if you cry out i'll be there now (chaelisa)

chapter 1

Chaeyoung stops in her tracks as she exits the fine arts building, caught in the middle of sliding on her sunglasses to block out the mid-afternoon sun. "What's happening here?" she asks, staring at the section of courtyard marked off by wooden stakes and construction tape and a few orange cones. The brick within the staked-off area has already been pulled up, revealing packed hard earth underneath.

"Oh good," says Chanyeol, coming up from behind her. "They're moving the statue."

"What statue?"

"The one in front of the econ building. You know."

Chaeyoung pushes her sunglasses up her nose and stares at Chanyeol.

"The warrior statue? The campus is famous for it? It's on the cover of a ton of our brochures?" Chanyeol sighs. "Have you ever even been to the econ building?"

"Why would I ever go to that part of campus," Chaeyoung says flatly, one hand gripping the strap of her satchel.

"For class. Meeting people. Ever leaving the fine arts building," Chanyeol says with steady exasperation. He starts walking, Chaeyoung jogging a few steps to catch up. "It's what you do when you're not a tortured artist."

"I'm not tortured," Chaeyoung says with the tone of someone who has been losing this particular argument for years but refuses to give up. "I'm just dedicated."

"Well anyway admin thinks because the econ building isn't really close to the center of campus they should move the statue here," Chanyeol says.

"That's our administration. Always hustling to push enrollment and please donors." Chaeyoung tilts her head up, enjoying the weather, already thinking ahead to dinner somewhere outside, preferably with a bottle of wine.

"I like it," Chanyeol says, but by then Chaeyoung has moved on to pizza or burgers, and the statue is forgotten for the night.

*

Chaeyoung isn't exactly lonely, but she is by her lonesome a lot, usually by design. She likes holing up in her tiny studio space in the fine arts building, sometimes overnighting and emerging for a random class the next day groggy and nonverbal, still lost in contemplation of her work. At least all of her general requirements are out of the way, letting her spend her senior year mostly focusing on her final semester project. Chanyeol sometimes pokes his head in to remind her to eat or sleep or to simply leave behind a steaming cup of coffee, and every other weekend or so she might find herself with their little shared pool of friends hitting an art exhibit or enjoying dinner. But her art is her life and her life has been an unending search for that perfect expression of – well, she'll know it when she finds it. Her professors can lavish praise on her and her classmates can be awed and jealous of her but Chaeyoung has yet to produce anything that is truly, singularly representational.

She disappears into her studio on a Thursday morning and pokes her head out nearly twenty-four hours later, stomach gnawing and eyes rimmed red, a dull ache in her neck from hunching too much in front of her canvas. And standing tall in the courtyard, resting on a five-foot plain stone plinth, is the statue.

It faces away from the fine arts building and Chaeyoung has to circle the base of the statue to peer up into its face. Her face. Late morning sun slants down over the both of them, directly onto the front of the statue, illuminating the stern planes of her face, the waves of loose hair cascading over her armor. She's caught in the act of striding forward, one arm crossing her body with her hand just about to draw forth her sword, calf-length cape gently swirling behind her. The sculptor somehow captured an urgency to her, a sense of motion perpetually stilled yet perpetually striving to break free. She looks fierce, covered in beautifully-embossed leather, neither time nor weather stripping away the details.