join you?"
It's a gradual process for Chaeryeong to turn her head away from the horizon, to take Ryujin's figure in, vaguely, before her eyes clear in recognition. The sun, peeking through those grey storm clouds.
Ryujin watches, patiently. Feels the corner of her lips tug up, in spite of her nerves.
Thankfully, Chaeryeong returns it. A ghost of a smile, the best anyone can get out of her these days. And with how the two of them are, right now, with how they've been, it's miracle that it's Ryujin of all people who's gotten it out of her.
And Gods, she's so pretty that it's sort of ruining Ryujin's life.
It comes at her with all the force of an enemy sword. Chaeryeong's hair is wild, wind-ruffled and barely tamed into a knotted bun. Her eyes are insomnia-dry, red. The bags under them are more pronounced than ever. She's the most beautiful girl Ryujin has ever seen, ever known, and she hates that she has to learn it anew, from scratch, every single time they stumble into a brief moment of respite like this one.
So, of course, the moment has to end before it's really even granted itself to them.
The little spark in Chaeryeong's gaze—that addictive one, more so than any nectar or ambrosia—is stamped out like most other joys have been this summer.
"Come to say goodbye, then?" Chaeryeong turns back to her laptop, fingers typing away as if resuming what she'd been up to. The lines of her body, her fine-boned fingers, say she's lying. "You shouldn't have bothered."
The apathy that's heavy in her voice says it's bait, the kind they've gotten used to throwing back and forth. The malicious kind, so different from the tenor of the banter they'd settled into early in their friendship—hard-won, yes, undoubtedly so, but wonderfully easy once they'd really gotten comfortable with each other.
This sniping, though, it tastes more bitter than any of their previous, stupid arguments. Something worse than a regular Athena-Poseidon rivalry stint.
Chaeryeong's face shutters. The unsettling blindness that's been plaguing Ryujin, so foreign when it comes to her but becoming terrifyingly more familiar, returns.
Well, not exactly—if there's one thing she knows for sure, it's that this conversation won't end well, and that nothing she can say will land the way she hopes for it to.
"I'll barely be gone for a week."
"How sad for you," Chaeryeong says, blankly. She's still typing, these staccato clicks and clacks on her keyboard, spelling out the truth to Ryujin more clearly than the alphabet ever could.
It rankles at her, the farce. What the hell is the point of it, really? Between the two of them?
"You don't have to be so-" Ryujin cuts herself off as soon as she registers how bad of an idea it is, but it's too late. Always.
She sighs, as Chaeryeong's gaze snaps back to her, as if on a hair trigger, raring to rise to an argument.
"So? So, what?"
"Nothing." Ryujin kicks at a pebble. Watches it skip across the creek, an impossible feat against the beating currents of the water. Wow, Dad. Would you mind giving me some girl advice, while you're at it? That'd be like, a gazillion times more helpful. Thanks.
"I'm sorry, did you want to come cry on my shoulder? Did your little mortal friend-" she spits out, and Ryujin can't pick out which word, mortal or friend, packs more venom, "-upset you somehow?"
"You'd be happy about that, wouldn't you," Ryujin mutters. It's a lost case, now, anyway, saying goodbye peacefully.
"What?"
Ryujin throws her hands up. "Well, you'd rather I be miserable, wouldn't you? You think I'm going off to some- some holiday, instead of trying to be a good fucking daughter, after going missing all the damn time this past year for missions-"
Chaeryeong's on her feet, too, now, laptop and papers shoved aside. They might be carried out to sea and she wouldn't notice, not right now, when she looks like this, when the full force of her attention is directed to Ryujin, electrifying. Ryujin sucks in a breath.
"Don't fucking pretend you're just going back to visit your mom," Chaeryeong whispers. "Bullshit."
The quiver of her jaw says she's rubbing salt in the wound, intentional. Calculated. Ryujin doesn't care.
"How fucking dare you," Ryujin hisses, low.
They're nose to nose, like this. And the truth has held up against the test of time, and this immeasurable distance between them. Chaeryeong's grey eyes are still breathtaking like this, darkened in anger, the sky moments before a storm breaks.
The last time they'd been this close, almost a year ago, exactly, Chaeryeong had kissed her goodbye.
They're both thinking about it, now, Ryujin knows. Wonders if Chaeryeong feels it, too, prays that she can—this tangible, bonfire heat between them, one Ryujin would plunge into without any of the godly protection hovering over the surface of her skin.
Her gaze drops to Chaeryeong's lips—cracked, bitten red, insistent, rushed, too fast, too desperate, too much of a surprise, too much like a goodbye—before she realises her mistake, wrenching her eyes back up to Chaeryeong's, panicked—
—but it's too late. The shutters are back up. Too fast, too soon for Ryujin to catalogue anything new, to orient herself any better in this torturous new dynamic they're entrapped in. Not quite friends—not much of anything else. She'll take enemies, again, even, inherited and nonsensical as their long-forgotten rivalry may be. So long as it gives them a name for each other.
"Have fun with Jimin," Chaeryeong croaks out. Then she blinks, furiously, the skin of her neck reddening.
She hadn't meant to let it slip, Ryujin knows. It's one detail too many, illustrating that she's been paying a little too much attention to Ryujin and her plans.
Ryujin's finger twitches in an arc, where her hands are clenched into fists behind her back. Muscle memory.
She ignores the jab, the new line, the bait. "My mom will ask after you," she says, instead, a peace offering. "What do you want me to tell her?"
Chaeryeong's gaze returns to the horizon. The line of her shoulders says she's grateful for an out, and the jut of her chin says she's fallen quickly back into contemplation. "The truth," she says, dazedly. "That we're all holding on as best as we can."