Submerged

There’s light spilling out from underneath Jihyo’s bedroom door and so Jeongyeon knocks once and then enters the room.

Jihyo’s in bed, reading an old book by candlelight, and she gestures emptily when Jeongyeon closes the door behind her and moves to sit at the foot of her mattress.

“You just walk in?” she says, smirking.

Jeongyeon shrugs.

“I figure if you were doing anything dirty, you would have locked the door.” She reaches to pinch the top of Jihyo’s book and guide the cover into the light. “You read romance novels now?” Jeongyeon snorts. “Maybe you should have locked the door. I’m so sorry to have interrupted.”

Laughing, Jihyo shoves her.

“It was a gift from Ryujin,” say says and Jeongyeon rolls her eyes.

Grinning, she says, “Of course it was.”

“She says the South Pole gets boring,” Jihyo explains, her fingers tracing the book’s spine. “She says there isn’t anything to do like there is here and so she gave me an entire box of books.”

Jeongyeon’s brow furrows. “Ryujin has been to the South Pole?” But Jihyo only shrugs.

“Apparently,” she says. “Who knew?”

Shaking her head in amused disbelief, Jeongyeon climbs up to the top of the bed and joins Jihyo under the covers. They’re not sisters but Jihyo thinks they should be, thinks it would have been nice if the universe had let their bond be based in blood. (She told Jeongyeon this once, way back when they were still sharing a room in boarding school. But Jeongyeon had just shook her head and said, “It’s better this way. It means more that we chose each other.” And that was the last they ever spoke of it.)   

“What time do we leave tomorrow?” Jeongyeon asks. She’s staring at the candle, her eyes fixed fiercely on the flame. It’s one of the very first exercises you learn as a young firebenders, the bending equivalent of basic scales on piano – breathe in and the flame gets bigger, breathe out and the flame gets smaller.

“Sunrise,” Jihyo says. She closes her book, not bothering to mark the page she was on, and puts it on the nightstand. “We should have been sleeping three hours ago.”

Jeongyeon shrugs.

“We can sleep on the boat,” she says.

“Not likely. You know Minseok’s going to make us do drills on the bow.”

Jeongyeon rolls her eyes, groans, throws herself dramatically across the bed, across Jihyo’s legs.

“I hate him,” she says, her words muffled by the comforter.

Jihyo smiles and says, “No, you don’t.”

Minseok has been their trainer since they were eleven, something Jihyo always found impressive since he was only fifteen at the time. He’s her father’s most trusted advisor, a position that no one in the entire Fire Nation takes lightly, and Jihyo thinks Minseok is a good guy. Cute, too. He just also happens to be a bastard in the training room.

“No,” Jeongyeon sighs. “I don’t.” She flips over onto her back and stares up at the ceiling. “He’s not, like, staying once we get there, right?”

Jihyo’s laugh rumbles in her chest like thunder and she says, “No, don’t worry. He’s dropping us off.”

Jeongyeon’s sigh is one of relief. “Thank fuck.”

They lay in silence for a while. It’s not common for them but it’s not uncomfortable, either. They’re tired, anxious, eager. Most of all, they’re restless. They’ve had this date marked on their calendars for months and months and they’ve spent the last several days packing, saying their goodbyes, tying up loose ends.

Tomorrow, they begin the second phase of the training, the second phase of their lives. Tomorrow, they leave the Fire Nation for the South Pole.

“You know Momo’s already there?” Jeongyeon interjects suddenly, cutting through the silence.

Jihyo smirks.

“How do you know?”

Jeongyeon scoffs and looks up at her. “How do you think? She wrote me as soon as she got there, probably before she even unpacked. She needed me to know ASAP that she got there first.”

Jihyo can’t help the way she laughs. Jeongyeon’s bitter rivalry with Momo is better than any romance novel Ryujin could have given her. If it wouldn’t earn her a swift kick in the face, Jihyo would playfully suggest that the two should just kiss and get it over with already.

“I can’t believe she’s going, too.”

“I can’t believe you can’t believe it,” Jeongyeon says bitterly. “Everything I do, Momo does.”

“And everything Momo does,” Jihyo says, “you do.”

Jeongyeon glares at her and Jihyo thinks there’s still time for that kick.

“I don’t mind that she’s there,” Jeongyeon says, ignoring her. “We get along fine if we’re not training, sparring or competing.”

Jihyo laughs loudly.

“Right,” she says, “because I’m sure there won’t be any training, sparring or competing at the largest and most competitive bending university in the Southern Hemisphere!”

But Jeongyeon shrugs.

“I’m just saying. Outside the training room, outside of competitions, outside of the ring, we get along fine. There’s gotta be downtime. We can’t just train 24/7.” She pauses, then looks to Jihyo with wide eyes. “There is downtime, right? We aren’t actually training every second we’re awake, are we?”

Jihyo chuckles softly and moves her hands so that she can play with Jeongyeon’s hair.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “There’s more to Guanjun University than just bending. We signed up for all those classes, remember? History, language, science. We’ll be studying as much as we’re training.”

Jeongyeon continues to stare up at the ceiling as though she can see through it, as though she can see all of the stars in the clear sky above the Parks’ palace.  

“Guanjun University,” she repeats. She likes how it sounds, likes how the words feel leaving her lips.

If she’s honest, she still can’t believe it. She still can’t wrap her head around her new reality. She is attending Guanjun University. Jeongyeon Yoo, the daughter of a farmer, the girl with absolutely nothing to her name. She’ll be the first Yoo to ever step foot inside a university and it happens to be one of the three most prestigious academies in the entire world.

Jeongyeon will tell you that it couldn’t have happened without Jihyo, without the Parks, but Jihyo will always vehemently disagree. She’ll cite Jeongyeon’s skill, her wit, her work ethic. Yeah, Jihyo is the prodigy. She is the one from a noble family, the one born with a silver spoon, the one, perhaps, with more raw, natural, inborn talent. But Jeongyeon? Jeongyeon has worked for everything she’s ever gotten. She’s struggled and fought and persevered in ways that Jihyo barely understands.

And that is precisely what Jihyo’s father respects and admires so much about Jeongyeon. That drive, that perseverance, that competitive spirit – he saw it in her from a young age. And that is why he approached Jeongyeon’s father almost a decade ago. He explained that Jeongyeon had promise, that she had talent, that she was a good influence on Jihyo and he offered to take her in, to move her into the palace, to pay for her training, to send her to boarding school with Jihyo.

The rest was history. (Or at least Jihyo liked to think so.) From then on, they weren’t just best friends. They were teammates, training buddies, partners-in-crime. Eventually, they became like sisters. Jihyo’s father wasn’t a particularly warm man, wasn’t someone who prided himself on his nurturing nature, on his parenting abilities, but he did right by Jihyo. And, more importantly, he did right by Jeongyeon.

Jihyo always suspected that her dad thought of himself and Jeongyeon as kindred spirits. She loved her dad more than anything but she was objective enough to see that the only thing they had in common was their bending. Otherwise, they were night and day. But it was clear to Jihyo that he saw something in Jeongyeon that he saw in himself and that made him uniquely motivated to help her reach her full potential.

More than that, he understood Mr. Yoo. He, too, was a single dad who was doing his very best to carve out a life for his only daughter. (And growing up without a mom is just one more thing that bonded Jeongyeon and Jihyo like glue. It was a pain their peers just didn’t understand but something that they could always talk about and know the other truly and deeply understood.)

“Do you think we’ll miss it here?” Jeongyeon asks. She’s sleepier now, her eyes heavy, her question punctuated with a yawn.

Jihyo bites the inside of her cheek, thoughtful.

She figures they’ll miss the warm weather, the good food, their friends, their pets, the comforts of home but if she’s being honest with herself, she’s been ready to leave for a good, long while. The older she gets, the harder it is for her not to leave the nest. She’s stayed this long for her father, for her little brother but now that she has an excuse, a real reason to leave home, she’s not about to look back.

“I think we’ll be okay,” she says. “We’re ready.”

“You really think so?” Jeongyeon asks. She’s drowsy so she moves to lay next to Jihyo, to rest her head on Jihyo’s pillow and Jihyo’s shoulder.

“I do. You gotta figure a lot of our friends left home three or four years ago. Krystal and Taemin were fourteen when they left the Fire Nation to study. We’re twenty. We’re more than ready.”

“But they didn’t go all the way to the South Pole,” Jeongyeon rasps. Her eyes are shut and she’s halfway to dreaming but she still needs a little push and so Jihyo kisses the top of her head.

“Even in the South Pole,” she begins, “we’re only a day’s journey from home. And that’s just by boat! It’s even quicker if we take a bison or a dragon. If we get homesick, we can visit.”

“Dragons are expensive,” Jeongyeon yawns, “and endangered. Where are we going to get a dragon?”

“Baby, I’m rich,” Jihyo laughs. “If we want a dragon, I’ll find us a dragon.”

“In the South Pole? That’d be impressive. It’d be easier to take a polar bear dog.”

“Fine, okay. We’ll take a polar bear dog. My point is we can come back whenever we want to. We can visit your dad or have our friends come out to see us. Whatever you want. This isn’t a one-way trip.”

“Yeah,” Jeongyeon sighs. “You’re probably right.”

Jihyo settles into bed, uses a swift flick of her index and middle finger to extinguish the candle on her nightstand and says, “Don’t worry too much, okay? Change is scary but we’re ready for this. You and I have faced a whole lot worse than going to a cushy university in the South Pole. The worst that can happen is we get frostbite and do you know how hard it is for firebenders to get frostbite?” She waits for Jeongyeon to laugh at her joke, then peers down at her friend when no laugh comes. She hears the shift in Jeongyeon’s breathing, realizes she’s asleep and smiles to herself. “Me and you are going to do just fine,” she whispers, pulling the blankets up to cover them both. “Just you wait and see.”