Work Text:
“It doesn’t hurt,” said Kyujin.
“Mm,” said Yoona, taking an ice pack from her bag without looking.
The bruise on Kyujin’s shoulder had blossomed into a vivid violet about halfway through the last round, and had steadily evolved into a kind of purple that didn’t have a name yet. Yoona watched it break artistic ground in real time.
“Seriously, unnie, it looks worse than it is.”
“Mm.”
“It was a fluke. She got lucky.”
Yoona pressed the ice pack to Kyujin’s shoulder and didn’t say what she was thinking, which was: three years was a lot of luck. Because for nearly three years Kyujin had lost to Kim Jiwoo.
It hadn’t always been this way. When they had first met, it was Kyujin who defeated Jiwoo every time. Occasionally there’d be an upset, and Kyujin would stagger back in surprise, but more often than not, Kyujin reigned victorious on the podium.
Then Jiwoo defeated Kyujin in a tournament final, and then another, and then another. And for the next three years Kim Jiwoo had kept getting lucky.
“Let’s just go home. I want to review the match for tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I could have had her.”
“Okay.”
Kyujin stood, slowly, willing herself not to wince. Her body vetoed this decision and she gritted her teeth. She put her hand on her shoulder and took it off again. Yoona watched her do this twice.
“Kim Jiwoo,” Kyujin said, mostly to her shoulder.
“Mhm.”
“Kim Jiwoo.”
“I heard you the first time.”
🥋
Kyujin exuded a distinct bouquet after tournaments, which was why Yoona had already draped the couch with a long, plush towel and sat clear on the other side of the room. Kyujin lay on the towel with her phone held over her face and the television playing a YouTube video in which returning champion Kim Jiwoo axe kicked perennial challenger Jang Kyujin’s shoulder in slow motion, while an announcer who called herself Morrow achieved volumes that had not previously seemed possible from a human throat.
“Whose idea was it to show stuff in slow motion?” said Kyujin into her phone.
“Who knows,” said Yoona, playing Minecraft on hers.
The video looped and Kyujin watched her bruise form again and again and again.
“She got a clean hit on the counter,” said Yoona. “In the third round.”
“I know.”
“You stepped right when you had plenty of time to step left.”
“I know.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I know, Yoona.”
Yoona did not finish the sentence. She had been starting and stopping sentences with Kyujin for three years now and had developed a kind of expertise in saying things in just half a sentence.
Kyujin opened Instagram, which she had promised herself she would not do, and there it was. Jiwoo had posted a photo of herself just about to kick Kyujin in the face, her foot a blurry missile inches away from Kyujin's head. Both of their faces were visible: Kyujin, with the resigned look of a woman who knew exactly what was about to happen. Jiwoo, with a grin that was, to Kyujin, extremely uncomplicated.
The caption said: night night ❤️
“I’m going to kill her.”
“Mhm.”
“I am going to find her and end her.”
“You will literally see her at 5 PM tomorrow, assuming you win in loser’s bracket.”
“Which I will. And then I’ll end her.”
Kyujin threw her phone across the room. Yoona picked it up and threw it back with the practiced motion of someone who had been doing this for three years.
Kyujin turned her face into the towel. The voice in her head, which had started when she had been kicked in the face and which she had long given up on stopping, said Kim Jiwoo in the rhythm of her pulse. She picked up the remote and skipped to the next YouTube video. Jiwoo’s latest stream started playing. Kyujin groaned and turned back into the towel.
Jiwoo streamed three nights a week, mostly perfume-making, sometimes makeup, always talking. Somehow, she’d cultivated a following that Kyujin could only describe as devotional. The streams were almost entirely unrelated to her fights; Jiwoo would mention her events in passing, the way a person might mention they had run an errand. Yesterday I beat someone unconscious. Anyway here’s my latest perfume.
“Isn’t it weird,” mumbled Kyujin, muffled from the towel, “that nobody comes to her matches?”
Yoona, on the floor, looked up while still tapping something in Minecraft.
“I mean,” said Kyujin. “People come. Fans. But like.”
“Like real people.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d think she would have a Yoona,” Kyujin said, raising her head.
“I’d think she would have a Yoona.”
“And she doesn’t.”
“And she doesn’t.”
Kyujin slumped back down into the towel and thought about this for a while. Jiwoo’s grin on Instagram had not been that uncomplicated. Jiwoo’s grin had been doing several things at once. Kyujin could not identify all of them with her head buried into a towel. Kyujin was not sure she wanted to.
She did not look up again for another two hours.
🥋
In her dream she dodged, and Jiwoo was already there.
She always was.
🥋
The bakery had upside-down peach tarts on Sundays. Kyujin had been buying them on Sundays for some time. It had started as something she did for herself after she lost; she had begun, somewhere in the third month of losing to Jiwoo, to refer to them as her consolation tarts, until Yoona had told her, gently, to stop calling them that. Now they were just tarts. She had not won, and the tarts were good. Separate from the loss.
She was six people from the counter when something moved at high speed in her peripheral vision and a body collided with hers in a way that felt practiced, like it had collided with this exact body for years and knew exactly where its bruises were.
“Kyutie!”
“Get off me.”
“You almost had me.”
“Jiwoo, your hand is right on the bruise.”
“No. It's more over here.”
Jiwoo adjusted her grip slightly, without looking, and squeezed. Kyujin grunted in dismay. Jiwoo moved her hand back and rested her chin on Kyujin’s good shoulder. She smelled like citrus and something warmer that Kyujin hadn’t watched enough perfume-making streams to recognize.
“You almost had me,” Jiwoo said again. “In the third.”
“I stepped right.”
“You stepped right.”
There was a small silence. Jiwoo’s chin lifted off Kyujin’s shoulder. Kyujin could feel her, somehow, looking at the side of her face.
“Why did you step right, Kkyukkyu?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hmm.”
The line moved, and Kyujin along with her. Jiwoo stayed attached. The bakery clerk, who had known Kyujin for years and who had developed her own theories about the woman attached to Kyujin, raised an eyebrow in a way that Kyujin elected to ignore.
“About your Instagram post,” Kyujin said.
“Mhm.”
“It was insulting.”
“It was affectionate.”
“It said night night.”
“Affectionately.”
“Is that what it was.”
“I used a heart emoji.”
Kyujin turned her head, finally, and Jiwoo’s face was much closer than Kyujin had bargained for. Kyujin made contact with Jiwoo’s eyes. Jiwoo closed them and puckered her lips. Kyujin swung her head back so quickly that her neck cracked.
“You owe me a tart,” Jiwoo said.
“It’s a tart per tournament.”
“It’s a tart per win, Kyujin, you’re the one who changed it.”
“I did not.”
“You did too. Last time it was two tarts per win. The time before that it was three tarts.”
“Well, three tarts was just unreasonable.”
“It was your idea to begin with.” Jiwoo had somehow wrapped around Kyujin like ivy. “Even though I keep beating you in front of two thousand people.”
Kyujin almost snorted. “More like a hundred. Where are you getting two thousand?”
“The organizers stream our fights on YouTube. You’re my number-one rival, after all.”
“Well, you’re not mine.”
This came out faster than Kyujin intended. Jiwoo’s grin, which had been at full capacity for the entire encounter, dimmed a few percentage points.
“Kyujin, I know where every single one of your bruises are,” Jiwoo said.
“Jiwoo.”
“I know how well you slept based on how fast you kick.”
The line moved. Kyujin did not. The woman behind her politely coughed.
“I’ll tell you what.” Jiwoo untangled herself from Kyujin and stepped ahead of her in line. “Beat me tomorrow, and I’ll pay you back for every tart.”
“Every.”
“Every. Going back to the beginning.”
“Jiwoo, that’s hundreds of tarts.”
“It is.”
“That’s a million won of tarts.”
“It is.”
Jiwoo gave Kyujin the smile she used when she streamed, which Kyujin realized was different from her usual smile. Kyujin chose not to think about how she could recognize the difference.
“And if I lose?”
“You’ll lose.”
“If I lose?”
“I want a whole box of tarts,” said Jiwoo. “For every win. Going forward.”
Kyujin coughed violently. Jiwoo grinned her real grin, looked at the bakery clerk — who shrugged — and ordered an upside-down peach tart that was decidedly not an consolation tart.
🥋
Kyujin took her tarts to the gym and ate one of them on the way there. The gym was empty on Sunday mornings and she could hear her own breath in the room. She put the box of tarts down. She got up. She drilled the counter.
Jiwoo’s kick, slow-motion in her head. Step off the line. Step left.
She knew how to step left. Her body knew, too.
She drilled it again. She stepped left.
She drilled it a third time, very slowly, watching her own feet, and her feet stepped left, and her feet stepped left, and her feet stepped left.
She listened to her own breath. Consistent.
Kyujin went to her box of tarts and ate one, considering this.
Then she drilled the counter to Jiwoo’s roundhouse, which she had not countered properly in approximately one year. Her body did it just fine. She drilled the spinning hook kick she had not landed on Jiwoo in six months. Her foot found the right angle without even trying.
Her own breath was still consistent.
She sat down on the mat for a long time.
🥋
Kyujin came home a few hours before she was due at the tournament. She went to her room. She closed the door. She sat on the bed, then on the floor, then on the bed.
Then she went to go find Yoona, whose door was closed, an unfamiliar set of sounds coming from the other side.
Kyujin knocked.
“I’m busy.”
“I wanted to talk to you though.”
A grumble, which, granted, was not unusual when Yoona was gaming. The door stayed closed.
“What are you doing anyway?”
A pause. The sound of rapid key presses. Then: “I’m jungling.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Kyujin pressed her ear against the door and heard what sounded like some kind of skirmish, followed by more keyboard smashing, concluded with a deep groan and Yoona rolling away from her desk.
“Yes?” Yoona opened the door, still in her gaming chair.
“What are you playing?”
Yoona glanced back at the computer. “League.”
“League?”
“League of Legends.”
Kyujin blinked. “When did you start playing League of Legends?”
Yoona looked down. “A few weeks ago. After the party.”
"The tournament party.”
“Jiwoo was there and she told me about it,” Yoona mumbled. “And then I started and it was really fun.”
Kyujin opened her mouth, closed it again, and then laughed and laughed until her bruises hurt and she had to stop. Yoona, who was staring at the ground like she could see into the center of the earth, endured.
“Unnie.”
“Kyujin.”
“Do you play League with Jiwoo?”
Yoona bit her lower lip. “Yes.”
“Do you talk to Jiwoo?”
Yoona nodded, still biting her lip.
“Unnie, what do you talk to Kim Jiwoo about?”
Yoona closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, giving the impression of a woman in hell. “She asks lots of questions.”
“About?”
“About you.” Yoona opened her eyes. “She wants to know about you.”
Kyujin sighed. “Unnie, you’re supposed to be on my side.”
“She doesn’t ask questions about fighting, Kyujin,” Yoona said, slowly. “She asks other things. Like she wanted to know if you were eating right, and I said you were, most of the time. And she wanted to know if you were sleeping okay, and I said yes, unless you were watching some YouTube video all night. And then she asked if you were happy. And I said that was a hard question.”
“Why would she ask all that?”
“She didn’t say.”
Kyujin leaned on the wall behind her.
“You guys just started talking?”
Yoona was quiet.
“Unnie.”
“We’ve been friends for a long time, Kyujin.”
“How long.”
“Years. Since your fourth tournament with her, when she noticed I came to all your matches, and she came up to say hi.”
“So she did have a Yoona after all.”
“Yeah. But I only cheer for you.”
Yoona looked back over to her computer, where the chat was going wild with rage over why Yoona’s champion was just standing there. Yoona stared for three seconds, and jerked her head back to face Kyujin, having made the decision to be a good friend instead of a good teammate.
Kyujin stared at her feet, which had kicked Jiwoo in the torso countless times across three years, and which she now suspected could have kicked her in another place, too.
Then Kyujin tried to remember a specific moment in a specific match where she had executed a move against Jiwoo that she could call absolutely flawless, no holds barred. She could not remember a single one. At least, not since they’d first started.
Finally Kyujin tried to remember a specific moment in a specific match against anyone other than Jiwoo where she had pulled her punches. She could not remember one of those either.
“Unnie.”
“Kyujin.”
“I’m trying to think of a single time I went all out against her. Besides when we first started.”
The League sounds continued. Yoona’s eyes remained on Kyujin.
“Yeah?”
“And I can’t.”
“Yeah.”
Kyujin looked at the ceiling, which she did when she didn’t want anyone to be able to see her face. The voice in her head, which she had been ignoring for three years and had only gotten louder, chanted a name over and over again.
“Yoona-unnie.”
“Mm.”
“I don’t think I want to beat Kim Jiwoo.”
Yoona paused for a long time.
“Kyujin,” said Yoona, gently, “I think we all knew that.”
🥋
The locker room before the match smelled like B.O. and antiseptic, and Kyujin was hurriedly getting ready so she wouldn’t have to stay longer than she needed. Then the door opened and Jiwoo came in.
Kyujin noticed Jiwoo was dressed for the fight, her dobok clean and pressed. Kyujin also noticed Jiwoo was in the wrong locker room.
“You’re in the loser’s bracket locker room.”
“I know.”
“So you’re in the wrong locker room, Jiwoo.”
“I know.”
Jiwoo sat down on the bench across from Kyujin and looked down, quiet. Three seconds passed. Then ten. Eventually Kyujin lost track of the seconds, and knew only that Jiwoo had gone the longest she had ever gone without saying anything in Kyujin’s presence. Her hair was up in the high knot Jiwoo did before fights, and her hands gripped her knees tightly, as though she were nervous.
Jiwoo, Kyujin knew, did not get nervous before fights.
“Kyujin, I want to ask you something.” Jiwoo was still looking down.
“Okay.”
“I’m just going to say it.”
“Okay.”
Jiwoo raised her head, looking straight at Kyujin.
“Will you fight me like you’re trying to win?”
“Jiwoo.”
“Like you’re trying to win, Kyujin.”
“I’m always trying to win.”
“No. At best you’re trying not to lose. There’s a difference, Kyujin, and I can tell, I’ve always been able to tell, and frankly it’s insulting.”
Kyujin’s mouth opened and closed. Jiwoo watched her, with an attentiveness even greater than what she paid the camera on her streams.
“You weren’t always like this, Kyujin. But at some point, you stopped fighting to win, and you started fighting not to lose. And I want you to fight me to win.”
Kyujin shook her head. “That’s ridiculous, Jiwoo.”
“It’s not. I know you, Kyujin. I know your body. I know your thoughts. I know you even better than Yoona-unnie does.”
“Why would you even care?” Kyujin snapped. “The fans love it when you kick me in the face.”
“Because, Kyujin,” Jiwoo said, standing up. “I don’t care about the fans. I care about fighting you. If you fight me to win, and you win, you’ll remember what it takes for you to win. And if you fight me to win, and you lose, you’ll know exactly what you need to train. Either way, I’ll have actually fought you. Which I haven’t done in three years.”
“Jiwoo.”
“I would like to fight someone who actually wants to fight.”
“Jiwoo.”
“Is it because you don’t want to hit my face? You can hit my face. I don’t mind.”
There was a small silence, in which Kyujin discovered she could not, in fact, look at Jiwoo’s face.
“Kyujin,” Jiwoo enunciated, as her face did the same thing it had done in her Instagram photo, which was grin a grin both complicated and uncomplicated. “Do you not want to hit my face?”
“I’ll kick your face if you want me to, alright?” Kyujin spat.
Jiwoo batted her eyelids. “Do you like my face, Kkyukkyu?”
“I’ll kick you in the face right now if you don’t stop.” Kyujin’s ears brightened under the flickering lights.
Jiwoo reached across the bench. The bruise was still on Kyujin’s shoulder, although the color had faded over the day, making it plum where it had been previously indescribable. Jiwoo put two fingers on it, very carefully, in the exact place where her foot had landed.
“I’m sorry about this one, by the way.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m a little sorry.”
“You’re not.”
“I am.”
Jiwoo moved her fingers over the bruise, the way someone might touch a sculpture they’d made themselves. Kyujin listened to her own breath. It was not consistent.
“Fight me like you’re trying to win, okay?”
“Sure, Jiwoo.”
“Like you used to.”
“Sure.”
“Kick me in the face.”
Kyujin exhaled. “We’ll see.”
“And then after,” said Jiwoo.
“After?”
“Buy me tarts.”
“Tarts.”
“Win or lose.”
“Win or win.”
Jiwoo laughed and leaned in and kissed Kyujin on the cheek and was at the door before Kyujin’s brain had quite caught up. And her hand was on the handle, and she turned, and her face was doing something Kyujin had not seen it do before and lacked brainpower, currently, to name.
“Try your best, number-one rival.”
The door closed.
🥋
The fight was the closest fight either of them had ever fought.
Morrow knew it within thirty seconds. The crowd knew it within a minute. Yoona, who had taken the same front-row seat she’d taken for three years, knew it the moment Kyujin set her stance.
The referee shouted to begin, and before his voice faded Jiwoo sprinted toward Kyujin, launching a push kick to shove her back.
Kyujin’s body, which had known how to dodge for a long time, dodged. In the audience, Yoona clenched her fists.
Kyujin launched two roundhouses cleaner than any roundhouse she’d ever launched, one low to Jiwoo’s ribs, the other high to her face. Jiwoo took the first and blocked the second, shoving Kyujin back with another kick.
“You went for my face,” Jiwoo said, only slightly surprised.
“You asked for it,” said Kyujin, her voice low.
Jiwoo kept on the attack, feinting a roundhouse, following it with her famous axe kick. Kyujin took it on a forearm that had previously been mere decoration and was now, finally, a guard.
They fought. For three years they’d studied each other, memorizing every detail of each other’s bodies and movements, and now it was time for the final exam. Jiwoo’s combinations arrived in the order Kyujin’s body knew they would. Kyujin’s footwork, which had been doing one thing against Jiwoo and another thing in the gym for three years, finally agreed with itself. Jiwoo beamed around her mouthguard. Kyujin smiled back.
Kyujin took the first round with a flurry of body kicks. Jiwoo won the second with a devastating kick in the head. By the second minute of the third round, Morrow had stopped announcing and had simply begun making bewildered sounds.
In the third round, with Jiwoo holding a narrow lead, Kyujin found the opening she had been ignoring for three years. Her reverse hook kick snaked past Jiwoo’s guard, snapping like a whip across her cheek, twisting Jiwoo’s head sideways in a spray of sweat and saliva. Jiwoo stumbled back and rubbed her face. The same face Kyujin had been unable to look at in the locker room, and maybe had been unable to look at since that first tournament loss.
The scoreboard flashed, vaulting Kyujin forward by five points.
“Night night,” said Kyujin.
Jiwoo wiped her mouth and smirked, lunging forward, driving a final roundhouse into Kyujin’s ribs for two points, just as the bell rang.
Jiwoo had won by a single point.
Kyujin did not register this for several seconds. She looked at Jiwoo. Jiwoo looked at her. Jiwoo’s mouthguard was out, and her grin was back, and her grin was, as always, only seemingly uncomplicated.
Kyujin lurched back as though she had taken a spinning kick to the head. Seeing this from the audience, Yoona let out a deep sigh three years in the making.
Kyujin and Jiwoo bowed. Then they walked toward each other.
Jiwoo, when she reached Kyujin, did not say anything for a moment. Then she put her hand, very lightly, on Kyujin’s shoulder bruise. Which had, by now, accumulated several additional layers of bruise.
“You fought me to win,” Jiwoo whispered.
“I fought you to win.”
“You kicked me really hard in the face.”
“I did.”
“How did it feel?”
Kyujin thought about this for a long time, under the bright lights, in the unbearably hot room, through Morrow’s endless blathering.
“Like I want to do it again.”
Somehow, Jiwoo’s grin, which had once again been at full capacity, expanded at least ten percentage points, into something Kyujin had never before seen, into something Kyujin wanted to see again and again and again.
“Okay,” Jiwoo said. “You owe me a box of tarts.”
🥋
The bakery was closed by the time they got there, because the bakery was closed in the evenings, which Kyujin had known and which Jiwoo had also known and which neither of them had mentioned.
They sat on the curb outside. Yoona had gone home already, allegedly to play League, but in fact because she had carried the emotional intelligence of the household for three years and was glad to finally return some of it to Kyujin.
“There’s a place down Hangang-daero,” Jiwoo said. “They’re open nights. And they have tarts.”
“I know the place down Hangang-daero.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s not as good.”
“Yeah.”
They sat. Kyujin’s shoulder hurt, very badly, in a way she felt consciously for the first time in three years. Jiwoo’s face was, at the moment, an interesting shade of mauve, and she was looking at it in her selfie camera as if it belonged to someone else.
“Jiwoo.”
“Yeah, Kyujin?”
“I’m not going to lose to you again.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.”
“Are you going to be okay with that?”
Jiwoo rolled her eyes. “Am I okay with— stop insulting me, Kyujin. I’ve been thinking about this a long time. I like who I am when I’m fighting you.”
“I like you, too.”
Jiwoo looked at her.
“I like who you are when you’re fighting me.” Kyujin scratched her ear, which was rapidly reddening. “And maybe when you're not fighting me, too.”
The curb was cold. Yoona was, somewhere in their apartment, playing League, or just as likely thinking about her extremely repressed roommate. The bakery clerk was at home, watching a K-drama, thinking about the will-they-or-won’t-they she witnessed in line every tournament day.
Kyujin’s left hand found Jiwoo’s right hand, which had been waiting for this for three years.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
They sat that way for some time, as the sun set and the dusk settled in around the passing cars, and Seoul continued being its uncomplicated, full self. Delivery riders and dog-walkers and people finding their way back home.
The place on Hangang-daero was not as good. Kyujin and Jiwoo went anyway, bodies turning indescribable shades of purple, holding hands in the dark.