Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The night air feels refreshing on Yu Rim’s skin as the two of them sit out on the balcony together.

She can feel Hee Do’s eyes on her as she runs her fingers over the rim of the wine glass Hee Do had gotten her.

Yu Rim knows that this is it. She can feel it in the air, prickling under her skin.

Every word she’s ever thought of and all the scenarios she’s ever come up with, every single possibility she’s gone over and over in her head - what to say, how to try and explain… they’re gone. It’s all gone, wiped clean by Hee Do’s grin and Hee Do’s affection.

She likes seeing Yu Rim happy.

And she makes Yu Rim so happy.

Yu Rim’s heart hammers wildly up in her throat.

“Hee Do…” The words feel thick on her tongue as they come out: “You do know why, right?”

“Hm? Why what?” Hee Do asks.

Yu Rim’s shaking fingers pause their nervous tracing of her wine glass, and she draws them back and turns to look at Hee Do. She is still sitting close to Yu Rim—so close—and her expression is open and curious. Caring.

Yu Rim’s heart hammers harder still.

“Why I’d be so happy even after getting a silver medal,” Yu Rim finds herself saying. "Even if it’s for another country.”

Hee Do is clearly about to argue the value of the medal, but that’s not what Yu Rim cares about right now. She can’t stop now. Hee Do has to know that… “I’m the happiest I’ve been ever since—” Lord. So long. “—I don’t even know when, even though I know what’s waiting for me once this is over.”

Yu Rim hasn’t forgotten. Everything going on in her life lingers right back where she came from—right where she’ll be again once these moments with Hee Do are over.

But right now she’s here with her.

The warm glow of the hotel room light spills out from the balcony door and frames the side of Hee Do’s face in gold against the evening sky—it brushes the curve of her soft full cheek, the arch of her brow, tints the shape of her full lips. Her eyes are on Yu Rim’s, and the warmth of her gaze is all her own.

She’s all Yu Rim cares about right now.

It’s almost stupid how much so, and Yu Rim shakes her own head at herself in near disbelief.

Had she really not noticed?

Can't she tell how she makes Yu Rim feel?

“Don’t you know why?” Yu Rim asks quietly.

It feels obvious—it really does—and still the words feel stuck in Yu Rim’s throat as her erratic heartbeat spikes further.

Her gaze finds itself on Hee Do’s lips. She licks at her own dry ones on reflex, breath hitching.

There’s no way Hee Do won’t understand if Yu Rim shows her. And Yu Rim wants to.

She’ll show her.

She swallows hard and drags her gaze back up to Hee Do’s intense eyes.

Yu Rim hangs onto the tension of the moment, gathering all her will to move in across the small distance between them, to finally show--

Hee Do leans in quickly and presses their lips together.

Yu Rim’s breath hitches sharply—her gut dropkicks so hard it’s painful, and her heart feels like it stops.

A quiet smack, and Yu Rim watches wide-eyed as Hee Do pulls back.

What?

“H-Hee Do-yah--”

She--

"I know,” Hee Do murmurs. She knows? She… Then… “Don’t tell me you don't feel this too.” This? This…

This too.

The world spins. Yu Rim pushes back in at once, and Hee Do must have pushed in to meet her halfway too because then they’re kissing -for real now.

Every nerve in Yu Rim’s body prickles electric as she kisses Hee Do and Hee Do pushes her lips back against hers, oh my God, kissing her back, she’s kissing her back- Yu Rim raises her hands to touch Hee Do’s face, to- to make sure this is real–

Their lips part slightly with another soft smack—but this time just for a moment: just for long enough for Yu Rim to feel the puff of Hee Do’s breath against her lips before pressing back in, wanting to feel how full Hee Do’s lips really are, moving her lips to massage hers—she wants this to be good, for Hee Do to--

Hee Do sighs against her mouth as Yu Rim takes her lips between her own, as they push together and apart, soft smacks sounding quietly in the night air, Yu Rim’s fingertips burning where they touch Hee Do’s jaw--

Hee Do—Hee Do—cups her face with warm hands and parts her mouth wider, and Yu Rim parts her own too without a second thought, breathing raggedly, wanting to--

Yu Rim whimpers when the tips of their tongues brush briefly, heat rushing sharply down her entire body. She draws back slightly only to swallow and catch a broken breath before pressing in harder, tilting her head further to tease her tongue across Hee Do’s parted mouth, briefly, wanting to see if she’ll--

Hee Do makes a sound. She likes it. Yu Rim shudders, breathes heavily, and does it again, kisses her again, tingling, head spinning, barely able to process anything but Hee Do: Hee Do’s warmth, Hee Do’s mouth, Hee Do’s sighs, right there against Yu Rim--

"If I die don't be mad…” gets mumbled at some point in between damp kisses.

It takes a moment or two or five for the words to register in Yu Rim’s mind.

“What?”

Oh my God, Hee Do’s an idiot.

Yu Rim slaps her, hard. “Don’t joke about stuff like that!”

"Sorry!" Hee Do exclaims, managing to grab Yu Rim's hand before Yu Rim can hit her again for giving her the fright of her life. "It was just because my heart was beating so fast," Hee Do says simply, like that’s not one of the most heart-stopping things in the world to say. She presses Yu Rim’s hand to her chest and asks: "See?"

Yu Rim does see. Hee Do’s heart is racing under Yu Rim’s hand, thumping strong, because of- because--

“You can’t just say stuff like that,” Yu Rim says weakly, before she even realizes she’s done so.

How can she still make Yu Rim-- Yu Rim didn’t think she even could fall more.

But Hee Do’s hand squeezes hers against her chest, and her heart still beats fast and strong—so clearly affected too—and the way it makes Yu Rim feel…

"I know, I know, it was a joke,” Hee Do sighs with a cute near pout, clearly thinking she’s still mad.

She’s so…

She’s going to end up making Yu Rim say it, isn’t she?

"No, not that," Yu Rim tries to clarify. Her face feels hot, and she feels like she’s found herself in another reality. Her heart is still doing its best to beat twice as fast as Hee Do’s under her hand, and it takes effort to manage to get any words out. "The-- the other bit…”

A slow smile starts to spread on Hee Do’s lips, and her gaze shifts in this way that…

“What, that you almost made my heart beat out of my chest?”

She’s teasing her, the asshole.

"Stop!" Yu Rim whines, trying to pull her hand back. She can’t stand her.

Hee Do lets out a laugh—that loud laugh of hers that seems to just burst out of her when she’s at her happiest and silliest. She doesn’t let go of Yu Rim and brings her in closer instead.

Yu Rim’s breath hitches.

“You don't want me to tell you that?” Hee Do asks, voice dripping with fondness and mirth. “Yu Rim-ah, if you kiss me again I promise I won't.”

Yu Rim could slap her. She could, but Hee Do’s eyes are crinkled over that silly grin and her face is right there, startingly close to hers and so pretty, and Yu Rim could--

She can.

She presses in and does it: kisses her.

Her lips are so soft. They fit against Yu Rim’s, warm and full, and Yu Rim can’t believe…

She could never have imagined it’d be like this.

And she’d imagined.

But having her here against herself, feeling her—feeling that quiet sigh she makes against her lips as she kisses her… Feeling the way she wraps her arms around Yu Rim, just like always, perfect, but so different now…

Yes, different. And real, undeniably so, even if Yu Rim can barely believe it. Her whole body tingles as Hee Do’s hand curves around her lower back and brings her in closer, so close together-- Yu Rim shudders, takes her lips with her own again, and finally gets to bury her hands in her soft hair. She strokes through dark strands and down the back of Hee Do’s neck, feeling her, unable to get enough as she gets to kiss her, again and again, sending her head spinning.

“Yu Rim-ah,” Hee Do sighs quietly in the space between their lips, voice heavy and unlike anything Yu Rim’s ever heard from her before. Shivers wrack their way up and down the back of Yu Rim’s neck, and Hee Do runs a warm hand up her back.

Yu Rim kisses her again, just once more—and then one more, just…

She loses count. At some point Hee Do pecks her lips and Yu Rim finds them pausing, foreheads resting together. Yu Rim valiantly tries to catch her breath, closing her eyes to try and cope with everything going through her.

This is…

She didn’t know anything could feel like this.

“In case it’s not clear,” Hee Do says quietly by her lips, voice still heavy, “I’m really happy too.”

She’s so…

She says it so simply. So goofy, incapable of ever leaving anything unsaid, and Yu Rim can’t help the absurd laugh that bubbles out of her as she pulls back.

Nothing ever feels as heavy with her around, does it?

“C’mere,” Hee Do says with a grin, pleased as always to get her to laugh, and Yu Rim can feel the curve of her smile against her lips when they kiss again.

Turns out it’s hard to kiss while smiling too hard. Hee Do chuckles—no, giggles—against her lips and makes them have to break back. Yu Rim can’t help giggling too, and she presses a fond kiss to Hee Do’s cheek.

“We should go back inside,” Hee Do says, voice fond as she rubs her hands up and down Yu Rim’s arms. “You’re getting cold.”

That feels impossible. Yu Rim doesn't feel cold. She feels warm all over, almost electric, and… And she doesn't want to stop.

She’d stay out here forever if she could. With her. Just the two of them and the stillness of the night surrounding them and nothing else.

Hee Do pulls back further and meets her eyes with her own, and a sharp pang of emotion hits Yu Rim’s chest.

Hee Do’s looking at her like…

Like the stuff of Yu Rim’s dreams.

“Come on,” Hee Do says with a soft smile, touching down Yu Rim’s arms until she's taking her hands and standing up.

Here, with her, for real, Yu Rim will do anything she wants. So long as it keeps her with her. So she follows.

Hee Do lets her walk inside first, so Yu Rim steps further into the room while Hee Do closes the balcony doors. The lights on in the room make Yu Rim’s eyes hurt, and she steps over to the other wall until she can flick most of them off.

Everything goes quieter once the balcony doors shut. Yu Rim pauses.

(They’re inside in the hotel room.)

(Alone.)

Yu Rim swallows hard. Her breath is short when she turns around to find Hee Do stepping her way. She moves forward herself, slowly, and then Hee Do is there just a step away, her warmth so close.

Hee Do licks briefly at her own lips, nervous, eyes roving over Yu Rim’s face. Yu Rim doesn’t know what she’s looking for, doesn’t know what to give her—but then Hee Do steps forward, even closer, leaning in slightly and pushing any clear thought straight out of Yu Rim’s mind.

Hee Do reaches for Yu Rim’s wrist and drops her gaze to Yu Rim’s mouth. Yu Rim feels lightheaded. Goosebumps wrack over her skin as Hee Do traces fingertips further down her wrist to her hand, threading their fingers loosely together.

Hee Do steps back and tugs her to come with, towards the couch, and--

She doesn’t want to stop either.

The thought lands like thunder as Hee Do sits sideways on the couch and tries to tug Yu Rim in, and this time Yu Rim doesn’t hesitate. She’s already reaching for Hee Do before even landing on the couch too, and all but a second later Hee Do’s face is in her hands and they’re both pressing in hurriedly.

They bump together a bit messily, and Yu Rim lets out a small breathless laugh at the awkward kiss. Hee Do grumbles quietly, but Yu Rim doesn’t wait: she tilts her head further and moves Hee Do gently with her grip so she can take her lips with her own again, fully this time.

A long still moment passes, and then their lips part. Yu Rim opens her eyes dazedly and finds Hee Do darting the tip of her tongue briefly across her lips, those lips of hers that… The thought fades: they both slide in closer on the couch and push into another kiss.

Yu Rim shivers from head to toe at each kiss. Shivers at each sigh Hee Do lets out against her mouth, each brush of Hee Do’s hands up her back and around her waist. There’s a rhythm to it, tentative, and Yu Rim pays painfully close attention: does Hee Do like it if Yu Rim kisses her like this? Slow and firm? Brief, or, or deeply like-

Hee Do lets out a ragged breath against Yu Rim’s mouth and tilts her head further, pressing in harder, hurried—Yu Rim finds herself breathless, trying to keep up. She ends up having to break back slightly and pausing to catch her breath. She strokes at Hee Do’s cheeks and tries it again—hard then, still, wet, but a bit slower--

Hee Do whimpers quietly, cradles her closer, and follows; less hurried but no less intense, taking any prompt Yu Rim gives and making Yu Rim’s stomach and heart and everything else flutter sharply.

Yu Rim finds them matching rhythms and trying at each new one: slower, harder, softer, erratic. Aimless, then purposeful. It’s thrilling to discover this too—how to be together like this, how good it can be. Yu Rim gets to bury her hands in Hee Do’s hair and find out that if she opens her mouth into a kiss like this, and tease the tip of her tongue out like that-- Hee Do makes this small sound against her mouth each time, and Yu Rim can’t tell if it’s her who draws her in then or if it’s Hee Do who takes charge and deepens the kiss, but it- it doesn’t- matter-

Yu Rim pulls back again, panting heavily. She keeps her eyes closed and clings with her arms around Hee Do’s neck as she tries to… tries to cope. Her entire body echoes with the feelings going through her, pulsing with her erratic heartbeat.

She feels Hee Do rub their noses together briefly, then kiss the corner of her mouth before pressing her forehead to Yu Rim’s temple with a deep sigh.

“Yu Rim-ah…”

That voice again.

Yu Rim shivers sharply, but Hee Do doesn’t say anything else. She just hugs Yu Rim close and kisses her cheek, slowly, once, and then twice- and then by Yu Rim’s jaw, and again, and--

Her warm breath draws closer to Yu Rim’s ear, and Yu Rim’s body draws to attention sharply. She squirms slightly and pulls back on reflex, and when she meets Hee Do’s eyes…

She looks tired and content. Pretty and warm against her, evidently trying to fight off how sleepy she is.

“Wanna go to sleep?” Yu Rim hushes with a smile.

“Mm,” Hee Do sighs, pushing in for a brief kiss that Yu Rim barely gets the chance to react to. She drops her face to Yu Rim’s shoulder then. “No,” she mumbles against her shirt, making Yu Rim laugh quietly.

“Yes, you do,” Yu Rim replies, fondness overwhelming as she threads her fingers gently through Hee Do’s hair. “Come on.”

Hee Do whines quietly, weight sagging further against her. “Maybe,” she sighs then. Codeword for ‘fine’. Yu Rim lets out an amused breath and presses a small kiss to her hair, heart pounding as she does.

Yu Rim slips into the bathroom before going to sleep and finds herself meeting her own eyes in the mirror.

She looks… shocked? Dazed. Flustered. Exactly how she feels, then.

Her lips are red, and they feel sensitive and swollen. She touches a fingertip to them in near disbelief, tingling from head to toe at the sensory memory of their kisses.

Their kisses.

She shivers.

She closes the bathroom door behind herself and climbs into bed to join her. Hee Do lets out a sleepy murmur and tugs at her to come closer, something about it almost making Yu Rim tear up.

She watches in the moonlit darkness instead as Hee Do sighs deeply and looks at her through heavy lidded eyes.

“’Night, Yu Rim-ah,” Hee Do whispers in the small space between them, feet tucked against hers.

There are words pounding hard against Yu Rim’s chest. “Goodnight,” she whispers back instead.

She holds Hee Do’s hand in between them and aches to touch her face and stroke her cheek, kiss her. She settles for fixing her bangs gently instead, and the small tug of a smile on Hee Do’s kiss-swollen lips as she falls asleep is everything.

Yu Rim needs to let Hee Do pace them.

It's all too new. Hee Do had certainly never told Yu Rim anything that ever made her think Hee Do looked at other girls any other way.

It must have been a huge thing to find out. It had been for Yu Rim.

If Hee Do had just been discovering herself… Yu Rim would let her. She'd let her do it. She would never try to push her into anything.

Her heart might feel like it's on the verge of breaking as Hee Do doesn't get back in closer the next morning, but it's fine.

She escapes into the bathroom to pull herself together.

It's fine.

She looks into her own eyes in the mirror. Then flicks the faucet on and splashes water against her face in what must be the umpteenth time this week.

Hee Do reaches out for her hand in the taxi, and Yu Rim can’t help the flutter of hope that jumps in her chest.

Hee Do smiles at her too, charming, nervous, cute. “I just want to be with you. Obviously.”

Yu Rim’s heart beats so fast it's a wonder she can still breathe.

Hee Do doesn't stop. She's incapable of letting Yu Rim’s heart settle down. No, instead she squeezes her into a full hug later, as soon as she gets to, then pins her later still under this heated gaze from across the restaurant table that…

Yu Rim feels shaky all the way back to the hotel, and she struggles to open the room door until Hee Do takes over.

Yu Rim is throbbing - in her chest, her eardrums, in between her legs. Her heartrate is beyond gone, and Hee Do’s mouth is the best thing she's ever felt in her life. She can't get enough - Hee Do’s full top lip is perfect for Yu Rim to lick at as they kiss, her sighs are agonizing when she does so, her tongue silken when she rolls it against hers.

Hee Do’s thick hair is perfect to bury her hands in. Her chest presses down against hers from above, her weight on top of Yu Rim’s in the hotel bed, and the curves of her body are painstakingly perfect to run her hands over. Yu Rim itches to touch her skin, burns at the very thought, but somehow, she manages to hold on to reason. She can't. She shouldn't. Not yet.

It rings in her head as she struggles to keep her body still, echoes when she clutches to Hee Do at the feeling of her mouth on her neck. She shouldn't.

She presses her thighs together and tries to breathe. She’s burning all over and Hee Do only stokes the flames, all enthusiasm.

Yu Rim knows this feeling. Her hips jump and her gut tightens. Hee Do licks her skin and breathes heavily right by her ear, and Yu Rim can feel herself clench around nothing, throbbing harder.

She wants her so bad she can't focus. She could- if she just- one press, Hee Do would only have to brush against her, Yu Rim is so turned on she’d- she could come just from this, maybe, she's so on edge, if she just keeps kissing her like that, if she-

She wrenches her mouth away and pushes Hee Do off her.

This time splashing water from the bathroom sink on her face does absolutely nothing. She stares at her own flushed face in the mirror as she pants heavily and tries to calm down, and it’s useless.

The tops of her thighs are embarrassingly slick when she chucks her clothes off, thanking her lucky stars that she had left a shirt in here earlier. She’ll have to go without underwear.

The hot water isn't exactly soothing. Yu Rim presses her palms to the shower wall and closes her eyes. The picture of Hee Do above her burns bright behind her eyelids, echoes under her skin - Hee Do, with her swollen red lips and that blush atop her full cheeks, sighing because of Yu Rim and looking down at her with heavy-lidded eyes, dark hair messily falling around them… her weight on top of Yu Rim, her slim waist under Yu Rim’s grip, the shape of her chest heaving against hers-

Yu Rim’s fingers shake as she runs a hand down her own stomach. Maybe if she just… She’ll be quiet. She's too on edge, it won't take long, she could-

Hee Do’s voice rings out from across the door, and Yu Rim whips her hand away and turns the shower knob all the way around at once.

The cold water hits her like a train, but it shocks any stupid thoughts right out of her.

God.

She makes it all seem so easy.

It's almost as if Yu Rim hadn't spent years agonizing over this. It almost makes her feel silly for having done so—except it just confirms it, doesn’t it? The difference she makes.

“Any other life changing secrets?” Hee Do asks with a heart-fluttering grin.

(I’m in love with you.)

“Can't think of any right now,” Yu Rim replies.

It's no secret at this point, is it?

Hee Do stammers cutely when Yu Rim pulls back from the kiss she just had to give her.

Yu Rim wishes a kiss could come even close to enough to showing her how precious she is. She wishes it could express how much she makes every weight in Yu Rim’s chest, on her shoulders, that much easier to bear. How just having her at all changes everything.

Yu Rim could handle it—was handling it—without her. With her, though…

With her, these things that had felt so big they’d taken up space in the distance between them… all of those suddenly seem manageable. What had felt like an ever-growing boulder before, pushing them further apart, feels like it gets brought to pieces by the explosion Hee Do is in Yu Rim’s life, then sorted with her to set aside.

It's hard work, it has been, but it doesn't feel like it with her.

No, she feels warm and soft when Yu Rim rests against her on the couch. The mix of old and new still prickles under Yu Rim’s skin: the satisfaction from the way Hee Do holds her, meaningful and natural, and the thrill of the tingles Hee Do wracks through her body with a light touch to her hair. The intimacy fills Yu Rim in the way Hee Do wraps her arms further around her and lets her burrow in fully against her chest.

Yu Rim grows drowsy fast. Hee Do’s chest moves under her with each calm breath and her heart beats a strong rhythm under her ear. Her warmth is such a comfort that Yu Rim lets herself sink and float in the coziness.

Hee Do is still the one to fall asleep first, and Yu Rim is blessed enough to get to hold her.

Hee Do looks at her, all nervous and earnest, a bit embarrassed and a bit shy, and Yu Rim’s never felt as free as she does in that tiny cable car when she gets to lean in and kiss her under the open blue sky.

Yu Rim never thought that desiring someone so much would feel like this. She didn’t know it could take you to a level of energy beyond even competing, an energy that is both addictive and agonizing, thrilling and maddening.

She thought things would settle down if…

No. In reality she’d never thought this far out. She never expected this to really happen, for Hee Do to really like her back like that. Never expected to get to hold her like this, get to go to sleep and wake up in the same bed, or get to kiss her—over and over and over again, each kiss feeling like a small miracle. She didn’t even know there were so many ways you couldkiss, that the first kiss wouldn't even be the best one and that it would get better each time. She had no idea that getting to have this would only make her want it more.

She tries to keep a lid on it. She doesn't want to scare Hee Do, doesn't want to make her uncomfortable. No, Yu Rim wants her to feel as precious as she is to her, wants her to know how much Yu Rim treasures each little touch, no matter how much the heat under her skin roars for things that are anything but pure.

But Hee Do seems to hold the key to stoking that heat further no matter how much Yu Rim tries to pretend otherwise.

She's not the one in control here. Hee Do is. Whatever the tide of Hee Do’s flames, all Yu Rim can do is try to hold on: hold on to her and hold on to her own senses while trying not to drown in the rush of everything Hee Do stokes in her.

Yu Rim wakes up abruptly.

For an intense moment of dazed confusion she has no idea why.

They’ve moved during sleep somehow and Hee Do is molded against her back, warm breath beating against the skin of Yu Rim’s neck. It feels hot and stuffy in the room, and the bedside clock tells Yu Rim it’s 3:04AM.

Another quiet low murmur from Hee Do, evidently still asleep with her arm thrown over Yu Rim’s waist, a dream unto itself, and Yu Rim shivers pleasantly.

Yu Rim sighs heavily. She nuzzles against the pillow they’re barely sharing and lowers the cover from over them slightly to cool off without needing to move away from her.

The next sound Hee Do makes is not a murmur.

Yu Rim’s entire body jumps to attention. She's instantly wrecked fully awake, tensing up and stilling completely.

Hee Do gives a small jolt of her hips against her, pressed in, and then--

Oh, God. That tiny little moan again.

Yu Rim’s gut jumps so sharply it hinges on painful. Her every sense feels hit at once as her body shudders and gets flooded by sweltering heat.

Yu Rim needs to get out. She can't take this, can't- she's- it's too-

She manages to escape from Hee Do’s still asleep grip and the smothering of the covers both and somehow shakily make her way to the bathroom on weak knees.

She's going to go insane.

Just breathe. She just needs to catch her breath.

Hee Do’s voice is raspy when she undoes Yu Rim completely:

“Don’t you know I’ll do anything you want?”

Everything in Yu Rim jolts.

Anything she–

Everything.

She wants everything.

(She wants to kiss her and she wants to feel her, touch her, get to know her from head to toe, and God does she want to make her feel good and- and make her come for her, know what she looks like when she does, show her what she does to her, how beautiful she is to her, how sexy, how amazing. She wants to hold her and keep her and not have to let go and she wants to show her just how much she wants all of it, show her what she can barely put the words together to say, it’s so much, surely too much-)

“I’ll let you,” Hee Do says hoarsely. “You drive me insane, Yu Rim-ah. I’ll always let you keep doing it.”

It's like something inside of Yu Rim comes apart: this knot, so tight that it had constricted her—downright shaped her—finally come unloose. Suddenly she can breathe and feel her lungs expand fully, yearning for every full gulp, finally not feeling on the brink of shattering. Everything in her pounds - overwhelming, reaching out. She can’t move fast enough.

Hee Do draws a hitched breath under her, and Yu Rim rolls them over at once, hurried, feeling Hee Do’s stomach flutter under her touch.

Yu Rim breathes raggedly, drags her hands further up smooth skin and rippling muscles. Her fingers hurt with tension, and then they meet softness.

Hee Do looks up at her with half-shut eyes as Yu Rim cups her breasts and feels so taken her head spins. She can feel Hee Do’s nipples hardening under her touch, pebbling under her palm and bumping against her fingertips, miraculous.

Yu Rim aches so much for her she can barely cope, tightening her thighs around Hee Do’s smooth one, pulsing, everything in her flaring for her, for this, even stronger than she already has been somehow.

Hee Do’s mouth parts and her eyes close briefly. She lets out the smallest of sounds - barely even a gasp, really - but it shocks desire down Yu Rim’s body so sharply that she whimpers.

She can’t--

It’s been too much; she just needs to--

Her hips are moving before she even realizes it, pressing down harder, and it feels good - it feels good to jerk them against Hee Do’s thigh, and God, the things Hee Do does to her…

Hee Do’s hands are so strong and needy on her, hurried too. She seems frazzled, almost surprised, but so, so eager, pulling Yu Rim closer, gasping, running her hands along her body and freeing the fire under Yu Rim’s skin to blaze fully for her.

“Hee Do-yah,” Yu Rim gasps in a hitched breath as Hee Do touches up her thighs and waist with a mumbled groan.

Hee Do’s hands are on Yu Rim’s breasts then, large and strong and squeezing at her, driving liquid heat down Yu Rim’s body.

“Fuck,” Hee Do breathes out, squirming her hips under her, pushing her muscular thigh up harder against her and making Yu Rim’s jaw drop.

“Yes,” Yu Rim whispers tightly, rutting her hips desperately, grabbing over her hands for a moment to squeeze her grip on herself harder. “You--”

“Is, is it good?” Hee Do pants in the heat between them, taking one hand down to run up Yu Rim’s back under her shirt.

Yu Rim nods tightly, drops further forward to try to kiss her, barely managing, she just needs to-

“Ah- I, a-ah--” Yu Rim’s gut tightens, all that piled up want spinning in her head, driving the pleasure up hotter in its molten swirl through her.

“Do it,” Hee Do gasps, hands restless, under Yu Rim’s shorts at her back, up her stomach, mouth pressing hurried kisses under Yu Rim’s ear. “Fuck, Yu Rim-ah-”

“Hee Do-yah, I--!”

Yu Rim comes abruptly, thoroughly, shuddering onto Hee Do’s warm thigh. She melts on top of her so profusely she goes dizzy weak for a moment.

Kisses get pressed to her ear, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, and as soon as she can manage, she turns just enough to take those lips with her own again.

“God…” Yu Rim sighs dazedly with a shudder, kissing her again briefly, then again, brought back to be with her.

She can finally take her in fully then. Hee Do, underneath her: shaky, hurried, nervous. Beautiful.

“Let me touch you,” Yu Rim whispers, hurried herself, hands fully on her now, the woman she's wanted for so long. She gets her torso bare for her, drags her hands up the defined muscles of Hee Do’s abs and her quivering stomach, and then those breasts… “Oh my God, you’re so-”

Hee Do whimpers sharply when Yu Rim nuzzles against her chest and kisses heated skin, hands threading through Yu Rim’s hair.

“Let me,” Yu Rim begs as she tugs Hee Do’s shorts down long legs and off, and then that cotton underwear, and then…

Hee Do tries helping her undress too but Yu Rim’s too hurried, already ridding herself of anything that could get in the way of feeling more of her, wanting to find out every possible way to fit together and anything and everything she might like and take.

“Y-Yu—” Hee Do’s voice is shaky when Yu Rim rests bare against her, shuddering pleasantly at the heat of their skins against each other’s and the way they fit together.

“This okay?” Yu Rim asks in a haste, spreading kisses down the curve of her neck. “Ah, I want to make you-”

“Yes, yes,” Hee Do whimpers, hugging her above her, meeting Yu Rim for the kiss she moves to take from her lips.

“I want you so much,” Yu Rim whispers against her mouth, running a hand down her body hurriedly. “Open your legs for me?”

Hee Do whines and drags strong fingers down her shoulders but obeys, and Yu Rim's never felt as powerful as the moment she gets to settle on top of her and drag a touch down between her legs, through curls, only to be met with thick hot wetness.

“Oh, my God,” Yu Rim gasps amid messy kisses, overwhelmed, trying to hold herself above her and press herself down against her and touch and kiss her all at once. “Let me make you-”

Everything Yu Rim had looked up and tried to learn - what she should do, where she should touch; everything she’d watched over and over to understand… all of it disappears in the haze of heat that takes up her mind. She just wants nothing more than her, can think of nothing other than her, here and now.

Hee Do gasps with an abrupt jolt under her, dropping her head back when Yu Rim really touches her.

Nothing could have prepared Yu Rim for this. For how it feels to touch her bare skin, intimate and wanting; how it feels to experience Hee Do’s desire in the way she sounds, the way she moves, how she holds on to her and touches her desperately.

Yu Rim shudders at the feeling of Hee Do’s legs spread for her, presses open mouthed kisses down her chest, head spinning at the way Hee Do drags fingers through her hair. She throbs at how hot she feels under her fingers, wet and slick, hot and velvety, and at how it feels to drag her tongue over a hardened nipple and wrap her mouth around it.

“Tell me,” Yu Rim breathes out, hot against her skin. “Does this feel good?” She can’t help humming when she mouths at her other breast, nuzzles close, tries teasing with the tip of her tongue. Soft, so soft-

“Y-yes,” Hee Do whimpers, dragging her hands down Yu Rim’s shoulders, scratching at the back of her neck, arching under her, their bodies molded together.

“How do you touch yourself?” Yu Rim asks in a panted breath, fingertips slipping between her legs, messy, exploring- lord, feeling her clench against the pads of her fingers- “I want to make you feel good-”

“I, I-” Hee Do stammers, gasped, biting her lip when Yu Rim pulls herself back up from her chest to look down at her to try and take in how she looks under her in the dark like this, dazed, shaky and turned on.

Yu Rim is too hurried, tries figuring out the angle and touch like she would herself, swearing she can feel her pulse under her fingers. She fits their mouths together for a desperate kiss, drags wetness up along her length, rubs messily, and moans when Hee Do gasps sharply the moment she bumps against her clit.

“Like this?” Yu Rim asks hotly by her mouth, watching avidly as Hee Do squeezes her eyes shut below her, how her jaw drops when Yu Rim rubs up and down along the sides of the swell of her. “Ah, Hee Do-yah, I’ve wanted to do this so bad-”

Hee Do opens her eyes and looks up at her through heavy lashes, hips jolting under her. “T-that-” she breathes out, high-pitched, pulling Yu Rim down tighter against her, their breasts pressed together, sweat starting to gather between them in the heat of everything.

“Mmhm,” Yu Rim hums against her lips, kissing her and raking her teeth over her full bottom lip, tugging at it, so taken by her, everything about her. “Let me show you-- Do you want it like this?” Yu Rim asks in a heated murmur, slipping fully between her legs, body rolling against Hee Do’s almost unintentionally, restless, obsessed with how it feels to be against each other like this.

“I, I d-don’t-” Hee Do whimpers, pressing their foreheads together, panting hard. “Yu Rim-ah--”

Yu Rim’s touch slips, so much wetness under her fingers that she barely needs to drag any back up to keep rubbing her, paying painfully close attention to Hee Do’s every gasp, taking in her every tremor. She tries sliding directly over her clit, and-

“Aaah,f-”

Oh my God. That moan-- Yu Rim shudders, hard, she could swear she nearly comes just hearing it, unable to help a moan of her own as she takes Hee Do’s mouth for a messy kiss amid heavy breaths, addicted to her. “Like that?” Yu Rim pants over her mouth. “You like it like that?”

Another drawn out moan is her response as Hee Do drops and presses her head back to her pillow, tense, thighs tightening by Yu Rim’s sides. She’s the hottest thing Yu Rim’s ever seen, hotter still when she bites her lip hard, muffling the next noise that comes out of her, perfect for this, perfect for Yu Rim-

“God,” Yu Rim gasps, pressing down to suck wet kisses and tease bites down the tense arch of her neck. “I want you to come,” she says against her skin, everything in her pulsing for her, wanting so bad to-

“Mm-” Hee Do drags her hands hard along Yu Rim’s back, wrecking shivers down her spine, hips squirming harder under her, dropping one of her legs further, restless, so restless under her, so warm and soft and feminine, sweltering heat inside of Yu Rim.

Yu Rim watches the way pleasure contorts her expression here in the dark - pleasure that Yu Rimis giving her, that she’s letting Yu Rim give her, that she’s asking for with a strangled little ‘please’ that makes Yu Rim melt thoroughly.

“Are you close?” Yu Rim asks hotly, rubbing tight circles over her clit, taking her mouth again for a brief heavy kiss, then again when Hee Do nods tightly, eyes squeezed shut and jaw dropping again with a hot little gasp. “Mm-hm?”

“Mmh—” Hee Do nods again, her every breath hitching audibly in the space between their mouths, turning into gasped breaths, higher and higher pitched as her grip on Yu Rim grows tighter, as her thighs squeeze around her. “Yu Rim-ah,” she gasps in a tight voice, breathless, and- “Ah-!”

Yu Rim aches and throbs and shivers from head to toe as Hee Do’s jaw drops fully when she arches up into her, tight, so tense, hanging on to her, making this breathless little strangled sound that undoes Yu Rim’s everything-

“Oh God,” Yu Rim gasps, watching her come for her, feeling it resound through her own entire body. “You look so good, Hee Do-yah-” she pants, pressing awed kisses to Hee Do’s chin, her jawline, under her ear.

Hee Do exhales sharply, panting hard for breath, hips jolting abrupt and strong with a small whine under Yu Rim’s touch. Yu Rim stops the grind of her hand between her legs and just keeps her hand cupped against her, feeling how she pulses and throbs under her touch, so much wetness clinging to her…

Yu Rim spreads more kisses down her chest, her breasts, anywhere, nuzzling against heated skin while Hee Do melts further, relaxing under her thoroughly.

Yu Rim doesn’t need anything else - just this, just her, just the way she can make Yu Rim feel with their bodies pressed together like this.

Hee Do’s chest is still heaving with her every breath, calming down as Yu Rim draws herself back up to kiss her face fondly. Hee Do runs a hand up Yu Rim’s back and trails a distracted caress up Yu Rim’s neck, through her hair, the affectionate touch trembling something in Yu Rim that only grows deeper when Hee Do sighs and presses a lazy kiss to her cheek too.

Emotion almost overwhelms Yu Rim right there and then.

She almost says it right there, almost tells her anything and everything she can, but she's too choked up, too overrun and taken by her to manage to do anything but kiss her reverently, affection echoing through her whole being.

Yu Rim finally draws her hand back from in between Hee Do’s legs fully and changes the arm she's holding herself up with so she can reach for Hee Do’s face, to stroke her soft cheek and bring her into another kiss, gentle and unhurried, awed and thankful.

Nothing can describe how it feels to kiss like this: slow, languid, over and over in between sighs and soft caresses, lingering in the echoes of all that heat - and all of it with her. Her.

It might be impossible to describe it in words, but Yu Rim will never forget it. Getting to hold her in her arms after only seals it further - there's no way Yu Rim would ever let go of this.

Doing it again, this time under daylight, confirms it even further.

The sight of her, beauty marks spread across her skin and flush tinting her skin by her neck, down her chest and over her cheeks… The contrast of their bare skins against each other’s, the way her muscles flex and tense when she moves against her, how sweat looks like over her body. What she looks like when she touches Yu Rim, the way she looks at Yu Rim, lighting sparks all over her. How much she wants it too.

It drives Yu Rim insane, keeps her so sharply on the edge that any touch from her has Yu Rim close to bursting.

It's amazing, addictive, makes Yu Rim feel downright feverish. The sounds Hee Do makes for her, the way she clings to her, how her body fits against hers… Yu Rim doesn’t care about anything else in the world, couldn’t even if she tried. All she cares about is this, is her.

Yu Rim wants to do this forever. She wants to see the goosebumps roll over Hee Do’s skin, wants to make her wet for her, wants to make her come, over and over again to show her how much Yu Rim wants her, how much she loves making her feel good, how crazy she is for her. And she does - Hee Do lets her and she does, does it as much as she can, as long as she can, for her, with her.

Like before, getting to have her only makes Yu Rim want her more - like a thirst that can't be quenched, only addictive, and Yu Rim is sure now that she could drink her in forever and never have enough. She would, she wants to. She will.

But Yu Rim should know well.

All good things come to an end.

The ringing of the hotel phone breaks through their reality so thoroughly that Yu Rim jumps up and off the bed in a jerk as everything crashes back into her in an avalanche. She can’t help thinking the worst, are they caught? Did someone see her? Did Yu Rim--

Coach Yushkov’s voice is calm down the line.

He says they had left the information at the reception, but that he needs to be sure she knows their updated schedule.

Their schedule.

Of course there’s no such thing as forever. It doesn’t matter what Yu Rim wants, nor how much she wants it.

She knows this. Somehow, for a little bit, she’d forgotten. It’s so easy to, when she’s with her.

But that doesn’t mean it ever stopped being true.

Time is running out.

Hee Do is too good at breaking Yu Rim down. Somehow, she makes her laugh.

God, Yu Rim doesn’t want to ever let her go. Their quiet conversation from last night rings in her head, and this time she tries mustering up her courage fully. Dating…

She’d said it so easily.

The hope in Yu Rim’s chest - the one she hasn’t been able to stomp out despite everything - makes itself known again. What if…?

Yu Rim doesn’t need to think about it. She’s already thought about it so much. Dating… Yes. Yes, Yu Rim would. Yu Rim wants to- to date her. She wants to- she wants to be her girlfriend. If Hee Do wants… if she was for real…

Then this is the moment. Yu Rim does it, she lets that hope blaze, musters up her will, starts asking her to--

Hee Do barges ahead of her.

“We’ll do it our way,” she says amid her ramble, fully earnest. Like it’s a certainty. Then, apparently finally catching on fully: “You wanna ask me to be your girlfriend, Yu Rim-ah?”

Yu Rim hates her. Yu Rim was about to ask, had just--!

Hee Do steals her words yet again with a kiss and that smile.

She’s the worst.

Worse than anything is reality.

The Games officially end tomorrow.

It all ends tomorrow.

(How is Yu Rim supposed to manage to go back now that she’s gotten to have this? Just the thought of doing it chokes something in her. Going back—alone—for more of the same: training, working, housekeeping; somehow keeping herself moving, salary by salary, medal by medal, then doing it all over again. All by herself.)

(There’s something inside of Yu Rim that makes her feel like she has to let go of her. This was always only going to be temporary, wasn’t it? Everything always is.)

(The hope… It’s easy to have it when under the sun holding her hand in her own. But Yu Rim will always need to make choices she doesn't want to make. She can't change reality. What she wants to do and what she needs to do aren’t the same.)

(And Yu Rim has already failed Hee Do once—no, twice—before. And now… Even if they do date, then, they’re about to be forced apart again anyway. Put back into their separate positions. How can Yu Rim be sure she won't fail her again? Everything in her life is so hard now. She’s going to need to focus again. It’s not fair to make Hee Do have to deal with any of it too, she doesn’t deserve that. Yu Rim wants her to be happy, not--)

“You’re impossible, you know that?” Hee Do snaps from across the table, startling Yu Rim out of her thoughts abruptly.

Yu Rim looks back at herself from the mirror and tries to hold on to it:

It's still today.

The abyss that looms just behind Yu Rim’s heart in her ribcage is impossible not to feel. Not because of its presence. No. It's the emptiness itself—how it makes her every thrilled heartbeat echo different than it would otherwise.

Her grip on the sink counter grows tighter.

“Yu Rim-ah.”

Yu Rim can see it through the mirror: how she stands at attention and relaxes both at just the sound of Hee Do’s voice. It's muffled here through the door—but here still. Nothing like over the phone.

“Can I come in?”

A moment of hesitation. Yu Rim’s eyes still look—

Still, she opens the door and lets her in.

Hee Do gives her a small smile. “Thanks,” she says, gaze lingering on Yu Rim for a moment longer before she turns to the sink counter herself and rifles for a hairbrush.

Yu Rim watches through the mirror. Hee Do’s hair is still messy from Yu Rim’s hands, her cheeks still flushed from Yu Rim’s touches, her lips reddened from Yu Rim’s kisses. She’s wearing her sleeping shorts and a tee, and Yu Rim can barely believe she’s real.

“What is it?” Hee Do asks after a few moments.

Yu Rim blinks. She notices Hee Do’s eyes are on hers through the mirror now as she gathers her hair over a shoulder and keeps smoothing it out with the hairbrush.

She looks so soft.

Yu Rim’s heartbeat is fluttering, suddenly weightless, high in her chest. No echo gets to set in between each fast beat.

“What?” Hee Do asks again, quieter now, stopping her motions.

Yu Rim turns to look at her fully. She can’t touch her if she looks through the mirror, and she wants to.

And she gets to: Hee Do turns to her too, and Yu Rim reaches up to brush her bangs aside gently, just to see more of her.

“You…” Yu Rim pauses, touch lingering as she touches her jawline softly. Hee Do is looking down at her with a captivated look that has Yu Rim taking a step closer. “Can I say it?”

Hee Do licks her lips. “What?” she asks again, voice breathier now.

There’s so much to say.

There are words pounding in Yu Rim’s chest.

“You’re so beautiful,” Yu Rim says honestly. She doesn't miss the slight twitch of Hee Do’s expression, but at least she doesn't argue. Yu Rim cups her jaw and brushes a thumb by her bottom lip, and she can see it when Hee Do swallows hard. “I really love your hair,” Yu Rim adds, sliding her touch to thread fingers through and along dark strands.

Hee Do‘s breath’s turned ragged, and Yu Rim can’t deny how pleased it makes her. That she can have this effect on her and see it, written all over her face. Yu Rim bites her lip again over a smile and moves closer still, pulling gently at the back of her neck.

Hee Do moves with the touch to press down into the kiss Yu Rim leans up for, and when their lips part she sighs and presses down again, hand on Yu Rim’s lower back and lips lingering on a longer kiss.

“Okay,” Hee Do murmurs when it ends, eyes lingering closed for a moment longer.

Yu Rim can’t help the giggle that bursts to the surface. “Okay?” she asks, entwining both hands behind Hee Do’s neck and pecking her lips with her own.

Hee Do’s expression starts turning endearingly embarrassed.

Yu Rim laughs, endeared beyond belief, kissing her again and melting when Hee Do slides a hand up under her t-shirt to touch along her back.

“I mean it,” Yu Rim hushes by her lips.

“Come back and be with me,” Hee Do replies in a whisper, pulling Yu Rim in closer still while stepping back towards the door.

Yu Rim follows her, of course she does. Without pause, not even sparing a glance at the mirror at all.

“Tell me something,” Hee Do says quietly in her hold. “Anything.”

They used to do this back then - back when it was all so new and tentative, only just starting. If it got to be too quiet, be it from awkwardness or nerves or anything else, this is how they’d managed to fill in the gaps and become fully them. Hee Do had been the one to start it—Yu Rim still remembers reading that message on her computer back home. ‘Just tell me something, anything.’ Then, later, asking it herself: sitting next to her shyly, swinging their feet, and listening to her; getting to learn what her voice sounded like under every emotion and trying to remember each one.

Yu Rim was always going to end up falling for her.

“And you’ll be mine,” Hee Do whispers.

Yu Rim is.Hers. She wants to be, she will be.

Be it here, wiping her tears away and trying to convey everything bursting through her into her hold around her, be it thousands of kilometers away aching for her. Yu Rim feels like she has been hers all along.

Hee Do’s voice is thick with emotion: “See you soon, ok?”

I love you. I’m in love with you.

All Yu Rim can do is nod.

I love you, pounding in Yu Rim’s fingertips.

I love you, burning in her eyes and stuck in her throat.

Trembling in her hands.

But if she says anything she's going to break. She’s going to break, and she doesn’t know if she can do this if she does.

Hee Do’s hands draw away from her face and so does she. Yu Rim holds her breath and watches. She wants to make sure to take in everything she can, even now in these last few moments, so she watches fixedly until the door closes and she’s gone.

Then silence.

Silence, resounding and echoing as Yu Rim stands there and stares unseeing at the hotel room door, trying to swallow down the knot growing larger in her throat. She knows perfectly well what's waiting for her once she turns back around towards the room, and still the emptiness hits hard. The space feels abruptly large again, larger even than in the first day.

Yu Rim takes measured steps towards the bed and takes a seat. Touching a hand to the mattress reveals no coldness - instead, a hint of warmth lingers under her hand, tiny but there still, enough to get Yu Rim to lie down fully just to try and hold on to it.

The pillowcase still smells like her shampoo and the sheets still linger with her sense.

Yu Rim buries herself in both and allows the sobs choking her up to burst out before she needs to go back out into the world that's been lingering right there this whole time.

Yu Rim had completely forgotten. She’d been so anguished, lost and dizzy in the abrupt shifting of everything back into its wrong place, that it completely slipped her mind that ending rehearsals are with all countries.

The moment she realizes it she jumps off her seat, ignoring Stanislav’s startled call from beside her.

“I think I left something behind,” she says before walking off in a hurry.

She searches through uniform colors, grows frustrated from not being able to look over the mountain of athletes larger and taller than her, and swerves through delegations.

She hasn't told her.

Regret builds like bile in Yu Rim’s throat as she walks around the open stadium. She has no idea how she’s supposed to find her here - but surely she can. Surely, surely Yu Rim can still…

But she isn’t. They’d said their goodbyes and Yu Rim can’t find her.

How could she not have told her? How can she let her go without making sure she knows, truly, what this has all meant to her—how much she means to her?

She has to tell her.

It feels like now or never as Yu Rim rushes frantically through the crowd of athletes that evening, Olympian after Olympian, none of them hers.

She needs to tell her, she can't let her go without making sure she knows, without giving her at least this. The night sky’s blasting with lights and music and cheers around her and all it does is drive urgency further within Yu Rim. This is it; this is the last chance she gets. She can’t let her go without this, she can’t let this end without-

She knows it's her the moment she spots her.

“Na Hee Do!”

The wild drumming of Yu Rim’s heart feels like it nearly drowns the explosion of the fireworks in the sky above as they meet bodily amid the crowd of athletes and dreams on the stadium floor.

Hee Do feels strong and warm, solid against her and filling her senses, and Yu Rim can’t manage to catch her breath. Raindrops cling to Hee Do’s eyelashes as she looks down at Yu Rim beneath flashing lights, and the words finally burst out of Yu Rim, for her: “I love you.”

Emotion rushes out and washes over her along with the words. She really does. She pulls Hee Do back in to hug her tighter, pressing herself closer and trying to impress everything she can into the words, everything Hee Do deserves to know and hear. She says it again against her ear, gasped out, breath hitched as Hee Do brings her up and in just as hard: “I really love you-”

“Me too,” Hee Do says, loud yet almost drowned out by the world erupting around them. She lifts Yu Rim off the ground further, burying herself in against her and enveloping her all at once. “Fuck, me too,” overwhelmed, tears audible in her voice.

It feels thrilling and terrifying all at once. The proceedings for the Ending Ceremony are a swirling haze of color and light rushing by around them, emotions blasted their way from every direction possible—from the athletes drawing up to the end right there with them, from the crowd cheering them on towards it, from the sheer realization of it all. There’s laughter and joy—a lot of it—and also a keen sense of building agony: something like relief and despair both that twirls into it all to build the frenzied moments that make up the hours that whirr by.

Yu Rim’s heart staggers painfully when the pyre is put out high up above them, the finality resounding.

But Hee Do squeezes her hand in her own and threads their fingers together, solid against her, her sheer presence inescapable. When Yu Rim turns slightly to look up at her, no fire could compare to the warmth that that look in her eyes brings Yu Rim.

“I’ll see you soon,” Hee Do promises by her ear again in a last tight hug before their time truly ends.

Her promise is echoed by the squeeze of her arms around her, by the pounding in her chest against her own and the way she lingers and holds her for that one more moment still. It’s echoed further still by the breath she lets out against Yu Rim’s neck when Yu Rim nods against her and squeezes her back: shaky, hitched with emotion.

And Yu Rim loves her.

Hee Do whispers against her, downright ordering: “Don't forget I love you too.”

That night, looking over the night sky above the clouds from inside a too-cold airplane, still tingling with her sense, Yu Rim vows to herself not to.

Getting back to Moscow this time around ranks high on the list of weirdest experiences of Yu Rim’s life.

The Sheremetyevo airport feels… familiar.

Going back to the apartment does too.

And walking inside…

Everything looks the same as she’d left it, and still it’s unlike ever before.

It feels strange after these few weeks away, yes. But taking her shoes off, dragging her luggage in, and leaving it by the radiator in the living room, then heading into the bedroom and throwing herself onto the bed… It feels awfully like coming back home.

She jerks back upright in bed in a jolt. No, she’s just too tired. Anywhere that isn’t an airplane would feel like home right now.

(It wouldn’t.)

(Not without them. Not without her.)

(Except, apparently…)

Yu Rim forces herself to get off bed and heads back to the living room, looking for her cellphone in hopes of something that will help settle the sudden restlessness in her chest. There, next to the computer.

“Shit,” she hisses. Apparently, she’d forgotten to turn it off before leaving.

It’s fine. Hee Do’s on her flight anyway, not even on her layover yet, still making her way home. (Making her way away.)

So that leaves Yu Rim here: standing in the middle of the living room of an apartment she can call her own, looking outside the window at the view she only now realizes she’d gotten used to seeing every day, and getting hit with a feeling of mourning so strong it turns her breathless.

She’s not sure mourning over what. She’s too exhausted, missing some things—someone—too much to do anything but try and cope with the fact that she doesn’t even burst into tears.

The feeling of her against Yu Rim lingers.

It had lingered the whole way through the flight back, all through the first day back at the apartment, and it lingers still in the first night of trying to fall asleep under heavy covers by herself.

It’s like a phantom weight, a warmth that isn’t there but that Yu Rim can feel if only she shuts her eyes that little bit tighter.

Doing so brings the sight of her back too: grinning scrunched under the sun at her, biting her lip shy and eager with her, licking her lips nervously and looking intense leaning in. Surprised and pleased, teary-eyed and pleading, happy and excited, slaw-jacked and tense.

Each one burns electric still in Yu Rim’s mind, tingles thrilling under her skin. Echoes with a newfound absence too, makes her restless, fiddling with her fingers and trying to keep from trying to grasp for something that just isn’t there no matter how much it almost feels like it is.

Yu Rim is right back to where she was. Like before, she’s left to cling to memories and what-ifs, left to live out her days with this feeling of missing pervading through everything.

Except now…

Now it’s… Brighter? Yes. Amid anything else that it may be, it’s brighter, because it’s not just it. It’s all she used to have, the memories to cling to—and lord does she cling to them—but not only does she have that, she also has…

“I’m gonna kiss you silly next time I see you,” Hee Do’s message says on her computer screen.

Yu Rim grins and bites her lip so hard it hurts.

“You sound awfully sure of yourself,” Yu Rim sends back, teasing. “Just like that?”

“Yea,” Hee Do replies at once. “You just get ready.”

Yu Rim doesn’t think she can. Not when it comes to her. With each day that goes by, Yu Rim keeps failing to find the in-between where this will all settle down—where it’ll feel weird, too distant, not enough. Maybe settle into something less.

It doesn’t. Though it isn’t enough—nothing is. Be it a message or a call or an e-mail, were it a hug or a kiss or a whole night, Yu Rim knows that it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough.

But “not enough” doesn’t feel like it’s made up of despair anymore. It feels like…

It feels like the way for more.

“Hey, two-time Olympic medalist,”Oppa greets on the phone when she picks up. She can hear the fondness and the pride in his voice. “Now what’s that like?”

“Kind of weird,” Yu Rim admits with a chuckle. “Hi.”

He laughs. “Good weird?” he asks.

She hums in thought. Is it the good type of weird? “I don’t know. It’s good to have it.” She kicks her feet idly as she waits for the bus towards the city center. She needs to go to the Fencing Federation headquarters to sign new image release forms. “The pay was great. Coach told me I need a gold though… so I’ll have to keep up with club season too.”

“And here I was thinking you’d be celebrating still,”Oppareplies, and Yu Rim doesn’t believe him for a second.

“Uh-huh,” she says with a roll of her eyes.

“Really, though. You did great. Both of you did.”

Yu Rim bites her lip.

She still hasn’t really talked to anyone about what it was like with Hee Do. It’s too precious for her to. Not that she has that many people to talk to as it is. And of course everyone knows they’d met up—everyone had watched it.

“Did you…?”

“What?” Yu Rim asks when his pause lasts a bit too long. Her stomach is broiling in on itself all of a sudden.

“Hee Do seemed quite happy when she got back.” Before she gets to ask how he knows, he goes on: “UBS had her on for the post-Games special. It should be going up this Friday.”

“That’s nice,” Yu Rim manages to say.

“It had been a while,” he adds. “Since she looked like that.”

The broiling in her stomach is now a cauldron of conflicting emotions.

Yi Jin laughs shortly like Yu Rim is amusing him somehow even though she isn’t doing anything. “I’m glad you two got to sort things out.”

“Yeah,” Yu Rim replies. “Me too.”

“ Congratulations, Yu Rimie. I’m proud of you.”

“You were on the front page!” Mom calls excitedly into the phone, making Yu Rim laugh. “You did so well, Yu Rim-ah.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Yu Rim says, and means it completely. “I wanted to make you proud.”

“You did, you always do. Your father’s friends won’t stop sending congratulations, you know?”

Yu Rim laughs again. She can picture what that’s been like. She remembers back when she’d won her first major Junior championship - he’d kept the newspaper clipping of it pinned to this truck dashboard for ages. It had started turning mortifying the older she got. “Don’t let him get too full of himself in front of them again.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,”Mom replies. “And you know Miss Kwon from the chicken shop? She’s finally stopped trying to make it seem like her son is becoming a doctor. She had nothing to say the day the special aired. You know she always does!”

The pride and giddiness in her mother’s voice makes a pride of her own fill Yu Rim’s chest. She can’t remember the last time she’d heard her mother sound this carefree. “I thought Miss Kwon’s entire pride was that her son was getting married?”

“That was before that came crashing down,” Yu Rim’s mom says in a gossiping tone. “No one believed that boy could hold it together that long. And anyway, everyone in church kept coming to talk about your match, so she eventually gave up.”

Yu Rim shakes her head with a laugh. “Yeah?”

“Hey, Hee Do should come to the shop, I think she deserves a winner’s feast.” They’d done that for Yu Rim back in ’97: a meal with all of her favorites, before she knew to wonder how much it must have cost for them to. “ Should I make her some samgyetang?”

So much goes through Yu Rim at once that she needs a moment as it all pools in her tummy in a whirlwind. Yu Rim’s mother doesn’t fully know, but she certainly suspects, what Hee Do’s home life is like. “Hee Do will eat anything,” Yu Rim says, not even trying to keep the fondness from her voice. “I’m sure she’d love whatever you make.”

Yu Rim is truly blessed in some ways. Even if she can’t be there for it, with them, how could she not be thankful for this to be in her life?

Hee Do’s message has Yu Rim’s heart sinking cold: “Have you checked the news?”

The rush of possibilities of what that could mean is overwhelming.

But when she clicks the link Hee Do sends in the next message, it's… not at all what she'd expected.

It’s their hug at the finals.

‘The Olympian spirit’, they call it. Yu Rim has her qualms with whether that is what the media likes to pretend it is—and whether people actually like it as much as they say they do.

Self-sacrifice, selflessness, things like that: awe-inspiring.

But at the core of being an athlete, and at the core of why people follow sports, is the opposite. It’s competition and the drive to win. You can’t selfless your way to a gold medal.

Maybe that's what makes it special, then. When everything and everyone around you is set up to encourage you to be self-serving, when all the stakes are stacked against you… Going against that…

Yeah, Yu Rim can see it.

It feels… Odd. That a piece of them is right there on display for the whole world. Not just a piece, but that moment.

But it feels nice too. After everything, witheverything, something about what they have—this precious thing—managed to shine through, strong enough for the world to see. Rather than being driven against each other, they’ve managed to make the relentless gears and their thirst for elimination grind to a halt.

No competition can be as strong as that moment. They can’t put a twist on this, they can’t spin it.

Something like pride twists in Yu Rim’s chest. Right beside all the love.

“A long way from all the nasty shit they’ve pinned on us, huh?”

Yu Rim can almost see the quirk of her smile just from reading her message. “Yeah,” Yu Rim sends back. “I think that moment really is impossible to turn into something negative.”

“Definitely. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad they caught it on camera.”

Before Yu Rim can reply, Hee Do sends another message:

“If anything should ever stay on record about us, it’s that day.”

“Yeah? How come?” Yu Rim asks.

She watches the little message that tells her Hee Do is typing for a few long moments. She pictures her thinking over her words, tries to cope with the fondness that comes up just from that. “I guess since it just feels like everything before was just leading up to that moment, you know? It's only right.”

It comes back to Yu Rim: the euphoria, the anguish. The relief. The crashing down and the breaking the surface at last.

“Everything had always been leading up to that - to us in Madrid, to everything about it, and I didn't even know it.”

“I feel kinda dumb looking back lol like it's so obvious now.”

“What is?”

“How I’d been falling for you all along.”

“Hee Do-yah…”

“Fuck, I miss you so much already...”

Yu Rim’s heart jumps, has her fingers shaking as she types: “Me too, I really do.”

“I want to kiss you so so bad.”

Yu Rim’s everything somersaults.

Hee Do doesn’t take mercy on her, never interested in leaving anything left to say:

“I watched this over and over again and kept remembering how it felt to hug you, hold you right then.”

“I missed you so much back then like I didn't think it’d be possible to miss you more, but I do already.”

“I wish I could hug you like that again right now and I wish I could kiss you and touch you and hold you.”

“Please,” Yu Rim sends shakily. “I want all of that too, you're driving me crazy.”

“Yeah? I like that. I like driving you crazy.”

Yu Rim curses under her breath. “You do. You really, really do…”

Before she can stop herself, Yu Rim adds: “Next time I’ll show you just how much.”

“Fuck”

“Yah”

Yu Rim bites her lip, hard, pleased. “What?”

“That's just evil.”

It is. But Yu Rim just can’t help it when it comes to her.

As with everything, the lull can’t last forever. And it doesn’t: the world takes its space back in Yu Rim’s life like she fully expected it would.

The Russian Olympic Committee was the first to demand Julia. There was a home ceremony for the medalists, and, well—Yu Rim is a Russian Olympic medalist now, so of course she had to go.

She was put on a podium in uniform and medal, shaken hands with, and given a gigantic cheque that was larger than her. There were pictures taken at each step as she shook hands firmly with men she knows are directly responsible for her having her job. She didn’t have to wonder what they really thought of her getting a silver instead of a gold. It’s obvious. Any comments about looking forward to her next gold are but a confirmation.

She wasn’t the only honored one there—and she was certainly nowhere near the most important one—but she was the only one in her category. Still? Again. On some days it’s isolating. In others, like this time, it gives her a boost of pride that fills her chest and helps her keep her head held high.

Once all ceremony is over and done with, she gives the gigantic cheque back in exchange for a real one she can take to the bank.

Her father is the first one to see it.

He calls her in the middle of the day back home, almost in a panic. He evidently thinks something went very wrong.

“You need to go to the bank,” he near-shouts down the line. “This is absurd! You can’t let-”

“Dad,” Yu Rim laughs.

“Don’t laugh at your father, do you not understand how serious--?”

“Daddy,” Yu Rim calls again. “It’s not a mistake.”

It’s quiet then for a long, heavy moment. Yu Rim sits back further on her couch and waits.

“Go Yu Rim, what did you do?” her father asks slowly.

“I brought Russia back a medal,” she answers simply.

The pause that follows feels even heavier, and any and all pride she’s built up can’t compare to what it feels like when she can hear the hint of tears in her father’s voice. “ You…”

He doesn’t seem to know what to say.

“We’ll get there,” Yu Rim tells him, her own voice getting garbled. “I’ll get us there.”

After another long pause, he replies: “You shouldn’t have to.”

That doesn't matter. They both know it very well. “I want to,” Yu Rim says. “I will.”

Total original debt: ₩647.128.250,30
Original debt: ₽15.156.000,00
Original debt: 421.000€
Debt on transfer: ₽14.832.000,00
Debt in July: ₽13.055.730,00

Take home pay: 140.940 RUB
Original transfer amt per month: 95.805 RUB
Current transfer amt per month: 100.000 RUB

Silver medal, Russian federation: 1.332.000₽
Silver medal, sponsors: 170.000₽

= 1.502.000₽
August salary: 176.543₽
August transfer: 137.000₽
Total transfer: 1.639.000₽

Post-Games debt: 11.416.730₽

Total paid off: 3.739.270₽ => 75.3282% left
!!! *1/4 paid

Check total in ₩ at Shinhan bank.

One fourth of the way through. But Yu Rim’s further along in her contract than that.

She’s always been a hire under CSKA—the Central Army Sports Club in Moscow. She keeps thinking of it as Coach Yushkov’s club in her mind, but it’s very much not his club. It’s much more than that.

Coach Chan Mi had said Yu Rim could learn a lot from him, which she has, and from such an elite club. But that’s never been what this is about.

“I want your medical check-up results,” Coach Yushkov says at his office desk. The club is a lot further away from Yu Rim’s apartment than the Novogorsk Training Center, which had meant a long bus ride into the city this morning for her. She’s still a little sleepy. “How’s your ankle?”

“It’s fine,” she promises. Now that she’s awake enough to look around, she thinks this office might actually not be his. It’s a cluttered mess, and it barely fits the small desk and the two chairs they’re using. It feels odd—just as odd as the notion that she’s starting somewhere new all over again.

She wants to ask about the prizes for the local competitions. They’re going to be much smaller than any FIE competition, never mind Olympic ones that’s for sure, but anything can make a difference. But she doesn’t want to give the wrong impression by jumping into that—even though it would be the right impression.

He sorts through some papers and hums. “Kirill can arrange your exams.” She has no idea who that is; probably someone in the club. She hasn’t really met anyone yet. “Your salary will still be paid on the same day of the month. Any questions?”

One less now. “When does the NT reconvene for the next season?”

The end of the season has meant everyone moving out of Novogorsk. Yu Rim, of course, had never moved in, so much like Yelena she didn’t need to worry about it. Darya and Lashyn are a different story however, along with one of the two new girls.

Yu Rim is used to the back-and-forth between national team and local seasons. But she’d gotten used to it back home—switching from the NTC in Seoul back to Tae Yang and vice-versa. And now…

She’d finally gotten used to the team they’d built up in Novogorsk, from teammates to technicians, and it was stupid of her to, knowing it was all just temporary. Much good it does her now to have gotten comfortable.

“October,” he says. Like she’d expected. So back to Novogorsk in October - two months from now - all the way up to at least March, which is when the first mid-season break should come. Right at the time Yu Rim had first gotten here, and when the last year of her current contract will start.

Coach scribbles onto a piece of paper before handing the note to her. Thankfully his handwriting is blocky and clear for her to read without struggle:

ЦСКА - ты, Таля
Динамо - Елена
Спартак - Лашын
ДОСААФ - Дарья
Локомотив - Полина

It’s a short list of the clubs each of them is placed in. “Isn’t Yelena graduating first?” Yu Rim asks. He’d noted Yelena down under Dynamo, but Yu Rim was pretty sure she wasn’t going to compete again until finishing her last year of high school this year.

He nods. “Previous contract. They signed until 2002.”

“Oh,” Yu Rim mutters, looking back down at the list.

So Yu Rim is the only one here, along with Talya—one of the new girls she hasn’t really met yet. Everyone else is spread out to their own corners. Yu Rim’s not even sure whether all of these are in Moscow, though she expects not. She’s not sure it matters at the end of the day.

“Stanislav…?” she asks.

Coach’s expression doesn’t quite change. “Under negotiations,” he answers shortly.

Yu Rim takes a second. Then she folds the note and pockets it. “What should I start on?”

There’s still a lot that Yu Rim knows she needs to do, and a lot that she needs to make right.

She sits before her computer and hesitates after opening her old e-mail account. She’s tried to convince herself that she doesn’t need to do this, that maybe she shouldn’t, but she knows she does.

So she makes herself open the folder she hasn’t dared click on for longer than the shame lets her admit.

From: [email protected]
Subject: I got this thought today
October 17th 2000 19:29

Yu Rim-ah,
We’re moved back into the NTC this week. My new roommate is Seung Eun now…
I know it must be super lonely for you and that I have everyone around me still, but... But you used to be here every day with me, and we’d go through the same stuff together and we’d spend so much time together every single day, you know? Even if I can keep in touch with everyone, no one knows what it’s really like the same way… I thought suddenly this must be what getting a divorce must feel like ㅋㅋ … the others don’t really understand. Anyway I guess I was just wondering what you think?
Seung Eun doesn’t snore but her side of the room smells kind of weird btw

The next e-mail comes two days later. Hee Do had replied on top of her own e-mail:

Actually, I don’t know if you’re feeling that way, I hope it’s not… lonely, that is… Sorry if I kinda made it seem like I know it all or like I know your stuff better than you. I just mean that if you want to talk about it… or even if you want to not talk about it, that’s okay, too. I just wanted to, you know.
Agh. Sorry. I think classes are killing my brain. I hope you get it? I’m here for whatever. I don’t want to ask stuff if you don’t want me to, but I always want to know, I’m up for knowing.

Yu Rim can almost hear the hesitance and the uncertainty in Hee Do’s voice through the screen. The shame in Yu Rim’s gut mixes with regret—she’s the one who caused that uncertainty in her. She’s the one who made her feel lonely too.

A week and a half later, on its own, without a subject line:

I don’t know what the right thing for me to do is, Yu Rim-ah. I almost bought myself a flight ticket just so I could go and make sure. Do you want me to stop e-mailing you? Should I just let you come to me when you want to? Or is this OK? I want to do… whatever. I don’t want to do the wrong thing, I just want to be here for you. You don’t need to do anything, I just wish you could let me know. I wish you’re doing okay.

There’s more. Many more.

There are simple e-mails, like the one where the subject line is just “ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ look at this” and it has a video attached. The video turns out to be a band of cute cats playing some Western song that sends Yu Rim giggling.

Then there are ones where Hee Do is evidently trying to get at something. “Did you ever feel like you made a mistake with Ji Woong?”

And ones where her tone comes through loud and clear: “So Ji Woong gets to go visit?”

And the regret: “Sorry… I didn’t know. Are u ok?”

After a while of sitting there chewing on her lip, Yu Rim makes up her mind. She stands up and grabs a pad of writing paper along with a pen before settling back down in front of the computer and starting to make note of everything she wishes she’d said back then.

CSKA is too far away for Yu Rim to run to each morning, and just that has changed her routine significantly.

It still trips her up sometimes—how large Russia, and by extension Moscow, really is. She doesn’t have to cross the city - she barely even is making her way into it - but it still takes so long to just get there.

She gets up with the sun every day, which right now means at 5:30AM, to walk to the bus stop. The bus rides are never full, and they’re always so quiet that she’s started looking forward to the naps she can manage to take sometimes before having to switch lines to the metro. She almost misses the darkness of winter—with dawn only breaking after 9:00AM, she bets she’d manage a nap every day.

Much like the hiring scouts kept telling her back then, CSKA is a prestigious club with a long history. Getting out at the subway stop only brings her to their sports complex: they house clubs from fencing through fighting sports through hockey to just about every ball-related sport. And for each one, they have the appropriate venues.

It’s tiresome. She feels not unlike she used to at Novogorsk back in the beginning, having to map out unfamiliar routes, facilities, and schedules in this huge place—with the big exception that she can read the signs now, which helps tremendously.

There are many, many, people around, all the time, everywhere. Getting to go ho--

Getting to leave every day feels like a relief. She tries not to fall asleep on the ride back so that she can still try to catch Hee Do online as soon as she gets home, otherwise the time difference means needing to wait for the next chance.

She doesn’t always manage.

It’ll cost a couple hundred roubles, but… but it’s been weeks now, and…

“Yu Rim-ah,” Hee Do greets when she picks up, sounding surprised but also maybe pleased.

“Hi,” Yu Rim greets back into her cellphone, biting down a smile and fiddling with her nails. Her stomach’s fluttering just from hearing her voice. “I just wanted to call you for a bit…”

“Just for a bit?” Hee Do asks. “Can I have more than just a bit?”

God. She can have everything she wants. “Maybe,” Yu Rim answers instead.

“What do you mean, maybe?” Hee Do asks then. Yu Rim can hear the smile on her voice.

“Maybe you will, maybe you won’t,” Yu Rim says. “What are you doing right now?”

“Talking to my girlfriend on the phone.”There’s no way she can tell the way that that makes giddiness curl in on itself in Yu Rim’s gut, but she almost sounds like she can when she continues: “She’s supposed to ask me how my day was any time now.”

Yu Rim laughs briefly. “How was your day, Hee Do-yah?”

“Finally you asked,” Hee Do says at once. “You’re not going to believe the shit I heard-”

Долг:
11.416.730₽ 11.316.730₽

“Oppa,” Yu Rim greets on the phone. “Can I ask you something?” She makes sure to pre-empt immediately: “Don’t make fun of me.”

The tone of his voice turns a bit teasing, but he doesn’t instantly become insufferable. “What is it?”

“About dating. What type of things do you do? For your girlfriend?”

Apparently that’s not what he expected to hear, because he blurts out a huh? that seems unintentional.

Yu Rim just… She was just wondering. Since Hee Do had said… in a few months. So Yu Rim should… What? What should she?

“What do you mean?” Yi Jin-oppa asks, not catching up to what Yu Rim is looking to know.

“You know… What did they like? When you would date them?”

To his credit, he actually tries answering. “Um. Well… At the start I’d try to do things they liked. There are things girls like about guys, and guys know they do. So you try to do that.”

Yu Rim remembers how insistent he’d been about how learning to play the guitar was totally cool, and that Yu Rim would understand when she was older. She figures she does, kind of.

“There's talking. Telling them nice things and making them feel good—in general, but also feel good about themselves. At first you do it so that they’ll know you like them, but if you stop saying it, they miss it,” he says good-naturedly.

“Uh-huh…” Yu Rim answers, mulling it over. She remembers one of his girlfriends asking him constantly: did she look nice?

And she remembers Hee Do: blushing, shy, whenever Yu Rim told her she did.

“What about… if you were going to take a girl out on a date? Where would you take her?”

Now he laughs. “Why are you asking me all this, Yu Rimie? What are you getting up to out there in Russia?”

She scoffs. “Nothing.” Certainly not now. Not yet, not without her. “I was just wondering what it’s like from the other side.”

She knows what it’s like to be the girlfriend, at least a little bit. But she doesn’t know what you’re supposed to do when you have a girlfriend.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Oppa says. “It’s hard to read a girl’s mind, and when you’re first dating, a lot of it is trying to do that. It was one thing to date back in school, but once you’re adults things change—you’re supposed to provide the person you’re with with more than just fun. You need to be more for them. I think that matters more than where you take them for dates. Then again, last time I got broken up with it was a lot about not going on dates, so maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about.”

Last time.

It’s only then, stupidly, that Yu Rim realizes who she’s asking advice to.

For a moment her ego flares up and she doesn’t quite try to squash it down. He might be popular with women, handsome, experienced. Yes. All that and more, even if he’s not rich anymore. But he still didn’t get her.

Yu Rim has.

“Maybe you really don’t,” Yu Rim teases.

“I’ll listen to any advice you have,” he answers with a laugh. “Don’t go breaking too many hearts out there in Moscow, will you? Be careful.”

“I would never date a Russian man,” Yu Rim says at once. For more than one reason, but really only one that truly matters. “Don’t worry.”

It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday, and Yu Rim walks into one of the CSKA Sports Hall break rooms to find it chock-full of people. She sighs.

She just wanted to grab a quick drink to bring outside and drink in silence before going back to training. Instead she ends up having to wait in line for one of the coffee dispensers while the room full of techs argue about what channel to keep the TV on.

She’s reasonably sure that most of these people aren’t from the fencing club, given she doesn’t recognize their faces at all, but at least she’s not expected to greet them like she would’ve back home.

She knows that the women’s FIFA qualifiers for soccer are happening currently. From what she can make out coming from the TV, there’s some other male European soccer league happening as well—hence all the arguing.

She briefly wonders why people won’t just go to the entertainment center to watch either championship, and shifts her weight on her feet impatiently. Once she finally gets her turn at the coffee dispenser, her cup comes back empty.

A glance at the coffee maker confirms that of coursenone of the men in the room had bothered making more—including the guy who’d just taken the last drink before her.

She grits her teeth in sharp annoyance. Someone’s just started loudly talking about hockey when the sports commentary coming from the TV gets cut off by the news. And now her break is about to end, so she leaves without her coffee and moment of silence both.

She’s exhausted by the time she leaves training, but she’s thankful the new international FIE season is coming soon. Novogorsk sounds like a downright secluded haven in comparison to all this.

That evening Yu Rim flops down onto the couch and pulls a blanket over herself. There are a dozen things she should probably do, from washing the dishes piled up in the sink to doing laundry or cooking dinner, but all she wants is to get warm and comfortable and sleep for a thousand years.

Quiet nights have felt different since coming back from Madrid.

It’s been way over a year now that her entire life had centered on the Olympics. The feeling isn’t unfamiliar - she remembers how odd it’d felt to go back to school after Singapore back then. Between starting to be treated as differently as she’d been and realizing that now that that was done all she had left was to do it all over again…

It’s her second medal now. She’s not a student anymore, and she has a contract to deliver on still: these Summer Games were never going to be the end.

She realizes she’s been sitting there with the TV on and muted, so she reaches for the controller and raises the volume.

“President Putin has had another call with President Bush this evening, government sources confirm.”

Maybe she should talk to Coach Yushkov about the changes to her training he’d tasked her with. She knows adding variety for its own sake is counter-productive, but…

“-have claimed responsibility for the attack, stating that-”

She doesn’t recognize that word at all, but the reporters move on too fast for her to even try to remember it. The screen shows a skyscraper with fire spreading across the top.

She falls asleep right there on the couch.

She’s actually able to grab coffee in the break room the next day, and this time the TV is set to the news.

“I’m telling you,” this one guy—Pyotr?—is saying. “Nowhere’s safe anymore.”

“You don’t know shit,” Kirill answers.

“Tomorrow’s the 13th,” Pyotr—or was his name Miroslav?—insists. “You forget Pechatniki already, you motherfucker?”

“Turn that shit off,” an older coach snaps from across the room, and someone does.

It doesn’t let the room go back to silence.

“At least Putin’s in office now,” someone says. “That shit sucker Yeltsin’s got his hands growing from his ass.”

“Did you see they said it’s probably Islamists?”

“Good, bring the Americans’ bombs to the border in Chechnya and we’ll see how long all this shit lasts.”

“You think the Americans care about that?”

It wouldn’t be the first time people around her seem preoccupied with something that doesn’t mean much of anything to her. But the news. They don't move on, and instead it keeps being talked about more and more.

She means to ask him what’s going on - it feels like this is growing big - but she can’t seem to catch him on his phone.

It starts making her concerned.

Oppa, are you busy?

Three more texts, an e-mail and two calls later, there’s still nothing. She tries to ignore the bad feeling trying to sink down her stomach. She decides to call home instead and ask Mom in case he’s gone by the shop recently.

“He’s what?” Yu Rim asks in shock. Surely she didn't just hear that right.

“In New York,” Dad says again.

Her heart sinks. “In New…?” The pictures that keep getting looped on the news now flash through her mind. He’s there?“What about Yi Hyun?” she asks urgently.

“I don’t know, Yu Rim-ah,” Dad says.

What the hell is Yi Jin doing?

He looks gaunt on the TV screen—at least according to Hee Do.

Yu Rim’s eyes burn with tears.

“He must have felt like he had to do this,” Hee Do says.

But why does he always feel like he needs to drop everything behind and go away? Especially now? And to there? In the middle of all that?

When she bursts into angry tears on the phone, Hee Do sits with her on the line and lets her cry. “I know, Yu Rim-ah,” she hushes softly when Yu Rim’s breath stutters in a sob.

The combination of it all: the danger, the recklessness, the disappointment and the worry, the disbelief that the rug’s been pulled out from underneath them again… it chokes Yu Rim up beyond repair, ignites the fear inside her rooted in the knowledge that things can always get worse.

“Hee Do, please,” Yu Rim begs on the phone.

“Are you serious right now?” Hee Do asks, rattled.

It had started with Hee Do saying she could be there the next day. That she wants to be there with her and that she’d already checked and the training schedule would be fine, and she’ll stay with Yu Rim-

“Just- I- please don't get on a plane. Not now.” Fear grips Yu Rim’s gut so tight she shakes.

(It’s been a haze of news upon news: more attempts on different flights, copycats, violence Yu Rim had no idea was going on in the world brought to light and plastered all over: newspapers, TV, radio, even online.)

(The Federation’s sent notice upon notice about changes to air travel—cancelled flights, airport shutdowns, changes in security proceedings—and amid all of it is Yu Rim, removed from the people she cares and worries about, trying to understand what any of it means for their lives and wellbeing.)

Hee Do makes a frustrated angry noise. “Yu Rim-ah, you’re-”

“I can’t risk you,” Yu Rim says, voice garbled. “Not for anything. Please don't do this. Not you too. Please.”

Hee Do is quiet for a long time as Yu Rim cries on the line.

“I’m calling you every day,” she says eventually, her voice rough and wobbly. “Don't you dare not pick up. You hear me?”

Relief floods Yu Rim so hard she sways in her chair.

“Thank you,” Yu Rim whispers through her tears.

“I have his new number,” Hee Do greets on the phone.

“What?” Yu Rim asks, sitting up in bed and rubbing at her eyes. The bedroom is pitch dark around her, and she feels completely disoriented. “What… Hee Do? What time is it?”

“Sorry, it’s morning here. I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible.”

“Know? Know what? I- Are you okay?”

Hee Do’s voice turns softer while Yu Rim tries to reach for the bedside lamp. “Yeah. Everything’s fine. Sorry, sweetheart. I woke you up, yeah?”

“You did,” Yu Rim answers hoarsely. “It’s okay. What am I supposed to know?”

“Yi Jin’s US phone number. Can you write it down?”

Yu Rim stumbles off bed and pads through to the living room to get her notebook by her computer. “Oppa’s…? How did you…?”

“I managed to get it from mom. Ready?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Yu Rim pencils down the number on the backside of her notebook cover, trying not to yawn through it. Once she’s done, she props her weight with her hand against the desk and rubs at her face.

“Are you going back to bed now?”

“I think so,” Yu Rim mumbles. “How did you…” It doesn’t matter, does it? “Thank you, Hee Do-yah.”

“Of course.” She waits through Yu Rim’s yawn, then adds: “Go back to sleep, Yu Rim-ah. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Okay,” Yu Rim murmurs, stumbling back towards the bedroom. “Goodnight…”

She’s just turned the phone off and crashed face-first into bed again when it hits her, and she sits back up at once. She shuffles for where she’d dropped her phone atop the covers, and as soon as she finds it, she presses speed dial seven. Hee Do picks up on the second ring.

“What did you call me?” Yu Rim asks as soon as she picks up.

“What?” Hee Do asks, sounding startled.

“Just now. On the phone.”

“Uh…” A beat, then: “Oh.” Her voice turns shy. “Is, is that okay? Should I… not?”

“No, no. You-” Yu Rim’s heart folds in on itself with fondness, giddiness, elation. The wish to be able to see her right now. “You can if you want to.”

“Okay. I, I do.”

“So?”

“So what?”

Yu Rim waits.

“Good… goodnight? Sweet…heart?”

Yu Rim bites her lip hard. “Goodnight,” she whispers back, smiling as she goes to turn off the call.

“Wait a seco-”

Her phone rings again.

“What the hell!” Hee Do exclaims.

“What? Sorry, I didn’t mean to hang up on-”

“You’re not gonna say it back?”

“Say what?” Yu Rim asks, holding back a giggle.

“Yah, Go Yu Rim!”

“Na Hee Do.”

“That’s-! You-!”

This time Yu Rim can’t hold back the laugh. “Hee Do-yah. Sweetie. Sweetheart.”

Hee Do goes quiet.

“Princess. Baby.”

“Okay, ew. Stop.”

“Kitten.”

“Kitten?” Hee Do asks, sounding both mortified and the way she sounds like when she’s trying to pretend she’s not liking whatever is happening.

“They say that here. Do you like it?”

“No,” Hee Do answers. She doesn’t sound too sure, and Yu Rim laughs again.

“Okay,” Yu Rim giggles. “I won’t use that one.”

The call connects.

For a moment she’s so surprised she doesn’t know what to do.

“Hello, Reporter Yijin Baek speaking, this is Jim,” he says again in English. “Hello?”

“Baek Yi Jin,” Yu Rim says.

“Yu Rim?”

That’s all it takes.

“What are you doing?” Yu Rim exclaims. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Yu Rim, now’s not-”

“Did you even stop to think about what you were doing? You said nothing and just did it, didn’t you? How dare-”

“Go Yu Rim,” he says strongly, cutting her off abruptly. “You’re crossing the line.”

“I’m crossing the line?! You get up and leave running towards the most dangerous thing possible without even- Did you even bother telling your parents this time? Hyunie? Before gallivanting off to try and save the worl--”

The tone dial comes across abruptly.

Долг:
11.416.730₽ 11.316.730₽ 11.216.730₽

They’ve started calling it a war.

They say there were protests trying to call for exactly that not to happen. The news Yu Rim looks up says the protests in New York had led to people being arrested, and she gets the feeling the articles are downplaying the sentiments around. Which makes sense that spirits would be high—she can’t imagine.

So she guesses the protests failed.

Yu Rim isn’t a child. She knows what war is - she’s plenty aware of it. She knows it’s a thing—something that not only has happened but that does happen. Of course she knows, how could she not?

But she never thought she’d end up learning what it’s like to experience it.

Not that she is - experiencing it. Is she?

She's witnessing it. Which isn’t the same.

But with Oppa there, and the news here…

It’s an odd thing. Living at the same time that all this is happening.

(That war is happening.)

Every day looks the same as before: she knows what her life’s set is supposed to look like. What it doeslook like. She recognizes all the bits and pieces and can place each and every one. It doesn’t matter where she is in reference to any: Seoul is in Seoul, Moscow is in Moscow, New York is in New York. None of this is any different than before.

Except the background feels darker suddenly. The surroundings. She’s sure some of it feels different because she’d never noticed otherwise—of course she never knew what went on at the Russian borders before, for instance. Her life was different, she knew other things—things like anything big that would happen at the Korean border, for one; but not what went on in Afghanistan.

But just because she didn’t know doesn’t mean that it wasn’t happening, does it?

Oppa definitely must have known. He’s always been the smart one. Is that why, then? Does he know more, is there a reason why he had to do this?

She doesn’t know. She’s so mad at him for keeping her in the dark at a time like this.

It’s on the last day of training at CSKA, when she’s bringing her things with her home on the bus and trying to listen to the news on the radio, that the realization comes to her.

She’s neverheard her father talk about his time in the army.

It feels absurd.

Part of her direly wants to ask all of a sudden: what was that like? What did he have to do? What were his day like? And does he know, then? Does he know how you’re supposed to deal with the fact that such a thing—that war— is happening at all, never mind so close by?

She tries her best to remember. Any talks, any passing comments, but she comes up empty. All she knows about her father’s enlistment is that he’d been deployed to the border. That, and the things everyone knows happens to men in the military.

(She doesn't think it's something she could say, but… some of it used to ring familiar. When she truly stopped to consider the hardest times back at the NTC, compared to some of the enlistment stories.)

(She never told her parents about any of it, obviously.)

And right now…

Everything’s already hard enough as it is. So Yu Rim doesn't ask.

But she does look it up. Some things she’d truly had no clue about - like this war that apparently happened in Vietnam. What could thathave been like? And is thiswar going to be anything like it? Others things she already knew. Even she couldn’t manage to miss some of these back in school. But she realizes she’d never stopped to consider one thing: the fact that her parents had lived through some of it. She tries to picture it - them, living through it all under Park Chung Hee - and can barely manage. They would’ve been college students back then. Almost exactly her age.

Her stomach swims with uneasiness.

Oppa’s conscription had been when he was supposed to be in college. He’d gotten released, but he never liked talking about it. She thinks he would’ve rather served—but she shudders at the thought of what things could’ve looked like if he had. Just trying to imagine him with a gun in his hand, for real, doesn't compute.

Then again, trying to imagine him anywhere right now doesn’t compute. She has no idea about anything anymore.

Concern has always been part of Yu Rim, has always been something she’s carried close. Closer with time.

(It’s about being ready. If something goes wrong— when it goes wrong—there’s no time to try and grapple with it.)

She’s gotten used to it: the worry, and the acting. The worry is fuel for kicking into gear, it’s concern and care and knowing what truly matters at the end of the day. Taking action is about doing what you need to do.

But it’s different entirely when there’s nothing she cando.

She doesn’t even get to know what’s going on.

The distance is one thing. But the invisible wall now put up between them is another entirely. He feels completely inaccessible to her.

It might all as well be just a blur.

And it is.

Novogorsk is familiar.

The girls are familiar, the team is familiar, the training is familiar.

A familiar blur.

“Hyunie, hi.”

“Hi, Yu Rim-noona.”His voice sounds so different that it stuns Yu Rim for a second. He’s actually growing up-- no. He has grown up. It’s happened already.

It’s the first time since she’s been here that she talks to him directly.

“I don't know,” Yi Hyun says. His voice is deeper and scratchier than it used to be, but Yu Rim can still hear the hint of the same shy boy from before in there. The one she used to be there for. “Maybe it's because he got used to having to do it. Hyung just… he decides what's needed and he does it.” The hint of bitterness Yu Rim can hear now is newer than anything else so far. “I hate it because he does it on his own. Because he always says it's for me, for us… but he never just asks! He just does it alone. You know that.”

That was more than bitterness now. That was anger.

It’s not the first time they talk about this topic: the reasons why Yi Jin-oppa might have done something. But this feels worse than it ever has before, because there’s a lot more at stake now—certainly a lot more than how embarrassing it was when he tried to act all grown up back in the day.

“I do. I know,” Yu Rim agrees.

Yi Hyun quietens, and when he speaks again, he sounds a bit sheepish: “I’m sorry, Noona. I bet you didn't call just to hear me whining.”

“You're not whining,” Yu Rim corrects. “It's okay. You can talk to me. Alright? If you ever need to, just send Noona a message, and we’ll chat.”

He agrees, and Yu Rim doesn’t have time to chastise herself for not doing this earlier, because he speaks again: “Do you feel bad for me?”

“What?”

“People keep pitying me.”

“I don't pity you, Baek Yi Hyun,” Yu Rim tells him at once. “I care about you. Those are two very different things.”

“But you feel bad, don't you? You feel bad that I’ve lost everything, that Hyung left me behind, that my parents are gone. You see me and you always see that, don't you?”

God. Yu Rim can barely dredge up the words. “Yi Hyun…”

His voice is rough on the line. “I'm so damn tired of it.”

She can’t help it and finds herself chuckling tearfully. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“N-Noona? Are you-?”

“Hyun-ah,” she calls. “Noona knows very well what it's like for people to look at you and only see the things that happened to you. I wouldn't do that to you. I don't.”

He stays quiet. Then, sounding sheepish, probably having remembered who she is: “I’m sorry, Noona. I… I didn't…”

“It's okay,” Yu Rim reassures. “I can listen if you want to let it out. But when I look at you, I see you. Okay? Even though I haven't been around…” Not because she chose not to. But she only ever called now, didn’t she? “I know that I’ve missed a lot… I don't know everything going on with you. Maybe you don't even like gaming anymore, and I bet you're taller than since I last saw you. And that’s just the beginning of it.” She holds back a sigh meant more for herself than him. “It's okay to be angry.”

“I didn't mean to…”

“It's still okay,” Yu Rim interrupts, knowing he didn’t. “I know you're not angry with me.”

“You never get angry though.”

Yu Rim blinks. “What?” she blurts out.

“You just… You’ve always been so cool. No matter what, you’d always just handle things.”

It takes her a moment. And then she can’t help the broken chuckle that bursts out of her. “Hyun-ah, Noona gets so angry sometimes that I told your brother to shove it the other day.”

“You did?!” he asks in shock.

“Yeah,” she confirms with a laugh.

“Wow,”he says, slowly, like he’s trying to imagine it.“How did that go?”

“He didn't like it very much.”

“I’m sure you had your reasons.”

“And he had his,” Yu Rim adds.

“Yeah…”

It’s not an unfamiliar pattern: Yi Hyun, taking Yu Rim’s side, and it making her pause enough to realize he should probably give his brother the benefit of the doubt too. And if he should… Should she?

“Will you reach out if you need anything, Hyunie?” Yu Rim asks softly.

“Yes.”

“And let me know how you're doing regardless?”

“Sure, Noona. Can you tell me more about what it's like to live abroad later?”

“Okay. I will.”

(They do each do what they have to do.

She knows that very well.

That doesn't mean she understands why this is what Yi Jin feels like he has to do—especially this time.)

“You walk home from here, yes,” Lashyn kind-of-asks in English on a chilly Friday afternoon that’s yet to turn dark.

It’s surprising to be addressed directly at all by her, in private, never mind being asked something like that.

The Training Center is a quieter place without Yelena, still in school, and Stanislav, who apparently is still in negotiations. Or maybe it’s just Yu Rim who hasn’t been paying attention. There’s so much she’s been trying to keep track of—she doesn’t have the time or the energy to bother.

“Yes, I do,” Yu Rim answers in English too.

It’s only the two of them in the break room. Lashyn purses her lips and seems to consider Yu Rim very seriously. “You should watch out.”

For a moment Yu Rim genuinely thinks she’s trying to threaten her—it wouldn’t be the first time a teammate has. But Lashyn doesn’t look angry. Instead, she glances to the side and continues quietly:

“The men with the black leather jackets.” She gestures over her own head. “No hair.”

“Wh-”

She looks back at Yu Rim. “It is dangerous still. They don’t like…” Something turns her expression sour. “They see you,” she says with a lift of her chin towards Yu Rim. “They see me…” She shakes her head. “Does not matter if you speak Russian.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Yu Rim asks, baffled beyond belief.

This time she answers in Russian: “Bombs and terrorists don’t just happen out of Russia.”

Yu Rim’s stomach sinks. Lashyn doesn’t look like she’s just trying to scare her.

“Now you know,” Lashyn says, expression cleared and back to that neutral one she always carries around Yu Rim. “My conscience is clear.”

Getting to be the last one at the Training Center again, on her own, helps.

Focusing on her body, on taking it to its limits… it really, really helps. Even at the cost of talking to her for the day.

I get that, Hee Do’s message on MSN says that weekend. Just be careful, ok?

“I will be,”Yu Rim promises. “I am. You don’t need to worry.”

I know you will… but still I worry. I guess it’s kinda silly, but I will worry. Don’t you dare hide it from me if something happens, I will find out.

Долг:
11.416.730₽ 11.316.730₽ 11.216.730₽11.116.730₽

“Shouldn’t you be in training?” Yu Rim asks, checking the time. The World Cup might’ve been moved to next year, but Yu Rim knows very well that things are still business as usual.

“Nope,” Hee Do chirps down the line. “Hang on, the TV remote isn’t working.”

“You know you can’t fool me, right?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,”Hee Do says casually.

She’s been right there through it. Stubbornly, almost infuriatingly at times, somehow managing to bridge the connection with Yi Jin that Yu Rim can barely grasp at. As she’d told Yu Rim, she can’t do miracles—but what she can do, she does.

Which means she still turns on UBS Korea every day and calls Yu Rim to tell her what’s going on. If he’s on, what does he look like if he does. From what Yu Rim has gathered, that’s been ‘worse and worse’.

Yu Rim feels angry that she even has to try this hard to get something, anything, and he seems angry right back.

“I don’t have a degree, Yu Rim!” Oppa exclaims down the line. “Every day I stay on this job is a lucky day, because I’m not special,”he nearly spits out.“I’m a cheap hire they can pay less, and I’m replaceable.”

“What does that have to do with-”

“I need this! I need to do well. I don’t have a career, I don’t have some sort of talent that sets me apart like you do. I don’t get prizes for doing my job at the end of the day, and nothing’s to say that tomorrow I don’t get replaced by someone else.”

“Oppa, all I’m-”

“You want to know why I would come? I was the only one without a family or any attachments who could just get up and go. That’s how little I have. Not even a single plan for the future. I needto make the most of this.”

She hasn’t heard that pain in his voice before, but the way it echoes in her chest…

“I care about it too, of course I do. People are suffering. But I don’t have the luxury of not needing this, Yu Rim. Out of all people, you’re going to judge me for that?”

“Oppa-”

“I have to go.”

He probably does, but it still hurts when he hangs up on her.

What’s the point? Yu Rim is a mess. She’s just getting through the days. There’s nothing here for her to--

“Don't tell me not to. Don't push me away,” Hee Do interrupts.

Yu Rim goes quiet at once.

“I can't go right now, but I can on Christmas. I told you I’d come. Don't stop me, please. Just let me.”

“I…” How she grounds Yu Rim and sweeps the floor from underneath her feet all at once feels crazy. “Christmas isn't on the twenty-fifth here.”

“What?!” Hee Do sounds confused, halfway to angry. “Are you trying to-”

“It, it’s later. New Year's too. I get two more weeks off for it, ‘til January.”

A pause.

Yu Rim doesn't want to ask her. She doesn't want to make her feel like she…

“Will you let me stay with you until then?”

If she wants to, if she can…

“Of course,” Yu Rim says quietly. “If, if you…”

“I will. Lord, you drive me- Fucking hell, of course I will.”

“Are you mad at me?” Yu Rim asks tentatively.

“ No. Yes. I won't be once I’m there.”

Tears brim in Yu Rim’s eyes, her stomach lurching at the very thought. Of her really being here, and at her certainty that she will.

“ Until then, I’m here.”

“I know. Thank you.”

“ But I’ll be there.”

Yu Rim closes her eyes. “I can't wait.”

“When are you going back?” Yu Rim asks. “It’s been months.”

Oppa stays quiet on the line.

“You said you’d only be there until Christmas, tops,” Yu Rim reminds him. It’s so hard to catch him at all lately, it’s a miracle she’s even talking to him right now.

“Well, I’m not,” Yi Jin answers at last.

Yu Rim’s stomach churns. Before she gets to say anything, he adds: “I didn’t expect this to turn into a war when I said that.”

Of course he didn’t. None of them did. Yu Rim barely thought it’d be anything at all when she watched the news that day. “And now that it has, you’re… what?” she asks. “You’re just going to stay there forever?”

“I-- Really, Yu Rim?” At least his voice isn’t just dull now. Even if it's more exhaustion than anything else that comes through.

“There’s no way they wouldn’t let you go back,” Yu Rim says. “Hee Do’s mom could-”

“I’m not going to beg for any favors from the anchorwoman!”

“I’m not saying that-”

“Yu Rim, this is-”

It just bursts out: “You’re so selfish!”

“Oh, really? You want to talk about selfish, Go Yu Rim?”He snaps.“Tell me, are you still pretending that the reason you didn’t talk to Hee Do for over a year was because of some media gag? Or can you admit you’re not that different from me after all?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking ab-”

“You weren’t supposed to talk to me either, Yu Rim. I’m a reporter. But it wasn’t a problem, was it? Because that’s not why you weren’t talking to her. You were hiding and you don’t want to admit it and now you’re trying to call me selfish? Maybe I am. But I have to do this, I can’t freaking do this otherwise, Yu Rim. What was YOUR reason?”

She hangs up on him.

He texts her immediately afterwards, a short ‘thanks for proving my point’ that has her almost throwing her phone against the wall.

Долг:
11.416.730₽ 11.316.730₽ 11.216.730₽11.116.730₽ 11.108.730₽

He doesn't go back.

The fact that it’s going back rather than coming back isn't lost on her.

But they feel the same.

Hee Do very specifically tells her not to freak out before telling her.

UBS is looking for correspondents to send to the Middle East.

Yu Rim knows that he could do it. That he might.

The worst part of it is that she gets it.

(Out of all people, Yu Rim, you’re going to judge for me it?)

(And could she blame him? Wouldn't she? Do similarly? She could. She might.)

But she doesn’t know whether he will. If he is.

It hurts.

The thought of losing him, completely, of not knowing what is going on and how he’s doing—it hurts. All she sees on the news are worse and worse things, all she gets is to listen to Hee Do describe how he’s looking on UBS Korea. All she can do is pray he doesn’t go.

She has nightmares about it. Confusing, feverish. She dreams she gets a call, and his voice tells her there’s been a suicide bombing and that she doesn’t need to worry anymore. She knows what that means, and she cries as she asks him why he had to go, again. The line goes dead, and she gets no answers.

She was just going to get some coffee.

The highlight reel on TV goes by too fast, she doesn’t manage to catch it all. But she catches enough: an USA flight, and a bomb.

Something in her just sinks.Yi Hyun had texted her just yesterday that Oppa hinted he might be moving—but moving what? Job positions? Locations?

She picks up her phone, fees be damned, and tries calling. Anyone. It’s night-time in Korea, dawn in New York, and no one picks up.

And Yu Rim has a job she can’t afford not to do.

The line rings. And rings, and rings.

It shouldn't make her feel like this—like she's grappling desperately for something to keep herself from crashing. But it does.

Each time there’s no answer does, harder and harder, and by the time she’s done with training and listening to the fourth dial tone this call, it feels like she's about to plummet.

The blur turns loud in her head, her breathing this short of panicked, and she grabs for her things and leaves in a hurry.

It's insane, how sharp the daze can be. Feverish, making everything around her this short of insane, an indistinguishable smear that manages to be too bright and too dull to process sensically.

She needs to handle this. Yu Rim can't rely on anything, anyone else. She has to be able to handle this by herself.

The looming abyss feels too narrow, too deep and precarious for anyone else to fit, and even if it wasn't—it's on her. It's hers.

She hurries through the pavement towards the looming structure of white, and she's this close to breaking into a run to be sure she doesn't miss the ticket office when she realizes she's picking up her phone.

She's holding it to her ear and screeching to a stop. “What?” she finds herself panting. “Hello?”

“What happened? Are you okay? My stupid fucking ass didn't have my phone with me, Yu Rim-ah, what's-”

Her voice breaks through the insanity, shaking her, and Yu Rim crashes—because she can now.

She stops grappling, sinks to a seat on the edge of the large fountain by the Bolshoi Theater, and cries.

“I’m okay,” Yu Rim hiccups through tears. “I'm sorry, I- I just-”

Hee Do’s voice comes through loud and strong, heavy with tears, thick with concern, boldened with care: “Never apologize for coming to me. Don't you ever. I'm here. Okay? Stay with me. On the line.”

Of course Yu Rim will. She'd rather be with her than transported anywhere else, even to there, even when here.

“Okay,” Yu Rim agrees tearfully.

And she would rather be with her than have to watch the prince leave yet again.

Or have to wonder which one of them she really is this time.

She can't bear the thought of which ending it’d be for them.

“Talk to me,” Hee Do calls softly from the other side of the line.

Yu Rim’s crying hiccups out of her chest and makes her angrier. “Just when I thought things were—” a hiccupped sob interrupts her completely. “It all just- goes up in pieces again.”

“I know,” Hee Do murmurs soothingly.

“I can't believe it,” Yu Rim cries. Not that things went to hell. But that she thought they wouldn't, that she was dumb enough to-

“Yu Rim-ah-”

“I'm so tired,” Yu Rim admits. She's not just tired - she's exhausted. So exhausted it makes her cry harder. She can't keep doing this.

“Of course you are,” Hee Do says. “Because it’s exhausting. This universe fucking sucks.”

Yu Rim gasps a half-chuckle through the tears.

“Yu Rim-ah, you wanna know a good thing about days that I learned?”Hee Do doesn’t wait before continuing: “It’s that they pass and start and end without you having to do anything to make them.”

“I… What do you mean?”

“Whatever we do, a new day will always come. It’s like they say, right? ‘Nothing lasts forever’. Right now it fucking sucks, and it’s gonna suck until it’s over. So let’s let it pass.”

“Let it…?”

“Yeah. Let it come, and let it pass. I’m gonna be right here while it sucks, and I’m gonna be here when it’s better, too. So let the days pass until we get there. How does that sound?”

It’s not that far off to what Yu Rim’s told herself before: that she just has to make it through it. But the way she puts it makes it feel different.

“I guess,” Yu Rim concedes quietly, her crying having calmed down to sniffles now.

“I’ll take that as a ‘for sure, Hee Do-yah’.”

Yu Rim chuckles again.

Hee Do does it for her.

She confirms it with her mother: no, Yi Jin is not going to the Middle East.

“Does that help?” There’s some shuffling down the line, and Yu Rim can hear the hint of sleepiness on her voice. It’s late for Yu Rim, even later for her, and Yu Rim’s heart pangs.

“I…” Yu Rim pauses. She shuffles onto her back in bed and stares up at the ceiling. Here in the dark, she can almost see the memories going by as she revisits them. “You know, back then it was the same. I, I wanted him not to leave me and it hurt when he did.”

Hee Do makes a small murmur to acknowledge she’s listening. And it's her, so Yu Rim is able to let go and let it out:

“It hurt that I could lose him, and it was scary to realize just how much I’d lose when I did. It just, it made me realize how I really couldn’t do it on my own… it hurt to realize how much I relied on him. And… When he was gone, there was no one else.”

“Not anymore,” Hee Do murmurs. She’s right about that. “But you could - do it. And you did… didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Yu Rim agrees, eyes filling up with tears again.

“It’s okay…” Hee Do says quietly, like she can tell.

“I know,” Yu Rim says through the knot in her throat. “I know I can do it on my own. But I didn’t want to. I don’t.”

Yu Rim remembers how stupid she’d felt. For relying that much on their friendship, for getting used to it, for not thinking she could lose it. For needing it at all, and for not being ready.

It almost feels like she’s fifteen again now.

“There’s so many ways it hurts when you lose someone,” Hee Do says after a few moments of silence. “It’s so scary.”

Yu Rim’s heart aches suddenly. In some ways, Hee Do’s lost a lot more than Yu Rim.

“I’d still rather to have had them than not at all.”

Shame rises in Yu Rim. Hee Do’s lost her father. And Yu Rim’s… Is she overreacting?

“You’re right,” Yu Rim whispers.

At her angriest, Yu Rim wouldn’t have admitted it - she hasn’t. Before, all those years ago, she’s even wished otherwise. She’s wished she’d never met him, wished she’d just learned to do things on her own from the get-go—because wouldn’t it be easier then? It’d have saved her a lot of trouble.

But here and now, sitting on the other side of it - having the choice downright dangled in front of her…

And having her, too…

What a terrible thing it would be not to have them—to not have had them.

It's not anywhere near the same—the distance is ever-constant.

But Hee Do comes.

Yu Rim’s fingers shake as she watches person after person walk out of arrivals.

She stands on her toes to try to see over the mass of people moving through with suitcases, luggage and backpacks, families with children and businesspeople in suits and-

There she is.

Her heart jumps. Hee Do’s hair is up in a lazy bun and she has a large red scarf hanging loosely from around her neck. She’s walking slowly, pushing her suitcase beside her as she looks around at large with a small furrow of her brow.

Yu Rim lifts herself further onto her toes, about to call for her when Hee Do sees her.

As soon as her eyes land on Yu Rim, her expression shifts completely. Her frown disappears and she perks up, lighting up visibly as a grin starts to spread on her face. Yu Rim’s heart jumps, and Hee Do tightens her pace and makes a beeline towards her.

Yu Rim’s fingers shake harder. She can barely stay in place as Hee Do draws closer. She’s right there.

She’s right here.

“Found you,” Hee Do says with a crooked grin once she draws up to her, voice warm and husky.

Hee Do opens her arms for her as soon as Yu Rim motions to step closer, and when Yu Rim sinks into her, she’s everything.

“Hi, sweetie,” Hee Do whispers against her hair, wrapping her up tighter still in her arms and making Yu Rim’s heart tremble.

Yu Rim can’t get any words out past the knot in her throat. Hee Do is warm and solid and here with her.Yu Rim buries her face against the curve of her shoulder, clutching her tight.

Yu Rim gets them a taxi — they’re extremely expensive coming from the airport, but she doesn’t want Hee Do to have to endure a long trip in public transportation after what must have been an exhausting day.

Hee Do’s one larger suitcase is the only thing that fits in the trunk of the taxi. She also quite obviously has fun when the driver insists on taking it from her: she makes an okay sound and lets go of it. It has him instantly dropping the wheels to the floor with an oof, clearly not having expected it to be that heavy.

Yu Rim maybe should scold her or warn her. It’s not worth it to get on the bad side of a Russian man. But when she meets Hee Do’s gaze from above his shoulder, her eyes are crinkled in mirth and she’s sharing a secret little smile with her.

She might let pretty much anything go if that’s how Hee Do will look at her.

“I’ve got it,” Hee Do insists, taking her suitcase handle back from Yu Rim’s grip before Yu Rim can start taking it up the stairs of her apartment building.

Hee Do carries the suitcase up behind her through one, two, three flights of steps, then drops it heavily onto its wheels on the floor when Yu Rim stops by her door.

“This is it?” Hee Do asks as Yu Rim digs for her keys. At Yu Rim’s nod, she smiles so charmingly that Yu Rim’s motions stall. “Cool.”

Yu Rim pushes the door open and steps inside, shedding her jacket and kicking her shoes off quickly as she darts her eyes around to make sure she didn't leave any messes about. Hee Do is probably tired, and thirsty, Yu Rim should--

Hee Do grabs her wrist and tugs her back and around as the door shuts behind her.

She presses her lips to Yu Rim’s and kisses her, soft and firm. Tension drains out of Yu Rim’s body so fast it makes her dizzy, and she melts against her.

“Hi,” Hee Do hushes by her lips then, touching her jaw lightly and looking at her with warm dark brown eyes.

Yu Rim can barely breathe.

She reaches up and cups Hee Do’s full soft cheeks in her hands, a ragged breath escaping her as she presses up for another kiss. Her heart feels like it’s trying to beat out of her chest just to get closer to Hee Do.

The light smacking of their lips echoes in the quiet over the frantic beating of Yu Rim’s heart. Hee Do’s lips are as perfect as she remembers—no, even better than in her memories, full and plush between hers, so soft.

Yu Rim drags her hands along Hee Do’s jaw as they keep kissing slowly, touching down and around her neck, tender and firm, feeling her. Remembering her. Hee Do wraps her arms solidly around her with a sigh, perfect against Yu Rim, still, like always. Yu Rim is so in love with her.

Hee Do kisses her lips once more, then her cheek, her ear, and the curve of her shoulder before finally burying her face down against Yu Rim’s neck with another deep sigh, pulling her fully up against her into an all-encompassing hug.

“Hi back,” Yu Rim manages to say at last, heart pounding as she stands on her tiptoes and hugs her back tight around her neck.

Hee Do breathes a small laugh against her shoulder and Yu Rim drags fond fingertips along the base of her hair.

“Missed me?” Hee Do mumbles quietly under Yu Rim’s ear then, nuzzling close and running her hands up her back. They both know she already knows the answer.

Yu Rim answers anyway, knowing Hee Do just wants to hear it: “Missed you so much,” she whispers, just for her. It's the truth.

Hee Do is clearly exhausted, but she refuses to admit it.

Instead she walks around the apartment curiously while Yu Rim turns on the stove to heat up the soup she’d made earlier for Hee Do to have something warm to eat when she arrived.

"You still keep this picture, huh."

"What picture?" Yu Rim asks distractedly as she adds water to the pot of soup she sets to boil.

Hee Do scoffs, and when Yu Rim turns to look, she finds her by her computer, staring at the wall.

"What picture?" Yu Rim asks again, a smile already tugging at the corner of her lips. She thinks she knows what picture from the clearly displeased look on Hee Do's face.

Hee Do's own lips are tugging down at the corner. She looks like she's undecided on whether or not to pout.

"The one with your boyfriend," Hee Do says sourly.

Yu Rim lowers the stove top to a low boil and steps over. "I don't know about any like that," she says. "I have a couple with my friends and with my parents."

Hee Do scoffs again and crosses her arms just before Yu Rim reaches her.

"I do keep one of my girlfriend though," Yu Rim says, tugging at Hee Do's arms to get her to uncross them.

Saying and hearing it out loud still feels so electric. Her girlfriend.

"That one is my favorite."

Hee Do tries valiantly to stay sulky, but when Yu Rim presses up and kisses the corner of her mouth, she visibly relaxes, the tense set of her shoulders drooping instantly.

"Yeah?" Hee Do mutters quietly, searching Yu Rim's eyes for something. As if Yu Rim could have eyes for anyone but her still, somehow.

"Mmhm," Yu Rim confirms, reaching up to cup Hee Do's cheek and trace her soft features. "Always has been."

The way Hee Do looks at her then...

Yu Rim can barely process it, but her heart thuds abruptly hard in her chest. Hee Do lets out a bemused breath, almost embarrassed, and Yu Rim kisses her.

When she pulls back, Hee Do’s eyes stay closed for a long moment still. She runs her hands along Yu Rim’s waist and sighs, then presses down for another brief kiss.

“Come on,” Yu Rim says quietly then. “You should eat.”

Hee Do nods with a tired smile. Yu Rim tells her they can eat on the couch, knowing Hee Do is probably tired of sitting up straight from her flights.

“It's good. Did you make this?” Hee Do asks as she fills up her spoon again. At Yu Rim’s nod, she smiles. “Nice.”

She doesn't seem to be just saying it because she works through the bowl fairly quickly.

“Oh, speaking of-” Hee Do says with her mouth full. She nods towards her suitcase and pauses to swallow. “Might wanna open that.”

The weight is hefty when Yu Rim turns it onto its side on the floor by the couch, and when she unzips it, it makes sense why.

“Kimchi’s your mom’s,” Hee Do says from behind her. “It’s in those bags. I tried wrapping it in like fifty of them so that it wouldn't end up leaking all over.”

There are thermal bags messily about, but most importantly… There are packs of seaweed snacks, bundles of cookies, packs of gummies. Frozen tteok, tubs of paste, plastic bottles of lord knows what. Sachets of sauce, spices, packs of noodles, bags of flour. A bottle of makgeolli, two large liter bottles of soju.

“W…” Yu Rim’s voice dies out. “Where are your clothes?” is all she manages to ask.

“Carry-on,” Hee Do answers from behind her, evidently with her mouth full again.

Yu Rim bursts into tears.

Hee Do makes a noise from behind her, something between a squawk and a choke, and starts coughing profusely. “Hold-” she chokes out between coughs.

Somewhere between Yu Rim trying to wipe at her face and Hee Do managing to stop coughing, Yu Rim gets tugged into Hee Do’s side as she sits beside her on the floor.

“Stop it,” Hee Do says in a rough voice. “Stop crying.”

Yu Rim shakes her head and tries. “You're so dumb.”

Hee Do gasps. “Excuse me! Yah!”

Yu Rim gasps a short laugh. “God,” she whispers, wiping at her own face again until she feels Hee Do’s hands brush hers aside.

“I thought you’d like it,” Hee Do says, wiping gently at her cheeks.

Yu Rim sighs raggedly and turns fully into her, grabbing a fistful of her top and pulling her into a kiss.

Hee Do smiles against her and kisses her again, cradling her face in her hands and somehow being real.

“I might need to borrow some of your clothes while I’m here,” Hee Do mutters when the kiss ends, stroking at her cheeks again.

Yu Rim laughs wetly and pulls her back in.

They’re facing each other in Yu Rim’s bed, sharing the warm covers. Yu Rim traces random shapes along Hee Do’s arm, just glad to be able to. It’s hard to make her out in the darkness, but she can feel her.

She really is here.

"Can I hold you?" Hee Do asks in the quiet, not timid but with a tinge to her voice that twists something up in Yu Rim's chest.

Yu Rim would never say no to that.

They turn in the dark under the rustle of sheets until Hee Do is wrapping her arms around Yu Rim’s waist and bringing her back against herself.

(They've always fit so well together. And they still do—even better now somehow.)

Hee Do draws her in further and embraces her fully, tight, burying her face against the curve of her neck and breathing in deeply.

There are so many words Yu Rim knows they could try and say—some of them she feels, lodged in her throat, thudding in her chest. Others she hears in the slight shake in Hee Do's deep sigh against her.

They don't say it. They've had nothing but words all this time.

Right now, all Yu Rim needs is this. Hee Do nuzzles her and presses a brief kiss to the curve of her shoulder, and Yu Rim can feel the thudding of her heart against her back. She hugs Hee Do's arms around herself and strokes a thumb back and forth over the back of Hee Do's hand.

It seems to be all Hee Do wanted too, because she sighs again—tired, relaxing, intimate by her ear—and tucks her knees behind Yu Rim's.

She's all-encompassing. Yu Rim's heart shakes, and she falls asleep soon after Hee Do relaxes around her.

The bedroom is cold when Yu Rim wakes up.

It makes the warmth that envelops her that much better: Hee Do's arm is still wrapped around her, holding her securely, and the puff of barely-there snoring by her ear brings a smile to her lips.

Yu Rim stretches in place with a tight yawn, and she hears the skip in Hee Do’s breathing when she wakes up against her.

It's followed by a deep sigh, and Hee Do’s face pressing to the curve of her neck as she squirms against her back.

“Good morning,” Yu Rim calls quietly, shivering at the kiss Hee Do presses under her ear.

“’Morning,” Hee Do answers in a rough murmur, voice heavy and raspy. She sighs deeply again, wracking goosebumps all over Yu Rim’s body. She clears her throat slightly, sounding like she’s about to sniffle.

“Did you catch a cold?” Yu Rim asks, catching the sound at once.

“No,” Hee Do mutters, still sounding stuffy.

“I'll make you some tea,” Yu Rim decides.

“No,” Hee Do mutters again, stubborn, hugging Yu Rim tighter. “Wanna hold you… Like this.” She presses a not-quite kiss to Yu Rim’s shoulder and buries herself in against her.

Yu Rim’s heart pounds so hard it almost hurts. She can feel Hee Do’s heart beating in her chest against her back too, strong, and she swears she feels it skip when she hugs Hee Do’s arms around herself.

She’ll still make her that tea. But for now, she lets her hold her.

It's… Different.

Yu Rim had never had sleepovers when she was younger. Any other living spaces since—hotels, dorms—might have been shared, but they have never been her own.

Now, though, Yu Rim realizes just how much the apartment has become her space. Hers only. She’s had nary an intrusion since first getting here. Ji Woong was probably the only exception, and even then…

This isn’t just some visit. And it’s her.

But it's still someone other than Yu Rim, which makes her slightly self-conscious.

Back home it was different. Here? Everything is Yu Rim’s. Maybe not the place, not the furniture, not most of it—but it’s her messes. Her decisions, her choices, her cleaning. Which is fine, has been fine, because it just needed to work for her.

But two is more than one, and Yu Rim realizes she forgot to account for that while grocery shopping.

“Well then let’s go,” Hee Do says simply.

Hee Do hasn’t seemed interested in Russia at all so far. Both prior to and since coming, she hasn’t so much as mentioned a single thing she wants to do out in the city. But going to the grocery store Yu Rim always goes to has her the most interested she’s been since getting here: she grabs the shopping cart off Yu Rim’s hands and pushes it herself, looking around curiously and asking Yu Rim heaps of questions. Does she usually come here? (Yup.) When? (When I need to.) Every day? (No…) What do you usually get? (Well-) What about this? (We have enough of that already.) What’s that? (Um-)

She either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care how people keep looking at her for how much and how loudly she’s talking. When Yu Rim laughs, it’s too loud too, but with her there it’s hard to care.

“I’ll be right back,” Yu Rim says, but barely gets to take a step away before Hee Do’s grabbing her sleeve.

“What? Why?” Hee Do asks, slightly wide-eyed suddenly. “Where are you going?”

“Just going to grab pads,” Yu Rim says, pointing back towards where she knows the personal hygiene section is. “I forgot.”

She goes to walk away again, but Hee Do doesn't let go of her sleeve. “But…” she stammers slightly.

Yu Rim pauses. Affection squeezes her then even while she tries not to laugh. “Just stay put,” she tells Hee Do, unable to keep the amusement from her voice.

Hee Do notices instantly, of course. Her expression darkens. “Go away,” she mutters, letting go of Yu Rim’s sleeve and pushing her arm.

“Now you want me to go?” Yu Rim giggles. “Will you be okay by yourself, sweetie?”

Hee Do puffs her cheeks in annoyance and turns resolutely back towards the yoghurt options.

The desire to kiss Hee Do’s cheek is so strong that it almost aches. “Don’t wander off and get lost,” Yu Rim says instead, half-teasing, and hurries off before Hee Do can retort.

When Yu Rim comes back, pads in hand, Hee Do is a bit further down the aisle, leaned over to check the bottom of the desserts section. Her stance has her clothes letting a sliver of skin of her lower back show—Yu Rim steps closer, eyes fixed on the spot.

There’s an urge tickling its way down Yu Rim’s chest to her fingertips. When she reaches Hee Do, she reaches her hand out—

She hastily tugs Hee Do’s top back in place, and Hee Do jolts back up straight, turning to face her with wide eyes. She grins when she meets Yu Rim’s gaze—and then lingers, eyes dropping to watch as Yu Rim licks briefly at her own dry lips.

When Hee Do meets her eyes again, Yu Rim’s breath hitches.

Yu Rim comes to abruptly a second later, and steps back with a small awkward laugh. When she grabs for the shopping cart to turn it around, she glances at Hee Do and finds her biting at the corner of her own lip for a second before turning to put the dessert she’d been holding back in place.

Hee Do packs the groceries into the plastic bags Yu Rim had brought while Yu Rim pays.

Yu Rim’s thanking the cashier and zipping her coin wallet back up when she glances at Hee Do. She finds herself being watched—Hee Do is smiling.

“What?” Yu Rim asks, a bit startled, finding herself smiling back automatically.

Hee Do’s smile grows, squinting her eyes slightly in a way that has Yu Rim’s stomach fluttering. Hee Do shakes her head then and grabs their bags, waiting until Yu Rim reaches her side to start making their way out.

Yu Rim reaches over to take some of the bags from her. Hee Do’s hand is warm and soft under her fingertips.

Her touch lingers.

She wants to hold her hand and thread their fingers together; wants to press against her side and walk back like…

Like a couple.

Hee Do meets her gaze, and the fondness in her eyes is now deeper, tinged more serious. Yu Rim can tell she wants to do the same.

But this is Moscow. The desire is left to tingle under Yu Rim’s skin, unmet, and Hee Do lets her take the bags from her hand so they can each carry half as they walk back side by side.

Yu Rim guides them back from memory. Even just being side by side, Hee Do being there still makes everything feel different. In a way everything is: this is more food than Yu Rim could ever really eat by herself before it went bad—and she’s not going back to an empty apartment.

“You’ve really done well, you know,” Hee Do says. Yu Rim looks over at her, train of thought broken. Hee Do continues: “You better be proud of it.” Her eyes roam Yu Rim’s face for a moment. “I know I am.”

“You know you’re what?” Yu Rim asks.

“Proud of you.”

Yu Rim blinks, and Hee Do bumps her shoulder to hers lightly.

The words startingly lodge themselves in Yu Rim’s chest, right by her erratic heartbeat. It’s different, hearing it from her. It’s quiet then: they make the rest of the way back in comfortable silence. She makes even silence feel different.

Yu Rim’s opening the building door with her key when she notices the air feels heavier. Yu Rim paces her breaths, opens the door, and starts leading the way up the stairs. When she glances back briefly, Hee Do’s gaze is already on her, intense. Yu Rim's paced breaths grow shorter.

She feels that gaze on her all the way up to her floor. She’s trying to fit her key in the door, and she can feel Hee Do’s closeness.

Yu Rim walks inside first.

Hee Do closes the door behind them and locks it, then places her bags down on the floor next to Yu Rim’s.

And then strong hands are turning Yu Rim around and pulling her into a kiss before she even has time to lose her breath. She still loses it altogether: Hee Do cups her face in her hands and holds onto the firm kiss for a long few moments.

Yu Rim’s eyes flutter open when the kiss ends. Hee Do’s gaze is fully unguarded now: intense and heavy, lingering. Wanting. Yu Rim’s stomach flips sharply, and Hee Do lets out a heavy breath as she pulls her up into another kiss.

This time they don't pull back. One kiss turns into another and Yu Rim moves in closer instead, pressing up for more as Hee Do threads a hand through her hair and takes her mouth, again and again, almost impatient.

A hurry sets in then—they share short breaths between wet kisses, hands restless: Yu Rim’s along Hee Do’s sides, up her back, around her waist; Hee Do’s in her hair, down her neck, against the low of her back, pulling her to turn them around and press Yu Rim up against the door, leaving them no more way to get closer. Still they try, pressing together tight, and the sound Hee Do makes when Yu Rim raises a leg to slot her thigh in between hers melts shuddering heat down Yu Rim’s body.

They hadn't yet, until now.

"Can we," Hee Do starts saying, hot against her mouth, hands running down her body. Ah, she breathes then, heavy, as Yu Rim pulls her harder against her thigh.

Yu Rim hums, cups her face, welcomes her into another deep kiss, wet and messy.

"Ah, please, Yu Rim-ah," Hee Do gasps, shaky, hands hurried under Yu Rim's top now, blazing hot against her skin.

Yu Rim nods, mm-hmms muffled around their tongues, mussing Hee Do's hair up with her hands carelessly, grinding into her as Hee Do puffs and pants and unhooks Yu Rim’s bra from under her top, not bothering to pull either off before cupping her breasts in her hands.

"Fuck," Hee Do whimpers in the hot air between them as their mouths part wetly. "Do you have any idea–" Hee Do kisses her again, briefly, taking a hum from her as she feels the weight of her breasts, "how much I thought about this–"

Yu Rim whimpers, burning, mind reeling with the possibilities of when, how– "Me too, me too–" Yu Rim says shakily, pulling her back in, needing to kiss her.

"Mmh–"

No memory could do her justice.

Yu Rim feels feverish, every touch from Madrid and word exchanged since charging their movements: hurried, desperate, familiar but shockingly new, still.

"Do you want-"

"Yes, yes-"

A groan against her, kisses trailed along her face, to her ear, and then a hand pressed firm between her legs, over her pants.

"Hee Do-yah!" whimpered sharply when that hand grinds hard against her.

"Fuck, you're so-" Hee Do gruffs, grinding harder, thrusting her hips behind the press of her hand with a choked breath, pushing her hard against the door.

Yu Rim had wanted to be romantic—to take it slow and not give Hee Do the impression that this is all she wants, all she wanted. But there must be romance in the way hearing Hee Do whimper her name quakes something in her.

"Let me make you–" Yu Rim starts asking, begging, wanting to see her, feel her, hear her–

"You first," Hee Do gasps, insists, sliding a hand under the waistband of Yu Rim’s pants and underwear, nuzzling her face, dropping hurried kisses along her cheek before wrapping her mouth around her ear messily. "Ah fuck, you're wet–" breathed rough by her ear, forcing sharp shivers from her.

Yu Rim can't deny it, molten heat overtaking her, making Hee Do’s touch slide, intimate and shuddering. Yu Rim’s thighs squeeze Hee Do's hand tighter against her, and her hips move erratically in her rush.

She wants to come, she wants to come so she can–

"Please, Hee Do, m-my–"

Hee Do grunts, rakes her teeth along the shell of her ear, presses rough wet kisses everywhere—her jawline, her neck, her collarbones and mouth—and pulls her leg from in between hers, then her hand farther back–

"Yes!" Yu Rim gasps sharply when Hee Do starts rubbing her in sharp circles, slick and heavy.

"You're so fucking--" Hee Do cuts herself off to kiss her, sucking at her lips, licking into her mouth, shoving more heat under her skin.

Yu Rim squirms, so close already, whimpering, hitched breaths barely enough to suck in enough air, her head spinning. "C-close, so close," she whispers, desperate, reaching down for Hee Do's wrist to clutch at.

Hee Do hums heatedly, rubs her nose against her, nuzzling her and sucking loud wet kisses down her throat, still moving sharp, just almost--

Yu Rim drags her hand from Hee Do's wrist down to her hand between her legs, pressing Hee Do's fingers harder against herself, just a little bit to the--

“A-ah--” And then: “Mmh!”

The peak of pleasure is blinding.

Yu Rim only fully comes back to herself when she manages, finally, to gulp enough air back into her lungs.

"God," she whimpers, mouth feeling dry, chest heaving. She's barely standing on her own feet: Hee Do is clutching one of her thighs up by her hip and holding her up hard against the door with her own body, leaving Yu Rim's other foot barely on the floor.

She also has her hand still pressed against her, firm between Yu Rim’s legs against the pulses still echoing through her.

Hee Do rests their foreheads together and they share a few heavy breaths that Yu Rim can barely hear over the frantic pounding of her own heart.

"You're unreal," Hee Do breathes in the space between their mouths before kissing her heavily, almost robbing her of all air again. "Mm," Hee Do hums against her mouth when she makes her shake with the press of her hand harder against her.

Yu Rim tries to- to-

Their mouths slide wetly against each other's and she whimpers, her every thought interrupted by the want that throbs through her whole body.

"Please," Yu Rim gasps, muffled between their kisses, hot everywhere. Hee Do groans, tongue in her mouth, drawing back just for a second before doing it again, taking her lips and sliding hurried hands down her body.

Hee Do’s hands are shoving at Yu Rim’s jeans then and Yu Rim is pushing Hee Do’s top up, parting from her mouth for just long enough to allow her to—and then there she is, right there and so attractive, skin warm and soft under her touch. Yu Rim trails aimless kisses down along her chest while reaching behind Hee Do’s back to unbuckle her bra to see all of her.

“I-- ah," Hee Do gasps when Yu Rim wraps her lips around the tip of her breast to suck a wet kiss around her nipple, even softer in her mouth, addictive under her tongue. “I, I need to–”

Yu Rim hums dazedly, pulling back with a tug and a wet pop only to switch over, shivering as Hee Do drags her hands through her hair and clutches at her, back curving under her hands to press herself up harder to her mouth.

Hee Do’s clutch grows harder as Yu Rim lingers, her weight dropping heavier against her, and Yu Rim knows then. She remembers: Hee Do, shaky, eager, admitting she needed to sit down. So Yu Rim slides her hands down until she's grabbing at the back of Hee Do’s thighs and urging her to let her lift her. Hee Do does with no hesitation, lifting a leg and following until she’s hoisted up, weight fully in Yu Rim’s hands and around her hips as she reaches down and drags Yu Rim’s tee off her hurriedly, her bra going with it.

Their kisses are still hurried, and something about getting to carry her like this sends Yu Rim’s head spinning. She has half a mind to just take her to the couch, but she's already stumbled them halfway to her bedroom by the time the thought fully forms, and then it's just a few more steps before she's lifting a knee to her bed and leaning down to lay Hee Do on it.

The sight of her underneath her then, cheeks flushed and hair messy, bare-chested in Yu Rim’s bed, strikes sharp and electric down Yu Rim’s body. She doesn’t need to pause to make sure to remember it later—there’s no way she ever won’t. Instead she drags messy kisses down Hee Do’s chest, along her stomach, anywhere and everywhere, fingers shaking as she hurries to open her jeans so she can have her fully.

The jeans and underwear get thrown somewhere behind her as Hee Do moves back further on her bed, not needing to prompt Yu Rim before she’s following her until she has lying under herself, legs parting at the nudge of her own between them.

It’s different from Madrid. It might not be Seoul but those are Yu Rim’s sheets under Hee Do, and it’s Yu Rim’s pillow that Hee Do presses her head back against when Yu Rim reaches down to feel her, prompting a small whimper. It’s Yu Rim’s bed that creaks slightly as she adjusts herself above her and between her legs, and this time Yu Rim knows Hee Do knows how she feels.

That certainty - that they both know, that she gets to show it - is intoxicating. Almost as much as the way Hee Do’s mouth drops open in a silent gasp, almost as much as how wet she is as Yu Rim guides herself with the memory of how much she’d liked it when she rubbed against her clit like this.

She watches enraptured as Hee Do arches further under her and bites her lip, everything about her so sensual, from the flush of her cheeks to the arch of her neck. Yu Rim wants to kiss her but also watch her—she settles for pressing half-kisses by her jaw so she can see what the twist of pleasure on her face looks like again.

“Like that?” Yu Rim asks still, something like pride curling in her at the frantic nod Hee Do gives her while wrapping a leg around the back of hers, hands dragging hard up her back. Yu Rim does press down to kiss her then, unable not to any longer, taking her lip with hers so she can bite at it herself.

“Yu Rim-ah,” Hee Do gasps against her mouth, fingertips digging hard against her skin.

“Faster?” Yu Rim asks by her lips, getting another frantic nod in response even as they kiss.

“Ah,” Hee Do gasps quietly when she obeys, then again: “Ah!” louder as Yu Rim rubs harder too, wanting to make her come apart so badly it aches.

Hee Do can barely return her kisses now, so Yu Rim parts from her mouth to drag wet kisses down the curve of her neck, raking her teeth lightly along the tense line of muscle and tasting at her skin as Hee Do drops back and hugs her shoulders.

“Missed this so much,” Yu Rim tells her heavily, trailing kisses down her skin. “Wanted to see you,” she says, “kiss you,” in a murmur while nuzzling at the softness of Hee Do’s breasts. She sucks a brief kiss around a nipple before pulling herself back up to take Hee Do’s mouth. “Make you come,” she adds then, because it’s true, and Hee Do’s jaw drops with a sharp exhale. “Will you?”

“W-will--“ Hee Do whispers dazedly, squirming under her, restless, scratching a hand up the back of Yu Rim’s head, threading through her hair and hugging her tighter. Yu Rim tries moving her touch more directly over the bump of her clit under her fingers, getting a moaned: “Ah,Yu Rim-ah--” in response.

Hearing her name like that from her shudders through Yu Rim’s entire body. “Oh my God, Hee Do-yah,” she gasps, crazy for her, pushing through the small ache of tension she can feel starting in her wrist. “You’re so sexy,” Yu Rim confesses between panted breaths by Hee Do’s mouth, needing her to know, God, it drives her crazy how much—

Hee Do’s grip on her grows even harder, almost painful, her every breath coming out in small gasps now, higher and higher pitched as she squeezes her eyes shut. She makes Yu Rim crazier still, driving even more urgency to her touches. “I’m-- I--!” Hee Do tries saying, breathless, only to give up and tug Yu Rim down for a messy kiss instead.

The kiss only lasts for a moment. Hee Do breathes a sharp ah against Yu Rim’s mouth then drops her head back, pressing hard against the pillow as she starts arching under her, oh God, her eyes shut tight and eyebrows scrunched-- her mouth drops open even wider as her breathless gasps get faster somehow, she’s--

Hee Do goes quiet abruptly—she jolts under her, tense, and comes for her.

Yu Rim’s entire body echoes as she presses reverent kisses anywhere she can reach—she’s just so gorgeous under her, throbbing and melting heat under Yu Rim’s fingers, shuddering in place for an endless few moments, until—

“Fuck,” Hee Do breathes out, crashing back down fully onto Yu Rim’s mattress and panting hard under her.

Yu Rim smiles against her skin, tingling with heat and satisfaction. She brings her hand back up from in between Hee Do’s legs so she can hold herself up on both arms and take Hee Do’s lips for a soft awed kiss.

Yu Rim indulges herself. She traces her hands along Hee Do’s body, feels her every curve and every shape, sets about kissing every spot and every mark on her skin that she’d tried to map out back in Madrid.

She remembers and discovers and re-discovers her, presses confessions to her ear, thirsts for every gasp and every moan she can get from her.

She pulses with satisfaction and desire and gives Hee Do anything and everything she begs for, including herself—and then does it all over again, addicted, thirsting, aching with the way Hee Do clings to her, how much she wants this too.

There is no stopping point. How could she stop? Why would she? Not while she has her, here with her, under and against her.

She feels her pulse and clench under her fingers, and wonders about so much she didn't get the time to try last time. So much she'd thought about, before and since.

“Can I?” Yu Rim asks by her mouth, touch lingering.

“What,” Hee Do asks dazedly, turning her head and taking her mouth into another wet kiss.

Yu Rim hums, head spinning addictively, kissing her back and then again, rolling into it and rubbing along the wet mess clinging to her length. “Inside you,” Yu Rim breathes out.

Last time she'd only thought of what she does to herself, seeing if she’d like it, too, then getting addicted to what worked, focusing on that while trying to get to know the rest of her, so she never…

“Ah, fuck,” Hee Do whimpers. “Yes, yes-”

Yu Rim bites at her lip gently, then watches. Watches her face while pressing a soaked finger to her entrance, feeling that clench that echoes in herself, then pressing further, inside…

It's easy to glide in, sliding through molten slickness, along such a silky grip that…

Hee Do’s mouth drops open in a silent gasp, almost in disbelief as Yu Rim pushes gently until she's all the way in.

“God,” Yu Rim sighs, gut clenching at the feeling of her walls wrapped around her, throbbing, then squeezing when she tries feeling at them. “Is that okay?”

“Y-yeah,” Hee Do breathes out in a half-whimper, digging her hands down Yu Rim’s back.

Yu Rim draws back, slow, cursing under her breath at how Hee Do flutters at the motion. Yu Rim takes her lips with her own into an unhurried kiss, dizzy in the intimacy, in getting to be with her, against her, on top of her and inside her.

Hee Do whimpers fully this time when Yu Rim feels more insistently against her walls, loving how she can feel her react around her.

“You feel so-” Yu Rim whispers, breaking their kisses to press her forehead against Hee Do’s temple in her daze and watch her.

“Yu Rim-ah,” Hee Do sighs, wiggling her hips, almost in a hurry.

Yu Rim shivers sharply, any and all indications from her of wanting this hitting her so hard each time, and she draws back and forth inside her to try it, trying to remember what she's seen, what she's looked up…

“Tell me what feels good,” Yu Rim asks her, wanting more than anything for her to-

“Just- keep going,” Hee Do says in a hitched breath, the very pitch of her voice enough to stoke the fire in Yu Rim further ablaze.

Yu Rim groans, adjusts on top of her so she can look down, taking in the shape of her breasts, the slope of her stomach, the sight of her spread with Yu Rim’s hand moving between her legs. “God-”

Hee Do squirms when Yu Rim presses another fingertip by her entrance, hips jolting.

“Yes?” Yu Rim asks to be sure.

“Mm,” Hee Do confirms, restless, scratching down to grab at Yu Rim’s ass.

“Fuck,” Yu Rim hisses.

If one was amazing, two is extraordinary. Hee Do moans quietly, and her walls wrap tighter around Yu Rim now, strong, then stronger still when Yu Rim reaches deep, then draws back dragging.

Hee Do drops back down further, squirms her hips more, breath hitched. “Go Yu Rim,” she whimpers.

“Yes,” Yu Rim whispers, goosebumps wracking her at hearing her name like that from her.

Yu Rim presses down to taste at her skin, mouth along the arch of her neck, kissing towards her chest and closing her eyes to the feeling of her, of being inside her like this, dragging back out under the clench of her then sliding in with the slick. Hee Do jolts her hips with it, breath hitched and hot, chest arched and sensual, burying a hand in Yu Rim’s hair and pulsing around her fingers.

Yu Rim wonders what it’d feel like to be inside her while she comes, and shudders on the spot.

“Let me-” Yu Rim mutters, kissing hurriedly at her breasts before pulling back and sitting up, grabbing for her thigh with her free hand to spread it further.

Hee Do whimpers in near embarrassment but follows, and when Yu Rim reaches her other hand down to cover her clit with her thumb, she jolts sharply with a hot, tight squeeze around her.

“Yeah?” Yu Rim asks in marvel.

“Mm-hm,” Hee Do whimpers, eyes squeezed shut and muscular thighs squirming spread for her.

“Wanna feel you come,” Yu Rim says, voice coming out raspy. “With my fingers inside you-”

“Yu Rim!” Hee Do gasps, hips jolting and walls squeezing again, tighter now around her.

Yu Rim gasps herself, rolling her thumb over her messily, trying to finger her at the same time, jolting her hand faster, going crazy with the sounds of it - wet and slick, with Hee Do’s sharp breaths over it, sharper and sharper and more hurried, cut shorter as her hips roll and her stomach flexes-

“Good? Feels good, sweetheart?”

“Yes, yes-” And then: “Please, fuck, please- ah-”

“Oh my God, Hee Do-yah-”

Yu Rim bends down to lick at her abdomen, spread bites across her skin with how hot she makes her, kiss at her breasts and wrap her mouth around-

“Harder, harder!” Hee Do chokes out.

Yu Rim moans, sucks tight with her mouth and jerks hard with her hand, pulsing, moaning again when she feels Hee Do’s hand next to hers, nudging her to let her rub at herself.

“Gonna- gonna-” Hee Do gasps, rubbing her clit furiously, clenching so damn hard around her, driving a painful ache of desire through Yu Rim.

“Cum for me?” Yu Rim mutters, begs, touching along her body with her freed hand, scratching greedily along flexing muscles, wishing she could mold herself even further into her somehow.

“Yes, yes,” Hee Do whispers tightly, hurriedly, arching her back for her, squirming, thighs tense and hips canting, pussy molten hot around and against her, “Y-Yu- Rim--!”

Hee Do slaps a hand down against the bed and grabs a tight fistful of the sheets just before she jerks abruptly with a breathless, high-pitched gasp, followed by a choked little moan as she clenches ridiculously hard and quivers around Yu Rim’s fingers in a molten swirl that makes Yu Rim moan hungrily too.

“Oh, f-” Hee Do gasps, sounding overwhelmed, her hips jerking again and spasming shortly as Yu Rim drapes herself down over her.

“So hot, oh my God,” Yu Rim moans shortly, holding tight inside her, feeling at the heartbeat of her walls, the pulsing, strong and deep, making Yu Rim’s entire body echo and ache deliciously.

Hee Do whines and melts under her thoroughly, relaxing completely even as her hips give a small jolt that seems unintentional, lulled in the rhythmic throbbing still surrounding Yu Rim’s fingers. She barely returns the kiss Yu Rim takes from her lips, but it doesn't matter; Yu Rim doesn't need anything at all other than getting to do this, getting to see and feel her like this.

Hee Do does reach up eventually with a tired sigh and pushes Yu Rim’s hair back before tugging at her for a proper kiss, lazy, followed by another and another.

Yu Rim loves it, loves helping her stretch back out under her and resting fully against her, skin on skin. Loves the feeling of sliding back out of hot walls, of thick wetness clinging to her as she does, proof of what she can do to her, something like a miracle still.

“I can't get enough of you,” Yu Rim mutters, rubbing her face against her, “you drive me damn crazy-”

“You make me feel so fucking-” Hee Do moans dazedly, pulling at her, rolling them onto their sides, grabbing at her greedily and fitting a thigh between her legs that Yu Rim wraps around and ruts against eagerly.

“Hee Do-yah,” Yu Rim moans shortly when Hee Do thrusts her hips behind the press of her.

“So fucking hot,” Hee Do grunts, grabbing greedily at her and sucking messy kisses at her throat. “You're so hot-”

“Kiss my ear,” Yu Rim begs, shuddering when Hee Do does with a hot heavy breath that-

The moan that squeaks out of Yu Rim when Hee Do squeezes at her ass and ruts roughly against her gets cut short when she-

“Ooh, my God,” Yu Rim whimpers tightly as her body unlocks in trembles against her, shuddering sharply and jolting weakly.

“That fast?” Hee Do mutters, sounding unbelievably smug.

“Shut up,” Yu Rim gasps, fisting at her hair to bring her up to her mouth.

They're sweaty, kisses messy, touches dazed and hurried through the heat clinging to and between them. Yu Rim can barely cope with any and every touch Hee Do takes, shudders and comes for her so thoroughly it dizzies her, makes her beg her to hold on, wait… wait so Yu Rim can touch her more first, kiss her, tangle with her and make her whimper into her mouth, on top of her, against her.

Nothing, no memory, no fantasy can compare. Even when they fumble, even when one of them struggles, trying to figure out how to fit and move, trying to reach for the feeling off just so… even that is better than whatever Yu Rim’s mind could ever concoct. Because it's with her, it's shared with her and given to her and taken by her, beyond Yu Rim’s body but in her heart, her soul.

“I’m so in love with you,” Yu Rim breathes out by her bare skin as they lie together, panting. Yu Rim strokes fondly at the shape of her waistline, nuzzles by her neck. “Really,” Yu Rim mutters.

Hee Do’s chest moves deeply with each of her hard breaths, and she rubs her face against Yu Rim’s hair lightly, lazily. “Me too,” she sighs, tangling herself tighter against her. “But it's cold,” she adds in a whine.

Yu Rim chuckles, endeared, and tugs the covers nearly fallen off the bed up and back over them, loving how cozy it feels then.

They trade kisses underneath the covers, over and over, exchanging sighs and caresses. She looks lovely, glowing, cheeks flushed and lips reddened, all hooded eyes and messy hair. She cups Yu Rim’s face, strokes a thumb across her cheek and by her ear, lets Yu Rim tug at her lips in gentle bites and rolls into each next kiss.

Yu Rim is the absolute luckiest.

She's also the first to get back out of bed so Hee Do can stay under the covers in the warmth while Yu Rim gathers her clothes for her. She should probably get some food into them both because she knows the moment they come back to the bedroom, she’ll want more of her. She already does. She always does.

“The ice cream’s all melted.”

Yu Rim looks at the tub in Hee Do’s hands, water dripping from it, and indeed.

“You want ice cream soup for dessert?” Hee Do asks.

“We haven't had dinner yet,” Yu Rim points out.

Hee Do shrugs. “Want ice cream soup for dinner?”

Yu Rim laughs. What the hell, why not.

“Let me put the rest of this away first,” Yu Rim notes, gathering the rest of the groceries they’d abandoned by the entrance lord knows how long ago.

“Cool, where's the spoons?”

Yurim pauses, marker in hand. After a moment, she caps the marker again and puts it away.

She doesn't want to know. She doesn't want to spend their time together counting down the days until it's over.

She puts the calendar away too for good measure.

She’d just darted downstairs to take the trash out when she sees it. The envelope is rolled up and shoved halfway through her mailbox slot at the building entrance hallway. She half-expects it to be another catalog that she has no interest in but that always manage to get shoved in there like that.

But it’s a proper parchment envelope, thick, and the sender’s address is loud and clear before she even finishes unrolling it: UBS HQ 424-12 Yongdang 1(il)-dong, 58648 Seoul, South Korea

Her heart drops to her feet.

She’s still not sure whether in a good way or not as she walks back into the apartment with it in hands.

“What's that?” Hee Do asks curiously from the couch.

“I don't know,” Yu Rim admits, unrolling the thread from around the opening buttons and heading over to sit beside her. “It's from back home.”

When Yu Rim turns the opened envelope upside-down, the first thing to fall is a short piece of paper that she manages to grab before it falls to the ground. The rest seems to be a single stack of thick paper that she slides out and flips over to look at.

Only to find herself looking at them.

“Oh, hey,” Hee Do says, moving closer. “Can I see?”

It's them. Standing in the middle of the piste in Madrid, hugging.

Yu Rim hands Hee Do the stack and takes the note to read.

I figured if anyone deserves having these, it's you. I thought you might like them. These are the press versions from our photographers, I think they turned out great. You did well, Yu Rimie, congratulations
- Yi Jin Oppa

“Oh, ew,” Hee Do grouches from beside her, flipping past a picture of just herself.

“Stop it,” Yu Rim admonishes quietly, taking it back from her.

It did turn out great—the picture. This one, and all the others. This one is of Hee Do on the podium, gold medal hanging from her neck. Proud, emotional, and beautiful. Breathtaking.

The next one is of Yu Rim on the podium as well, and the next is of the two of them standing together at the top. Then with the bronze medalist. Yu Rim just about remembers having stood for these to get taken.

There’s one more of their hug, a closer cut that Yu Rim remembers seeing in the newspapers, and one of their match itself.

Hee Do makes to take the note from where she’d left it on her lap, and Yu Rim lets her.

“He's still there,” Hee Do says after reading it. Like a confirmation, and to remind her.

So this is what it's like. The other side.

“Yeah,” Yu Rim agrees, voice coming out hoarse.

Yu Rim has no idea when Oppa might’ve sent this, but it must've been months ago. It has to have been, before he left.

Her heart squeezes.

She might not know what he's going through. He definitely didn't know what she had been—because she didn't tell him.

But he'd known enough. And he still cared.

Hee Do presses a kiss to the side of her head, and Yu Rim sinks into her gladly.

“Guess you’re just gonna have to take down that picture with your ex-boyfriend to make room for this on your wall,” Hee Do sing-songs.

“Wait,” Hee Do says the next evening when Yu Rim walks into her bedroom after a shower.

“What?” Yu Rim asks. “I still need to dry my hair.”

“Wear this,” Hee Do says, shoving something towards her.

Yu Rim takes it in confusion, and when she unfolds the fabric she sees one of her large gym t-shirts. A familiar one, in fact, the picture of Hee Do wearing it in Madrid still vivid in her mind. “Um. Why?”

Yu Rim looks up to find Hee Do looking off to the side and doing a terrible job at pretending to not be blushing. “Does it matter? Just put it on,” she says, all bravado.

Yu Rim considers insisting. Her lips quirk at the corner, wondering what it is that has her like this all of a sudden, and she’s tempted to tease her.

She’s more prone to indulging her right now though. “Okay,” Yu Rim agrees, bringing it with her to the bathroom to change into before blow-drying her hair.

When she’s sliding into bed beside her and drawing Hee Do in close, Hee Do turns towards her. “Give it back later, okay?”

“Back?” Yu Rim laughs. It’s her t-shirt. “Sure, miss.”

Hee Do narrows her eyes at her, clearly knowing she’s this close to teasing her. “No funny business if you don’t.”

“Funny business?” Yu Rim giggles, sliding a hand to the low of her back to tug her in. “What’s that supposed to be?”

“You know exactly what,” Hee Do mutters while Yu Rim presses a kiss to her cheek.

“Okay, sweetie,” Yu Rim says, kissing her cheek again.

The way Hee Do relaxes into Yu Rim’s hold soon after, breath growing heavier as she starts slipping into sleep easily, is yet another confirmation of how—and why—Yu Rim will indulge her nearly anything.

Hee Do pours Yu Rim a glass first before filling her own and taking it from Yu Rim’s hand. They're standing down by the road in Yu Rim’s street, and Hee Do puts the champagne bottle down on the grass for lack of anything else to do with it.

“Oh I hate that,” Hee Do says with a sour expression as soon as she brings her glass down, sticking her tongue out with a disgusted frown.

Yu Rim doesn’t need to wait for the countdown or the fireworks.

“I love you,” she tells Hee Do, heart full.

Hee Do grins at her so wide, so happy. She bends down suddenly and wraps her arms around the back of Yu Rim’s thighs, lifting her up high in the air against her. Yu Rim squeals in surprise, grabbing at Hee Do’s shoulders out of reflex.

“And I love youuu,” Hee Do says loudly, silly, chin propped up against Yu Rim’s stomach as she spins them in circles despite Yu Rim’s much more frantic squeal now as her stomach jumps at the sudden spinning of the world.

She slaps frantically at Hee Do’s shoulder to let her down, but Hee Do just laughs at her, and that’s when the fireworks start.

There are yelled cheers in Russian from down the street and around them in the distance, bright explosions and whistles echoing from the night sky. Then, a loud screeching whistle sound shoots up as someone lights a firework not far behind Yu Rim. Her ears ring, but when the explosion goes off above them, she laughs breathlessly back down at Hee Do, watching enraptured as the flashes light up her face in colors.

She has no right making Yu Rim this happy.

She does bring her back down at last, bending her knees and letting Yu Rim stand back on her feet, but she doesn’t let go of her as she stands back up straight, arms around her waist now.

“Happy new year, Yu Rim-ah!!” Hee Do yells with her face turned up towards the sky. She’s so loud, way louder than she’d ever have to be.

But her silliness carries Yu Rim with it.

“Happy new year, Hee Do-yah!!” Yu Rim yells out at the sky too, giddiness bubbling up her chest when Hee Do laughs happily.

Hee Do presses loud smacking kisses to Yu Rim’s cheeks, first one then the other. “Here’s to being twenty-three,” Hee Do says brightly, not bothering to look up at the fireworks at all, eyes only on Yu Rim.

Her lips pucker automatically when Yu Rim lifts her palms to her cheeks and presses them together firmly. “Already? Are you sure?” Yu Rim asks, wiggling her hands slightly and laughing as Hee Do’s smushed cheeks move under her grip. “You don’t look a day over sixteen!”

Hee Do just makes kissy noises at her from in between her hands, then shoves her ice-cold fingers up under Yu Rim’s clothes in retaliation, making Yu Rim drop her grip instantly to bat her hands away from her stomach with a shocked jerk. Hee Do doesn’t give up though, and Yu Rim turns away from her to try to escape, wincing and twisting at the icy touch.

Hee Do laughs and laughs, taking her hands out from under Yu Rim’s top at last to hook her arms around her waist from behind instead. She pulls Yu Rim back into her chest and hugs her tight.

“Take me home, Yu Rim-ah,” she says, rubbing her nose behind her ear before pressing a kiss there too. “We’ll see how old I look then.”

Yu Rim gulps.

Hee Do rolls off her and drops down onto her back beside her on the bed, panting harshly up at the ceiling.

“Bet you’re glad I’m not sixteen now,” Hee Do says between panted breaths.

Yu Rim groans weakly, twitching, barely able to breathe as bright spots still linger behind her eyelids.

She doesn’t need to look at Hee Do to know how smug she must look right now.

Yu Rim wakes up to the smell of coffee.

Still half-asleep, she squints blindly at the daylight flooding the bedroom with a groan. The nice smell manages to prompt her to sit up groggily in bed and rub at her eyes instead of turning around and trying to go back to sleep.

Idle humming reaches her ears.

“Hey-come on,” gets sing-songed as Yu Rim feels her bed dip. “Break it on downn,” Hee Do sings just as Yu Rim’s vision comes into focus proper to see her shuffling on her knees closer to her on the bed. “Morning,” Hee Do greets with a smile she leans over to press to Yu Rim’s lips in a brief kiss. “Coffee,” she adds, taking Yu Rim’s hand and closing it around a warm mug.

Yu Rim gets another small kiss pressed to her lips before Hee Do hops back out of bed and slides back into her slippers.

“I’m hungry,” Hee Do says mid-humming, already making her way back out of Yu Rim’s bedroom. She stops by the doorway and looks back at Yu Rim expectantly.

Yu Rim chuckles, voice still raspy with sleep. “I’ll be right there.”

Hee Do smiles, pleased, and walks out. Yu Rim shakes her head and takes a sip of the hot coffee, glad to find it just sweet enough.

She can still hear Hee Do mumble-singing in the other room.

She can’t even see her and still her heart is this full.

Yu Rim looks around her bedroom at the slight mess Hee Do’s presence has left: her spilling backpack on the floor, the small pile of clothes hanging from the open wardrobe door, the comics she’d insisted on bringing for them to read together on the nightstand at the other side of the bed.

“I said, ‘I’m hungry’,” Hee Do calls loudly from the living room.

The only thing she can do is go to her.

When Yu Rim walks into the living room, Hee Do turns to look at her. “Seriously, what’s a girl gotta do around here to get some breakfast?”

“In my experience? Cook it,” Yu Rim answers, hiding her smile behind her mug at Hee Do’s answering displeased expression.

“What? No, that’s what I have you for,” Hee Do shoots back as Yu Rim walks closer.

Yu Rim can’t help the laugh she lets out at that. “Oh yeah?” she asks, amused. “What do I have you for, then?”

Hee Do reaches out and Yu Rim lets herself get pulled in closer by the waist. “Lots of stuff,” Hee Do says with a grin. “Have you forgotten already?” She asks, pressing a kiss to Yu Rim’s cheek. “It was only last night.”

Yu Rim’s breath hitches despite herself, and Hee Do’s grin turns knowing as she runs her hands along her back.

“I don’t mind reminding you,” Hee Do mutters by her lips, drawing Yu Rim up to chase her for a kiss without even having to try- then leaning back out of reach before she gets to take her mouth. “After you make me breakfast,” Hee Do says quickly, grin back in place as she jumps back and out of reach before Yu Rim can slap her.

Yu Rim narrows her eyes at her semi-menacingly but can’t pretend to be annoyed for long, so she sets about lazily frying some eggs with ham for them to have with toast and fruits. Her coffee mug is almost empty already as she drinks it by the toaster, this big rackety square thing that Yu Rim has always felt might be older than her but that’s always worked well enough.

Yu Rim glances out of the kitchen window. It’s a dull and cold grey morning in Moscow, and she’s so happy she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

For a moment she’s hit with a wish so strong, the knowledge so clear that this could be their everyday, could have been, that her chest tightens and her throat locks up.

It can't. It won't.

But…

She can still hear Hee Do humming some song in the living room behind her, now over the sound of what Yu Rim can recognize as one of the public TV children’s channels. Absurdly Hee Do both fits right in and doesn't, filling every space in a way that's almost unbelievable. Her presence is so strong that when she leaves Yu Rim knows there will still be an echo of her. That she will leave almost pales in comparison.

And Yu Rim knows then. She knows it with absolute certainty: she’d take this over just about anything else. Over and over again, selfishly, she’d pick this. She’ll hold on to it for as long as Hee Do will let her have it - have her.

Yu Rim wants to feel like this. Apparently, she can—even here, even like this, even with everything. She wants it so bad she'll fight for it if she has to, will give up most anything, will do whatever it takes to keep it.

When she walks back into the living room and Hee Do skips over to take the plate Yu Rim offers her, Yu Rim doesn't need to hold on to that want, that yearning. She's already happy.

And still she does. It doesn't matter that she doesn't need to with her here. Yu Rim still wants it: this happiness.

Hee Do looks at Yu Rim in surprise as Yu Rim pulls back from leaning over and pressing a kiss to her cheek.

“What was that for?” Hee Do asks with a cute hint of shyness to her expression.

“No particular reason,” Yu Rim answers genuinely. “Just because.”