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And here you come
with a shield for a heart
and a sword for a tongue
and your girls, your girls.
Wasn’t I beautiful
Wasn’t I fragrant and young?
Look at me now.
Carol Ann Duffy, Medusa
Her ankle gives way.
It’s hard to mask the loud thud of a body hitting a wooden floor, so of course Heedo turns.
Hair frazzled and wide eyed she asks, “Are you o—”
“I’m fine,” Yoorim grits out, but can only watch helplessly as Heedo makes her way to the first aid kit in the corner of the room and picks up the small plastic box.
“Na Heedo,” Yoorim calls, hiding the whimper that threatens to escape her throat, “stop it.”
“Weren’t you told to go easier?” Heedo counters. She’s at the cooler now, grabbing ice cubes and putting them into a cold compress. “How are you supposed to fence like this?”
Heedo kneels in front of her. This close even with the sun having sunk Yoorim can see the freckles that dot the skin just below her eyes.
Yoorim grabs her ankle and pulls it closer to her, but it’s no use—Heedo has always been the stronger of them, and clicking her tongue she easily pries Yoorim’s ankle out of her grasp.
“It’s swollen but it doesn’t look like it’s bruising,” Heedo murmurs, pressing the compress against a tender spot. Yoorim hisses.
“Hurt?” Heedo asks.
Yoorim looks at Heedo, then at her hands at her ankle, then back at Heedo.
“More than you think,” she tells her.
The last time Yoorim had met Na Heedo was half a decade ago, and for months after she had only her name in her mouth.
Picking up her sword. Next time, I’ll defeat Na Heedo.
Putting on her mask. I’ll defeat Na Heedo.
Getting into her stance, only her and a dummy in a cramped practice gym. Na Heedo.
Yoorim is fifteen when just before the summer, a bright-eyed, sweet-smiled girl stands in front of her, hands at her back and light pouring in.
“Hello,” she says, the team across her, Coach Yang beside her. “My name is—”
It rings in echoes of Yoorim’s heartbeat.
Na Heedo.
“Go Yoorim!” Heedo calls, walking over to her. Her shadow stretches long behind her; they’re at the school gate.
Adjusting the strap of her backpack, Heedo grins. “I’ll walk you home.”
“Please don’t,” Yoorim says, turning and walking away.
Heedo is taller, Heedo has longer legs. She catches up to Yoorim easily. “I’m right here,” she says. “So it’s either I’m walking you home, or you go in circles around town to avoid that.”
Yoorim doesn’t answer, and Heedo takes it as permission.
Oddly, Heedo remains quiet. All Yoorim hears are her footsteps, off rhythm from her own.
Just before they turn the corner to Yoorim’s street, she asks, “Do you just … do everything you want to?”
Heedo’s footsteps stop. “What do you mean?”
Yoorim stops with her. Turns to face her. “If you want to do something,” Yoorim says. “Do you just go and do it?”
Heedo’s brows furrow, the confusion on her face so intense Yoorim wonders if she’s ever thought of this before. “Um.” Heedo purses her lips, tilts her head. “I guess? Why not do something you want to do, anyway?”
Yoorim thinks of the lightness of Heedo’s feet and how powerfully she lunges forward, all abandon. All freedom?
“I see.” Yoorim nods. “Well—I live just down this street. Good night, Heedo.”
Heedo’s reply is faint, Yoorim having walked ahead. “Goodnight, Yoorim.”
Yoorim likes: how fencing is laser-focused, her entire world narrowing to the tip of her sword. How unforgiving it is, one half-second slip in focus and you’re down a point.
“It’s beautiful to me,” Heedo says. “Fencing. Well—maybe because of you.”
Yoorim looks at her. That lazy smile, that light air about her again. How can it be this simple to her? Beautiful?
“You’ve beaten me,” Yoorim tells her.
Heedo blinks. “I have, yes.”
“No.” Yoorim laughs and shakes her head. “Na Heedo, a prodigy,” she imitates, the constant whisper from then. “You’ve beaten me.”
The realisation is slow, but the shock spreads across Heedo’s face, the slackening of her jaw and the raise of her eyebrows.
Yoorim turns away. “You don’t even remember.”
“I barely remember anything from then.”
“You destroyed me.”
Yoorim looks back at her. Heedo looks even more shocked.
A burning heat wells in Yoorim’s eyes. “You don’t remember, but I do. You destroyed me, Na Heedo. Tore me to pieces. I had to build myself back up and make myself who I am now. The greatest in Korea. You destroyed me.”
Heedo’s breaths are visible. The rise-fall of her chest. But her face changes from shock to determination, that same red fire that Yoorim sees just before her eyes get hidden behind her mask.
“I’ll do it a second time,” Heedo says, voice steely.
Yoorim laughs. “What?”
“If that’s what it takes for you to build yourself again, Go Yoorim, I’ll do it again. For you to be the greatest not just in the country but in the world, I’ll do it again.”
Heedo comes closer and fits Yoorim’s wrist into her palm. Stares right into her, piercing harder than any of her thrusts have. “Just you wait, Go Yoorim. I’ll destroy you a second time.”
Heedo lets go and walks away. Yoorim looks at her wrist and can’t help but think, you already have.
“Here,” Heedo says.
It’s lunch. Yoorim usually takes hers with Yeji and Hansol, but they skipped today. She’d been eating alone on the grass until Heedo had appeared, holding out a box of banana milk.
Yoorim frowns. “How did you know I like these?”
Heedo grins and shrugs, before plopping down beside her. “I know a lot of things about you, Yoorim-ah.”
Yoorim takes it from her and punches the straw in. Heedo is leaning on her elbows beside her.
Everything is so easy to her. Yoorim thinks of that afternoon in the locker room, confessions spilling out of her mouth, handing her heart over to Yoorim barely a day after they’d met. Yoorim had been nothing but unkind to her since, but here she sits comfortably. She walks Yoorim home. She knows Yoorim’s favourite drink. She knows Yoorim’s footwork patterns, her favourite parry techniques.
Yoorim doesn’t miss the familiarity Heedo takes and assumes. Yoorim-ah, she’d said earlier, so smoothly, so confidently, unafraid to let Yoorim know that this is how she wants to call her. This is how she thinks of her, now: someone close to her heart. Someone she can let in.
“Is it easy?” Yoorim asks. “Liking me?”
Heedo doesn’t even look when she answers, and barely takes a second before she does. “The easiest thing I’ve ever done.”
Heedo’s weapon isn’t her sword.
It’s her effortlessness.
Yoorim tries to dig and finds nothing. No facades, no secrets—Heedo’s heart is on her frayed sleeve. Even while fencing it is—Heedo has a tendency to give her next move away, but can pull it off anyway because she fences like it was sewn into her muscle. What had taken Yoorim years to perfect takes Heedo a few repetitions. She fences like her body was made for it, like the air around her moves in line with it.
Heedo smiles at Yoorim like it’s second nature. Greets her, is kind to her without hesitance. Even now, when they’re locked in a bout, Yoorim feels it, the careful consideration. How does she do it without reservation? How, when Yoorim had to get here by building walls and only knowing herself?
It ends close, 13-15 in Yoorim’s favour.
“Am I good enough now?” Heedo asks, that grin across her face again once she removes her mask.
“For what?”
Heedo places her mask in between her hip and her arm, and places her free hand on her other hip. Her grin goes wider, eyes forming crescents. “To be your rival, of course.”
Yoorim snorts. “Why?”
“It’s what I’ve always wanted to be,” Heedo admits, “your rival.”
ere again, a confession that slips too easily from her mouth. Yoorim shakes her head, taking off her gloves. “I don’t think we can be rivals.”
“What can we be, then?”
Yoorim stills. She turns to Heedo.
What can they be? Yoorim knows what Heedo wants. But what does Yoorim want from her? The muscle memory, her affinity for the sword? The strength in her legs? Her height?
Maybe her ever-forwardness, the ground she covers in a lunge, the way she storms full-speed. Unbearable, unavoidable, an unstoppable force.
That sweet earnestness, that easy trusting, how her heart opens without much thought, how she offers it with her bare hands. Would Yoorim be better off living like that?
The sun that slants in through the windows is inescapable. Yoorim can see it all from here. The freckles that dust her face, the sweat on her forehead, the curl of her dark hair.
What does Yoorim want from Heedo? Maybe nothing at all. Maybe everything.
“Why don’t you stay with me,” Yoorim says, “and find out?”