[Summer; Show Jumping] Fervent Stone
Title: fervent stone
Author: hockeffusions
Rating: PG
Fandom: Red Velvet
Pairing(s)/Focus: Seulgi/Wendy
Length: 2,531
Summary: Living without fire is not an option for the two girls hunched over their books in the sixth form library.
Notes: Thanks so much to the mods for running this event! I have really enjoyed writing this story (even though it was massively different from what I set out to write), so thank you for making this possible.
There's fire and brimstone inside those two girls, Seulgi Kang and Wendy Son. They're the two over there in the sixth form library, bent over their books with dark hair pooling in the hollows between their shoulder blades. They don't look extraordinary. You couldn't tell that their hearts are asleep between the hours of nine and four, when they sit in classrooms and note down how to pass their summer exams. You wouldn't know that they don't breathe during these hours, that they don't care. There are sparks in their eyes, yes, but they're the glowing ember type, the ones that linger hours after the fire. Caged in by academia, they slumber, coaxed to brief life if someone asks about their horses - Seulgi's eyes flare at the thought of her bay gelding, and thoughts of Wendy's mare make her lips turn up in a smile - but they are soon dulled by monthly chemistry exams, fortnightly English essays. These two, they sleepwalk through sixth form and live each day for the tolling of the bell and the crowded sweatiness of the school bus, because at four pm the bus drops them off at the stables.
Air shudders into their lungs, and the sparks burst into flame.
They bundle their school clothes into their bags and don dark jodhpurs and riding boots that hug their ankles, fingertips humming with life as they collect body brushes and saddles and head collars from the tack room. They slide the bolts back on their horses' doors and they find that suddenly, after the effort of the school day, paper-choked and coffee-stained, breathing is easy. It feels natural to inhale now, the mixture of hay and dust and horse, and exhaling is a child's play.
Seulgi's gelding is always sharp in the afternoon. He has a habit of fidgeting as she slides his saddle into position, and has stepped on her more than once in his impatience. She's careful to keep her feet out of the way - a break in the skin and the fire could leak out, singe her boots. By comparison, Wendy's mare is docile in her stable, eyelids drooping and ears flopping to either side as Wendy slips the bit between her lips and teeth. But once she's in an arena, she's a firebrand, head tossed high and eyes rolled to white as she flies the fences.
Today is no different from normal. The two girls school their horses over one-metre fences, their flames at half-mast, burning hot and bright and fierce compared to their school-time sparks but nothing next to their conflagration on show days. It makes their after-school fire look like a sparkler clutched in the fist of a toddler watching their house burn to the ground.
Seulgi's gelding is habitually stiff when she circles him to the left, easing his muscles out of their stable-bound inactivity. He tries to push his weight out onto his right shoulder, leans on her right rein. But here - here are the flames, pushing him up to the reins with her legs, asking for more energy with a squeeze of her calves, her hot calves. He edges into working properly as they circle on, left then right, twenty metres diameter then ten and then five, serpentines, until his weight is distributed evenly over both shoulders and the reins are soft and light in her hands.
Wendy's mare has had the bit between her teeth - quite literally, despite her flash noseband trying to prevent her from doing this - since she felt the sand beneath her hooves and it's all Wendy can do to keep her from charging at the jumps with her head horizontal, unable to see where she's going but pulled to the fences by blind fervour. There are countless transitions, walk to trot, trot to canter, canter to walk and back again, every combination of gait and direction until she finally, finally relaxes a little and Wendy can push her into an outline, into working from her hind legs through to her hand.
But even so, this is the start of a session and it is messy. It often is. Seulgi's gelding crashes through the top part of an oxer, sending the poles flying across the sand with a thump and Seulgi's breath catches. It often does. Her eyes shutter for a second. But the fire is there, always there, pushing at the cracks in the shutters, burning tongues kissing the bottoms of her lungs in their desperation for air and she's forced to breathe again, to try again. She resets the fence, the parallel bars a metre high and eighty centimetres apart, and the two come in again. His hooves thump against the sand. Her legs are tight around him, burning him through her leather half-chaps and ankle boots. Her hands say up, come on up, you can only go up - and he lifts up with his front legs as well as his hinds this time to leave it standing.
Seulgi grins at Wendy.
This is another kind of fire entirely. This is the kind that slumbers in Wendy's gut, some kind deeper than the bonfires in her blood, some kind hotter, and Seulgi's smiles do nothing but fuel it. They aggravate Wendy's viscera and turn her stomach to knots, to firelighters that catch at the slightest provocation, the smallest change in Seulgi's tone or the quickest flash of a stomach as she stretches her arms over her head and pops out the joints in her lower back.
But that kind of fire isn't why they're here, horses thundering beneath them on the sand. Long lines of snorting warmblood are why they're here, sinuous curves of horse-over-fence, the tight corners between fences six-a and six-b, the breathless adrenaline of leaving each and every fence standing. The international circuits with their spotlights and their Longines rankings and their gorgeous, gorgeous horses are why Seulgi Kang and Wendy Son are here, huffing their hearts out as they school their horses over one-metre fences.
The kissing in the tack room is just a bonus. The tightness of Seulgi's legs around Wendy's waist is a bonus, only a bonus. It keeps Wendy awake at night, yes, but no more than the thrill of showjumping does, the electric song on the back of her tongue that sustains her through chemistry tests and English essays.
Hoofbeats on sand.
Perfect one-two-three canter strides. Perfect one-two-three take-offs.
The weight in the reins when a horse works well, energy flowing from the hind legs through the back and the shoulders and into the reins, soft and light.
These are the whispers at four am when Seulgi's texts have stopped lighting up her phone screen because Seulgi has fallen asleep. She'll be curled up in the smallest ball possible under her duvet, Wendy knows, from countless competitions spent together in the Sons' horsebox. The first time, they'd been casual acquaintances from the same yard, both competing at a two-day show and both forced to share the cramped horsebox living compartment by the fact that Seulgi's tent was leaking. Now when they share a horsebox, they share a duvet too. They lie in the luton above the horsebox's cab and sleep, heavy breaths and tangled legs, and they dream of the same thing. Of making it big, of jumping five-star tracks. Of perfecting everything they struggle with today - Seulgi's weak right leg, the way that Wendy crumples a little too much onto her mare's neck when landing after larger fences.
They share breaths and dreams, duvets and yard brushes, years and years of hopes and fears. There is too much history between them to back out now, to refuse the insistent push of Wendy's hand into Seulgi's when they're waiting between classes at competitions, mouths greasy from bacon butties and legs aching too much for riders who have another two classes to jump yet. Seulgi cannot resist the curl of Wendy's hair against her bare shoulder in chemistry class and Wendy cannot resist the dip of Seulgi's lower back in the canteen queue, pressing her fingers into it and feeling the fire in the vertebrae.
But even as the burn of their mouths on one another is addictive, the glory of a red rosette and a clear jump-off is even more so, heroin to the tobacco aftertaste of the backs of each other's teeth.
And today, today is competition day. Today is a one-metre-ten class. Today is make-or-break time, the qualifiers for the Pony Club Championships. Today is why they burn and today is where they burn the brightest.
Seulgi tacks up with the rest of the showjumping team from her Pony Club, their horseboxes gathered like a cluster of geese as mothers flap around them - Beatrice, your girth! Molly, have you got your gloves? Isobel, where did you put your competitor number, you're going to need it when you get on. Seulgi tightens her girth and pats her gelding on the shoulder with gloved fingers.
He feels it too - the bonfire of her bones.
"We can do this," she whispers. "We can do this."
He snorts and fidgets with his head as she fastens his noseband.
They find Wendy and her mare on the horsewalk down to the warm-up arena and the two ride abreast, reins loose and horses wide-eyed. They're a sight to behold, these two, the long, clean lines of their horses interrupted by martingales and boots, as few as possible. Wendy's mare has a running martingale only to stop her from throwing her head up so high that she smacks Wendy in the face, and Seulgi's gelding sports black brushing boots, blending into the darkness of his lower limbs and protecting him from knocking into himself in his keenness. He already has fetlock effusions, excess fluid in the joints between his cannon bones and his pastern, and whilst they don't bother him, Seulgi worries for him when she asks him to soar the big parallels. So she wraps him up, protects him from the worst of the knocks, and hops on, hip joints loose with adrenaline. Their horses are both plaited up neatly, balls of painstakingly braided hair rolled up along the crests of their necks, black on Seulgi's gelding and chestnut on Wendy's mare. Each step towards the warm-up arena and the two riders are blinding now, their bones glowing white-hot through their clothing.
This is their element.
This is their fire.
This is where they belong, bonfires for stomachs and white-hot bones sheathed in lean muscle. Seulgi's breath comes in fits and starts when they reach the warm-up arena and Wendy has to lean over, touch her burning palm to the back of Seulgi's burning hand.
"You can do this," Wendy says. "You can do this."
And then Wendy is off, tapping her mare into a trot with fire in her eyes and leaving Seulgi at the entrance to the warm-up. The steward trying desperately to make eye contact with her but she's not looking. She's not looking at anything but the fences in the competition arena - the big blue oxer at two, the tricky double of green verticals at four, the related distance of five and six on a dog's leg turn.
"Excuse me? Are you number six-four-three, Miss Kang?"
Seulgi nods. Her mouth is full of ash from lungs set aflame and her brimstone ankles sink into the stirrups, threatening to melt them against her gelding's sides. Her hands shake with heat haze. "That's me."
"Well, you've got twenty-five minutes until your time," the steward says. "Good luck." He must see the smoke curling from the corners of Seulgi's mouth, because then he adds, "You can do this."
Seulgi manages a smile and the smoke blinds her for a moment.
Her gelding is stiff to the left as she warms up but now there is combustion in her legs, in the soft drop of her ankles under her own weight and the tap-tap-go of her heels, nudging her gelding up into carrying himself properly, nudging him up into the contact so that his neck curves and he is free over his back, spine swinging with the movement and hooves thump-thumping onto the sand in a short canter. Each stride breathes more life into the fire in Seulgi's chest; each cleared practice fence cleans the smoke from her tongue until she is white-hot, radiant, perfect and unbeatable in her union with her horse, the lean beast underneath her, five hundred kilograms of snorting showjumper.
"Number six-four-three, you're in next."
She takes a deep breath. Wendy grins at her from across the warm-up arena, flashes her a thumbs up and mouths good luck, but it lights no fires in Seulgi Kang now. There is no room for anything except the course in front of her.
She gathers up her reins and puts her gelding into a trot. Her fire is quiet now that they're in the ring, white-hot but without the popping of sparks in her joints or the snapping of her sinews in the heat, and she uses it. Her gelding senses it too - he listens to the smallest touch of her leg as she nudges him into canter, hindquarters bunching with each stride to flood her reins with energy.
"Next in the arena we have number six-four-three, Seulgi Kang riding Last Waltz."
The buzzer sounds and she circles once.
Hoofbeats on sand.
Perfect one-two-three canter strides.
The weight in her reins as her gelding sees the fence, locks on and prepares himself for the ascent.
A perfect one-two-three take-off and Seulgi breathes on the descent.
They fly the oxer at number two, turning tight to number three, her gelding's hooves digging deep into the sand as he flies the fence. Number four, the pair of green verticals - she exhales and then they are jumping, the exhilaration of synchrony, of flight borne of sweat and heavy reins and muscle. Down, they're on the ground for the two strides between parts a and b and now up again, the soft malleability of fervent stone, the flex of Seulgi's sulphuric joints as she pushes the reins forwards to let him stretch over the fence, weight perfectly balanced over her ankles as he up-downs the vertical.
They leave it standing.
Next is the pink ascending oxer at five, the bars sloping away from them in a mirror image of her gelding's jump. His front legs hit the ground in left-lead canter and it's one, two before they turn, three, four, five and up, over the black-and-white vertical at six. Seven is easy, an spread and then a vertical, and she collects him effortlessly in the one stride between so that he picks his feet up, leaves it standing. Eight and nine, the parallels on the turn - he stretches himself over eight, taken at a harsh angle to keep up with the required time, and chips in a short stride before nine, catching her a little unawares but she is fire, she is brimstone and she will not be extinguished by a bad stride.
They clear nine, ten and eleven, and the final vertical at twelve is the last fence.
She breathes and he jumps. The whole course is untouched.
Author: hockeffusions
Rating: PG
Fandom: Red Velvet
Pairing(s)/Focus: Seulgi/Wendy
Length: 2,531
Summary: Living without fire is not an option for the two girls hunched over their books in the sixth form library.
Notes: Thanks so much to the mods for running this event! I have really enjoyed writing this story (even though it was massively different from what I set out to write), so thank you for making this possible.
There's fire and brimstone inside those two girls, Seulgi Kang and Wendy Son. They're the two over there in the sixth form library, bent over their books with dark hair pooling in the hollows between their shoulder blades. They don't look extraordinary. You couldn't tell that their hearts are asleep between the hours of nine and four, when they sit in classrooms and note down how to pass their summer exams. You wouldn't know that they don't breathe during these hours, that they don't care. There are sparks in their eyes, yes, but they're the glowing ember type, the ones that linger hours after the fire. Caged in by academia, they slumber, coaxed to brief life if someone asks about their horses - Seulgi's eyes flare at the thought of her bay gelding, and thoughts of Wendy's mare make her lips turn up in a smile - but they are soon dulled by monthly chemistry exams, fortnightly English essays. These two, they sleepwalk through sixth form and live each day for the tolling of the bell and the crowded sweatiness of the school bus, because at four pm the bus drops them off at the stables.
Air shudders into their lungs, and the sparks burst into flame.
They bundle their school clothes into their bags and don dark jodhpurs and riding boots that hug their ankles, fingertips humming with life as they collect body brushes and saddles and head collars from the tack room. They slide the bolts back on their horses' doors and they find that suddenly, after the effort of the school day, paper-choked and coffee-stained, breathing is easy. It feels natural to inhale now, the mixture of hay and dust and horse, and exhaling is a child's play.
Seulgi's gelding is always sharp in the afternoon. He has a habit of fidgeting as she slides his saddle into position, and has stepped on her more than once in his impatience. She's careful to keep her feet out of the way - a break in the skin and the fire could leak out, singe her boots. By comparison, Wendy's mare is docile in her stable, eyelids drooping and ears flopping to either side as Wendy slips the bit between her lips and teeth. But once she's in an arena, she's a firebrand, head tossed high and eyes rolled to white as she flies the fences.
Today is no different from normal. The two girls school their horses over one-metre fences, their flames at half-mast, burning hot and bright and fierce compared to their school-time sparks but nothing next to their conflagration on show days. It makes their after-school fire look like a sparkler clutched in the fist of a toddler watching their house burn to the ground.
Seulgi's gelding is habitually stiff when she circles him to the left, easing his muscles out of their stable-bound inactivity. He tries to push his weight out onto his right shoulder, leans on her right rein. But here - here are the flames, pushing him up to the reins with her legs, asking for more energy with a squeeze of her calves, her hot calves. He edges into working properly as they circle on, left then right, twenty metres diameter then ten and then five, serpentines, until his weight is distributed evenly over both shoulders and the reins are soft and light in her hands.
Wendy's mare has had the bit between her teeth - quite literally, despite her flash noseband trying to prevent her from doing this - since she felt the sand beneath her hooves and it's all Wendy can do to keep her from charging at the jumps with her head horizontal, unable to see where she's going but pulled to the fences by blind fervour. There are countless transitions, walk to trot, trot to canter, canter to walk and back again, every combination of gait and direction until she finally, finally relaxes a little and Wendy can push her into an outline, into working from her hind legs through to her hand.
But even so, this is the start of a session and it is messy. It often is. Seulgi's gelding crashes through the top part of an oxer, sending the poles flying across the sand with a thump and Seulgi's breath catches. It often does. Her eyes shutter for a second. But the fire is there, always there, pushing at the cracks in the shutters, burning tongues kissing the bottoms of her lungs in their desperation for air and she's forced to breathe again, to try again. She resets the fence, the parallel bars a metre high and eighty centimetres apart, and the two come in again. His hooves thump against the sand. Her legs are tight around him, burning him through her leather half-chaps and ankle boots. Her hands say up, come on up, you can only go up - and he lifts up with his front legs as well as his hinds this time to leave it standing.
Seulgi grins at Wendy.
This is another kind of fire entirely. This is the kind that slumbers in Wendy's gut, some kind deeper than the bonfires in her blood, some kind hotter, and Seulgi's smiles do nothing but fuel it. They aggravate Wendy's viscera and turn her stomach to knots, to firelighters that catch at the slightest provocation, the smallest change in Seulgi's tone or the quickest flash of a stomach as she stretches her arms over her head and pops out the joints in her lower back.
But that kind of fire isn't why they're here, horses thundering beneath them on the sand. Long lines of snorting warmblood are why they're here, sinuous curves of horse-over-fence, the tight corners between fences six-a and six-b, the breathless adrenaline of leaving each and every fence standing. The international circuits with their spotlights and their Longines rankings and their gorgeous, gorgeous horses are why Seulgi Kang and Wendy Son are here, huffing their hearts out as they school their horses over one-metre fences.
The kissing in the tack room is just a bonus. The tightness of Seulgi's legs around Wendy's waist is a bonus, only a bonus. It keeps Wendy awake at night, yes, but no more than the thrill of showjumping does, the electric song on the back of her tongue that sustains her through chemistry tests and English essays.
Hoofbeats on sand.
Perfect one-two-three canter strides. Perfect one-two-three take-offs.
The weight in the reins when a horse works well, energy flowing from the hind legs through the back and the shoulders and into the reins, soft and light.
These are the whispers at four am when Seulgi's texts have stopped lighting up her phone screen because Seulgi has fallen asleep. She'll be curled up in the smallest ball possible under her duvet, Wendy knows, from countless competitions spent together in the Sons' horsebox. The first time, they'd been casual acquaintances from the same yard, both competing at a two-day show and both forced to share the cramped horsebox living compartment by the fact that Seulgi's tent was leaking. Now when they share a horsebox, they share a duvet too. They lie in the luton above the horsebox's cab and sleep, heavy breaths and tangled legs, and they dream of the same thing. Of making it big, of jumping five-star tracks. Of perfecting everything they struggle with today - Seulgi's weak right leg, the way that Wendy crumples a little too much onto her mare's neck when landing after larger fences.
They share breaths and dreams, duvets and yard brushes, years and years of hopes and fears. There is too much history between them to back out now, to refuse the insistent push of Wendy's hand into Seulgi's when they're waiting between classes at competitions, mouths greasy from bacon butties and legs aching too much for riders who have another two classes to jump yet. Seulgi cannot resist the curl of Wendy's hair against her bare shoulder in chemistry class and Wendy cannot resist the dip of Seulgi's lower back in the canteen queue, pressing her fingers into it and feeling the fire in the vertebrae.
But even as the burn of their mouths on one another is addictive, the glory of a red rosette and a clear jump-off is even more so, heroin to the tobacco aftertaste of the backs of each other's teeth.
And today, today is competition day. Today is a one-metre-ten class. Today is make-or-break time, the qualifiers for the Pony Club Championships. Today is why they burn and today is where they burn the brightest.
Seulgi tacks up with the rest of the showjumping team from her Pony Club, their horseboxes gathered like a cluster of geese as mothers flap around them - Beatrice, your girth! Molly, have you got your gloves? Isobel, where did you put your competitor number, you're going to need it when you get on. Seulgi tightens her girth and pats her gelding on the shoulder with gloved fingers.
He feels it too - the bonfire of her bones.
"We can do this," she whispers. "We can do this."
He snorts and fidgets with his head as she fastens his noseband.
They find Wendy and her mare on the horsewalk down to the warm-up arena and the two ride abreast, reins loose and horses wide-eyed. They're a sight to behold, these two, the long, clean lines of their horses interrupted by martingales and boots, as few as possible. Wendy's mare has a running martingale only to stop her from throwing her head up so high that she smacks Wendy in the face, and Seulgi's gelding sports black brushing boots, blending into the darkness of his lower limbs and protecting him from knocking into himself in his keenness. He already has fetlock effusions, excess fluid in the joints between his cannon bones and his pastern, and whilst they don't bother him, Seulgi worries for him when she asks him to soar the big parallels. So she wraps him up, protects him from the worst of the knocks, and hops on, hip joints loose with adrenaline. Their horses are both plaited up neatly, balls of painstakingly braided hair rolled up along the crests of their necks, black on Seulgi's gelding and chestnut on Wendy's mare. Each step towards the warm-up arena and the two riders are blinding now, their bones glowing white-hot through their clothing.
This is their element.
This is their fire.
This is where they belong, bonfires for stomachs and white-hot bones sheathed in lean muscle. Seulgi's breath comes in fits and starts when they reach the warm-up arena and Wendy has to lean over, touch her burning palm to the back of Seulgi's burning hand.
"You can do this," Wendy says. "You can do this."
And then Wendy is off, tapping her mare into a trot with fire in her eyes and leaving Seulgi at the entrance to the warm-up. The steward trying desperately to make eye contact with her but she's not looking. She's not looking at anything but the fences in the competition arena - the big blue oxer at two, the tricky double of green verticals at four, the related distance of five and six on a dog's leg turn.
"Excuse me? Are you number six-four-three, Miss Kang?"
Seulgi nods. Her mouth is full of ash from lungs set aflame and her brimstone ankles sink into the stirrups, threatening to melt them against her gelding's sides. Her hands shake with heat haze. "That's me."
"Well, you've got twenty-five minutes until your time," the steward says. "Good luck." He must see the smoke curling from the corners of Seulgi's mouth, because then he adds, "You can do this."
Seulgi manages a smile and the smoke blinds her for a moment.
Her gelding is stiff to the left as she warms up but now there is combustion in her legs, in the soft drop of her ankles under her own weight and the tap-tap-go of her heels, nudging her gelding up into carrying himself properly, nudging him up into the contact so that his neck curves and he is free over his back, spine swinging with the movement and hooves thump-thumping onto the sand in a short canter. Each stride breathes more life into the fire in Seulgi's chest; each cleared practice fence cleans the smoke from her tongue until she is white-hot, radiant, perfect and unbeatable in her union with her horse, the lean beast underneath her, five hundred kilograms of snorting showjumper.
"Number six-four-three, you're in next."
She takes a deep breath. Wendy grins at her from across the warm-up arena, flashes her a thumbs up and mouths good luck, but it lights no fires in Seulgi Kang now. There is no room for anything except the course in front of her.
She gathers up her reins and puts her gelding into a trot. Her fire is quiet now that they're in the ring, white-hot but without the popping of sparks in her joints or the snapping of her sinews in the heat, and she uses it. Her gelding senses it too - he listens to the smallest touch of her leg as she nudges him into canter, hindquarters bunching with each stride to flood her reins with energy.
"Next in the arena we have number six-four-three, Seulgi Kang riding Last Waltz."
The buzzer sounds and she circles once.
Hoofbeats on sand.
Perfect one-two-three canter strides.
The weight in her reins as her gelding sees the fence, locks on and prepares himself for the ascent.
A perfect one-two-three take-off and Seulgi breathes on the descent.
They fly the oxer at number two, turning tight to number three, her gelding's hooves digging deep into the sand as he flies the fence. Number four, the pair of green verticals - she exhales and then they are jumping, the exhilaration of synchrony, of flight borne of sweat and heavy reins and muscle. Down, they're on the ground for the two strides between parts a and b and now up again, the soft malleability of fervent stone, the flex of Seulgi's sulphuric joints as she pushes the reins forwards to let him stretch over the fence, weight perfectly balanced over her ankles as he up-downs the vertical.
They leave it standing.
Next is the pink ascending oxer at five, the bars sloping away from them in a mirror image of her gelding's jump. His front legs hit the ground in left-lead canter and it's one, two before they turn, three, four, five and up, over the black-and-white vertical at six. Seven is easy, an spread and then a vertical, and she collects him effortlessly in the one stride between so that he picks his feet up, leaves it standing. Eight and nine, the parallels on the turn - he stretches himself over eight, taken at a harsh angle to keep up with the required time, and chips in a short stride before nine, catching her a little unawares but she is fire, she is brimstone and she will not be extinguished by a bad stride.
They clear nine, ten and eleven, and the final vertical at twelve is the last fence.
She breathes and he jumps. The whole course is untouched.