Nobody Like You

[RYUJIN'S POV]

Hit you like the mafia.

The track ended and the MAMA penthouse vanished. The gold light and the champagne taste evaporated, leaving Ryujin with the cold terrace rail against her forearms and Jeju's suddenly freezing summer air on her skin.

(I actually decided to write this scene around 'That's a No-No' before it went viral. I discovered it by Googling "ITZY angry songs" and deciding this was the one. Funny how the universe works... huh.)

The shuffle rolled over. "That's a No No" kicked in with all its brass and percussion and chants, the Moombahton beat landing heavy through her AirPods, and she let it fill the empty space.

She'd been out here too long. Her jaw ached from clenching through the fight and clenching through the replay on top of it. The chill had crept past her elbows, and her fingernails had carved defensive half-moons into the pad of her thumb.

She'd been twenty in that penthouse and she was twenty-three on this terrace, supposedly the exact same girl. The MAMA memory tasted warm and certain, unlike the wreckage of the last two hours.

Fuck Yeji and her quiet little "evolution". Fuck her sudden allergy to fun and her bullshit about needing to change, as if changing meant looking at Ryujin like she was a phase Yeji had outgrown. They built something together, the two of them, bunks to stages to every room they'd ever walked into as a unit, and Yeji was out here acting like she couldn't wait to go solo.

The kick drum agreed with her, her poor AirPods rattling their tiny guts out trying to slam a bass line built for stadium subwoofers directly into her skull. She dug the crescent deeper into her finger and stared at the dark.

The pool light was on, casting a teal glow upward through the surface that made the deck look exactly like the opening shot of the high-budget poolside porn Ryujin usually searched for on her phone at one in the morning. She looked back and suddenly Yeji was at the pool's edge, ruining the aesthetic. She had both arms wrapped around Minho from behind, her face buried so hard between his shoulder blades it looked like she was trying to hide inside him. Her fists were bunched tight in his shirt. Minho just stood there, making it easy, taking her weight with his broad back while his hands locked over her forearms. Ryujin couldn't hear the words over the distance, but she saw the tension, the ragged hitch of Yeji's shoulders as she spilled her guts directly into his spine.

Ryujin's chest went tight and hot and she pushed off the railing and went down the terrace steps before the rest of her caught up to what her legs already knew, which was that she couldn't stand there and watch that bullshit for one more second.

Move up faster faster, gettin' louder louder.

The bass dropped and her feet found the beat and before she knew it she was marching furiously down the path to her own voice.

She and Chaeryeong had recorded the brass and percussion three times because the first two weren't loud enough, and the final version turned her spine into a middle finger every time it came on. The gravel crunched under her slides in time with the kick drum and everything behind her got a little smaller with every step.

The resort path cut between stone walls and hedges that swallowed the villa lights within twenty steps. She wanted the dark and the salt air and her own group in her ears telling her she was right. Can't let you kill my vibe, that's a no no. The pre-chorus landed like a fist bump from a version of herself who still had her shit together and she took it gratefully and kept walking.

Her legs burned from the pace as her hands kept curling into fists, just to keep the option available. The air smelled like volcanic rock and sweet citrus, but she was moving too fast for the smells to stick.

Yeji's face in the living room wouldn't stop replaying. The hurt underneath was what kept catching. She could handle Yeji angry - she'd been handling Yeji angry since trainee evaluations when Yeji used to go dead-eyed and terrifyingly calm right before she snapped. She kept seeing that flash of real, unguarded pain from the moment when Ryujin said you've changed and meant it as a weapon, watching Yeji catch it as one because they both knew exactly what it was and Ryujin couldn't even pretend she'd meant something else.

She kicked a stone off the path and it cracked into the hedge.

Fuck Yeji for being hurt by something true, and fuck her for acting like growing up required a standing ovation. They'd been the same person for six years, matching each other's appetite and chaos. Ryujin remembered exactly what that appetite looked like: the two of them rotating on a cameraman in a hotel bed after Inkigayo, synchronized, high-fiving over his chest while publicly grading his thrusts. Ryujin had called them Ddaeng Ddong, a dumb duo name she'd forced on Yeji years earlier, repurposed as a mocking victory banner while Yeji rode a guy breathless. They used to devour people together.

Until some guy with nice hands and a nice dick showed up, and suddenly Yeji was wrapping herself around his back like he'd invented breathing.

And they were on the same pool deck where Ryujin had ridden Minho yesterday, demanding he eat her out with the same aggressive conquest energy she used on everyone else. But down there right now, Yeji was pressing her forehead into his spine, eyes closed, surrendering her weight.

The tenderness was going to make her throw up. This was Hwang Yeji. The same girl who once bent a guy's dick backward until he cried because he grabbed her hair and she hadn't said he could. Now that same girl was trading in the bunks and the breathless hotel rooms and every space they'd ever owned together for a man who probably folded his socks, and currently had his hands folded protectively around Yeji's own.

What the fuck was Ryujin supposed to do with that? Clap?

Do what I want, say what I wanna.

The lyric landed and her jaw unclenched for the first time since the living room. Yeah. That was the whole point, wasn't it? She'd said what she wanted to say and she'd do it again.

You think that you know me?

She heard her own voice in her ears delivering the rap she'd laid down in a booth at JYP on a Tuesday five years ago, standing with her headphones half-off because one ear always needed to hear herself raw. She'd written the line about netizens, about comment-section psychologists who thought they knew her from a fancam. You can think what you want. I respect you, but hey you, don't ever cross that line.

She was the one who'd crossed the line tonight.

She'd stood in that living room and aimed for the thinnest crack in Yeji's concept because she'd helped build it. Six years meant she knew exactly which words would make Yeji's eyes go wet and her body brace against crying. Ryujin had deployed them on purpose, swinging with the ruthless efficiency she used in a dance break.

What kind of asshole does that to her best friend?

The synth bass was still grinding underneath the percussion but something had shifted. The beat that had been holding her upright all walk sounded off, like a speaker that got wet and was playing the right rhythm at slightly the wrong speed.

If you ever wanted me to fall, it's a pity but that's no, I'm sorry.

Lia's voice came in on the bridge, loud and clear and so sure of itself. I'm gonna keep singing, I'm gonna keep dancing, there's nothing to be scared of for me.

Ryujin almost laughed as she pushed past the last of the stone walls along the path. She was terrified. Of Yeji's quiet certainty in the living room, and of this widening space between them, as if getting louder could somehow mask the fact that her best friend was no longer standing next to her.

The brass and the drums played out together and Lia's voice faded.

The ocean rushed in to fill the quiet. The heavy thing in her chest surged up into the empty space where the beat used to be. She dug her phone from her pocket, jamming her thumb at the screen and walking too fast, trying to force the song back to the start so the quiet had nowhere to land. She needed noise.

The sudden flare of the lock screen washed out her night vision, leaving everything outside the glass pitch black. She dropped her chin, furiously swiping at the stubborn playback widget while her feet carried her blindly forward.

She clipped her shoulder hard against a low-hanging branch.

The canopy shuddered and a heavy tangerine dropped straight down, cracking against her knuckles and shocking her grip open. Her phone clattered onto the gravel, illuminating a patch of crushed shell. The tangerine rolled to a stop beside it, the rind splitting on impact and sending a sharp, acidic burst of citrus into the cold air.

"OW - FUCK."

She dropped to a crouch, shaking her hand out with a wince. Her knuckles stung and the branch was still swaying overhead like it was proud of itself.

She grabbed the tangerine first, arm pulling back on instinct to launch the fucking thing into the dark and watch something else break tonight. Her shoulder rotated into the throw before her nails broke the rind and the scent hit her full in the face, sharp and sweet and so unmistakably Jeju that her throat closed.

She knew this smell.

She knew this smell from the inside out. It was a tangerine grove two Novembers ago, juice running down her wrists and the sun on her neck while she grinned at a camera, deciding this island was her favorite place on earth. It was the passenger seat of a rental car with the Jeju mountains sliding past in the mist, and Yeji's voice asking something casual about building a house here someday.

Her arm came down.

She stayed in the gravel crouch, the tangerine bleeding orange oil into her palm. The smell filled her head with a version of herself she'd spent two years pretending she'd outgrown. Beside her, the phone screen buffered. She'd kept it on loop the whole walk down, thumb catching replay before the last brass note faded, but the tangerine had slowed her by ten seconds and shuffle slipped through the gap.

The shuffle spun the barrel again.

"Nobody Like You" kicked through her headphones in a bright, aggressively upbeat pop-rock rush. Her own voice opened the track, the three-years-ago recording of her saying yeah, uh, what? What? wielding pure brat attitude like it was an actual personality. Present-day Ryujin crouched in the dark, feeling the distance between that girl and this one.

She stood up slowly, shoving her phone in her pocket. She kept walking because the alternative was crouching in the gravel having a spiritual crisis over a piece of fruit, and she still had enough pride left to find that mortifying.