Celine tosses and turns for hours, drifts very briefly in and out of a dreamless doze, opens her eyes at godawful o'clock in the morning, and gives up on sleep.
She was handed a small pile of clothes, last night, but she learned yesterday that even the other Celine's blouses don't fit properly, too loose in the chest, too tight in the shoulders, and she doesn't want to deal with the discomfort again. The slacks are loose, too, but there's a belt, so at least that's fixable. For the rest, she makes do with the sport bra she pulled on yesterday when everything was still a nonsensical blur, and the shirt Miyeong gave her to sleep in. It's some kind of old gray-blue concert tee, too faded to read and spotted with dried paint and ancient stains, and she snaps off a loose thread before pulling it on and slipping silently into the hall.
If they lived the same lives, up until Miyeong's pregnancy, this world's Celine must once have sealed leaking sinks, replaced timing belts, kept Sunmi's disaster-prone bicycle in one piece; must once have had a regular supply of shirts like this to sacrifice for it. It's hard to imagine. The deep satisfaction of making a thing work, of fixing a problem for someone she cares about... it's practical, it's productive. It can't coexist with sobbing over every little thing, with trying to talk an issue uselessly to death instead of just correcting it and moving on. Truthfully, she wonders if whatever the twins did to the plumbing was really so bad that an hour with a toolbox can't fix it, or if it's just that her counterpart gave up being useful, over the last twenty years, abandoned basic repairs right alongside regular exercise and emotional restraint.
The moon is full overhead in the courtyard, casting deep shadows as she makes her way through the morning dew, the gooseflesh on her arms biting enough to wake her and then trivially dismissed. She hums, some mindless ambling improvisation to clear her head, and this world's Honmoon chases the sound, a pair of drowsy golden strands trailing after her, falling behind and then bouncing forward to catch up like a sleepy puppy. The dark smooths away the wrong paint and misplaced trees and turns the yard familiar, and the smell of damp pine and hackberry sinks into her like an old friend. She takes her time crossing the compound, gratified to find the bakgeori unlocked, and slides her hand to the switch by instinct.
But the ease of the outside air flees with the dark.
The angeori, with its thousand glass shard memories scattered on every wall, was to be expected, really. Was exactly the sort of thing Miyeong would want, and maybe Celine could still have found a way to touch just that, without bleeding, but this â
In Celine's own world, the shared areas of the hanok are decorated mostly with art. The angeori has paintings Rumi buys for her on tour, fashion plates and figure studies from Mira's design classes, a few complex macrame pieces from when Zoey broke her leg (the majority of these hung by Rumi with mathematical precision, and also no notice whatsoever). The bakgeori, now that the girls are gone, is all prints and hangings passed down the years, alongside a mix of random gifts from Celine's friend Rei, who does repatriation out of Tokyo and sends the odd piece she can't find another home for. Both arrangements are understated and coordinated and generally pleasant and it suits Celine just fine. She has never been the sort of person who hangs photos.
Or even someone who likes taking them to begin with, for that matter. She isn't good at it, always getting washed-out ghosts or people blinking, and it distracts her, to be recording the moment instead of living in it. She does try anyway, when she knows other people will want them â Miyeong mugging at an awards dinner, Huntr/x backstage at their debut, all the little moments of Rumi's childhood, alone â
â at any rate, the results are never worth that kind of display.
Miyeong, though, called photography a kind of archery where no one got hurt, and she'd been just as good at it. Just as precise at finding the perfect light, the perfect moment, the perfect shot. She said the camera could see things that eyes couldn't; could see the truth, if you did it right.
In this world, Miyeong has had time to look for that truth. There, in her family, those thousand frozen moments; here, in the shinmok at sunset, clasped hands, ballet dancers in flight. Close-ups of tools and toys and weeds growing out of sidewalks. Architecture from odd angles, city streets from so far above they're almost dizzying to look at.
They're organized by theme, Celine realizes, as she moves slowly through the pieces. Some playing with color, some with focus, a few evidently grouped in ways she doesn't have the expertise to understand.
Ways her own Miyeong never had the chance to teach her.
Celine forces her eyes away from the walls; it's of no significance, really, just another reason to focus on her actual purpose here. She shoves down on the yawning hollow trying to open in her chest until it yields, smothers it to a distant, irrelevant ache, and pushes forward.
And then she's there, the old armory. She had almost been afraid that it would be gone, deemed needless in retirement, but here it stands. Neatly sheathed blades and sturdy practice swords and gleaming polearms rest watchful in their places, marked by generations of hands still practicing for starlight. Celine reaches, unthinking, for the paired short swords crossed over the knife display, then recoils just as quickly, queasy at the thought of dead metal ssang geom against her palms, at holding any clumsy man-made imitation of her soul blades like it could begin to compare.
She takes the jikdo instead, and makes her way back out onto the practice yard, into the cool dark and pine-sap breeze.
It starts as always, with the first and simplest form: step, step, slice, turn, focus on her weight spread properly between her feet, her weapon stable and still in her hands. Once she's warm and steady on her toes, she moves up to higher levels, low stance and strike, high stance and sweep, tiger stance and reverse strike; up again, step and turn and strike, sweep and hook kick; up again, ignore the handful of gold strands gathering at the edges of her movement; up again, slash into thrust into two hands and reverse, the blade a brilliant flash of silver, fast and tight and perfectly placed.
And by the time the sun rises and she's working through the master-level patterns, everything else has fallen away. The smooth burn of exertion sweeps through her knees and back and wrist and leaves no pain in its wake; the steady rhythm of her heart pulsing in her temples crowds out the ache behind her eyes; the clean demand of step and strike and counting out each pace drives away all anger and frustration, leaves nothing behind but the first peace she's felt since all this began. Here, centered in her body as it does exactly what she asks of it down to the last and finest ligament, she can breathe, she is right.
Miyeong has been watching her since about twenty minutes before sunrise, but Celine keeps moving, counts out her steps and her strikes, works form by form all the way back down to the first while the dawn slides from amber to white, before sheathing the sword and turning to face her.
The Honmoon flickers out with an almost mournful note, and Miyeong, eyes cool and sharp like Celine has only ever seen behind a starlight arrow, teeth working with that horrible new-old familiarity at her lip, steps forward.
"You dodged the question last night," she says, and by the time she finishes the sentence, she's managed to school her voice and expression to an evenness Celine knows she's never seen from Miyeong before. "That's fine, the kids don't need to know. But I do. What kind of world do you come from?"
She steps forward again, leans in like a threat, like Celine's reach advantage and two extra decades of training and the weapon at her hip and the fact that Miyeong can outpunch a demon if she has to but has never beaten a fully-trained Hunter in melee combat in her life are all completely irrelevant, and her voice is still controlled, still nothing like the screaming Celine is suddenly sure Miyeong is just barely holding back.
"What's happening over there, to my wife?"
Celine waffles about the phrasing, the request. How to sound believable, about this unbelievable thing. How to make it clear that whatever this Sunmi rightly holds against her own Celine, Celine herself will not argue with, is truly sorry for, trusts Sunmi to put aside long enough to help. She writes, deletes, wrestles with autocorrect, deletes and writes again.
The muffled soundscape shifts a few times, as she works. The music halts for a while, then starts up again at intervals. Footsteps patter down the hallway, and then back a little later. She thinks at one point a microwave might beep. None of it is her business. She keeps editing.
Celine has just wrapped up, at least settled if not necessarily satisfied with what she's sent, when she hears a phone alarm ring clear across the building. It's followed immediately by a loud English nonsense phrase from Zoey about⌠crackers?⌠that Celine imagines is standing in for actual cursing. A brief burst of quieter conversation is muted by the closed door, and then there's a pounding of feet and a quick rap on the wood.
Celine braces herself, counts out her breath, and moves to the door.
There's the briefest moment after she clicks the bar away when Zoey's quiet, bewildered "Did she lock it?" just barely makes it through the barrier, and then it's open, and Zoey is standing there with a wide hopeful smile, Mira is a pace behind her looking mildly unimpressed, and Rumi is halfway down the hallway, leaning almost sullenly against the wall, arms crossed and pointedly not looking in their direction.
Celine has about a breath to take it in and then Zoey is off like a rocket.
"Okay so I actually had a stream scheduled for this afternoon that I slightly forgot about but that's why we invented alarms! And I did think about cancelling it, because obviously we're in kind of the middle of a situation here, but we already spent like half the day writing so it's probably a little too late to worry about that? Although I can't actually stream anyway because I don't have my whole setup here and we hit the ferry in kind of a rush and the only real machine in the hanok that could even sort of substitute is Celine's, and she does have a pretty good headset actually for conference calls but obviously she is. Not here to let me on and I think her mouse is possibly broken currently? I cannot game on a trackpad, a line must be drawn somewhere and I am drawing it there."
"Also," Mira adds dryly, "Her Steam library is truly dire."
"She has SpaceChem," says Zoey, loyally, "chat loves SpaceChem."
"I will literally make you that baked Alaska monstrosity you were talking about, from scratch, if Celine actually has SpaceChem installed on that laptop."
"It's not even half a gig! We get decent downstream here now! I could fix that in five minutes!"
"Long story short," drawls Mira, switching her attention to Celine, "she decided to do retro tabletop day instead. She needs to get into the office closet."
"Yes," Zoey agrees brightly, nodding. "I was going to be way more polite about it, but, that."
Celine steps aside, wordlessly, and Zoey bowls past her, pops open the closet, and pulls out a pair of weathered old wood cases, four field kono and a baduk board from where they're half-buried under a cardboard box of yut nori pieces, all of which have been floating around the hanok at least since Eunbi and Hana themselves were trainees.
"We're also going to need more food, if we're going to be here a while," Mira tells Celine, while Zoey juggles the game sets, "so I'm going into town. You should come with me."
Rumi shoots a glance sideways, at that, and Mira's arms are folded under her cool expression, and it's clear in both their body language that it's not a request. Which should be both ridiculous and insulting, but is actually sort of endearing, somehow. It puts her in mind of the twins, trying to throw their height around with Rumi back when they hit their last growth spurt.
And obviously, Celine has nothing better to do.
So she follows Mira out to their canary yellow Ignis and clambers inside.
It's a little cramped, and Celine ratchets the passenger seat back practically half a meter before she has enough leg room that she's not hugging her own knees. She sees Mira shoot a sideways smile at her, at that, like they're in on some kind of tall person joke together, but it's fleeting, and she's deadpan again by the time they're fully on the road. She starts a playlist, not loud enough to prevent conversation but not too quiet to fill the silence, and music flows out into the car that Celine can only describe as a world tour of orchestral metal; there's English, Korean, German, something that must be some variety of Slavic in amongst the power chords.
Mira hums along intermittently, not enough to wake the Honmoon, just idle familiarity. It's mostly pretty good, actually; Celine is just wondering how Mira would react if she turned the radio up, when the younger woman finally speaks.
"So I wouldn't normally ask this." She doesn't glance over, eyes on the truck they're passing. "But who knows what weird Honmoon logic got you here, it might turn out to be relevant."
She pauses, and Celine realizes she's waiting for⌠permission?
Given the complete lack of context, Celine can only shrug. "Ask what you like, I suppose. Though I reserve the right not to answer."
"Yeah, of course," agrees Mira, a little distracted, but then she's quiet for another minute.
Celine wants to tell her I'm not your Celine, you don't need to be afraid to ask me things, hates that it would make it worse, tries to wait patiently, instead.
"The ring that you're not wearing," Mira finally says. "It's Miyeong's?"
Celine pulls in a sharp breath. She genuinely had no intention of outing this world's Celine to her students, and even after everything â and not without reason â her own instinct at sudden confrontation remains deny. But Mira's not wrong, there's no telling what triggered this swap or what's meant to resolve it, and Miyeong's absence is quite possibly the axis around which every change here turns. So what if her marriage is involved in some strange way?
She finds herself reverting to negotiation tactics, like she's in a tricky work meeting, stalling for time to make a choice.
"What makes you think that?"
Mira doesn't roll her eyes, but there's a distinct unimpressed thread in her voice when she responds, "You call Rumi's brothers your kids, we found you in a puddle on our Miyeong's grave, and let's not get started on Rumi herself. You're not a good liar. Certainly nothing like our Celine," and there's something there, a grain of genuine irritation, and Celine doesn't know whether to be glad that Mira is at least able to hold one thing against this Celine, if only a little, or crushed by yet another way that her counterpart has apparently hurt them.
"And you girls have been discussing this?" she asks, still stalling, instead of addressing any of that.
"Me and Zo," says Mira. "Pretty sure Rumi hasn't noticed a thing." She sounds deeply amused. "Actually, pretty sure it's more that she doesn't want to notice."
Like it's silly, like it's just a passing, adolescent quirk. Like it isn't steel jaws digging sharp into Celine's heart, and she has to pause to breathe again, to remind herself that this isn't her world, this isn't her Rumi, it isn't fair to expect her to want to be Celine's daughter, that she has every right to be uncomfortable with the idea of Celine so deeply in her life when the Celine she knows is so undeserving of being in it at all.
"⌠you're right," she says, once she thinks she can speak normally, again, match Mira's perception that this is a casual conversation. "It's Mi's. We married almost twenty years ago, now, and raised Rumi and the twins together."
Mira's fingers drum on the steering wheel, not quite in time with the music, like a brief burst of anxiety, but she just sounds idly curious when she asks, "It's legal then? In your Korea?"
"Unfortunately no." Celine rubs at her finger, where her ring should be. "We are federally recognized by the commonwealth of Canada, though."
It earns her a quiet snort of laughter. "I guess I'll remember to update my passport if I ever want to get hitched."
An admission for an admission, to put them on the same level again. It's a move Celine recognizes intimately, has made herself and been reassured by from others a thousand times, but here, in this moment, from this steady young woman, it makes her already knotted stomach drop like a stone.
Because it's not that unusual, Hunters falling in love with Hunters. It's scattered across their whole history, between the lines, for someone who knows where to look. And why wouldn't it be? Hunters are chosen for each other, for how well they match, how easily they can create the harmony that protects the world, and for a Hunter interested in women, how could anyone else compare?
And what does that mean for this world's Rumi, tied soul to soul already to Mira and Zoey? Celine's own Rumi has never been serious about a girl, to her knowledge, but she's made it clear she could be, and is this one more decision taken away from this world's scarred and lonely version of her, one more chain she can't escape?
"Your kids are fine, by the way," says Mira. Through the speakers, someone holds an angelic note along several measures of snarling base, and Celine blinks across the car, the words not quite penetrating the spiraling storm in her mind.
Mira's still watching the road, but she apparently senses she's not getting a verbal response, because she elaborates, mostly sincere, a little cool at the edges but it feels like she's trying not to be,
"I appreciate that you've stopped being a dick about our Celine, but I'm not stupid enough to think you've actually changed your mind that she's some crazy asshole. And if I thought some crazy asshole was hanging out with my wife and kids, I'd be a little worried. So. Just saying, you don't have to be. Celine's good with kids. Not exactly cuddly," she allows. "But she treats them like people, kids are into that. And obviously she's not gonna hurt Miyeong."
Celine's reaction to the first claim can't even be called doubt, it's pure disbelief, but Mira just thanked her for keeping that sort of opinion to herself, so it seems impolitic to say so. And it's true it never occurred to her to worry about Miyeong. How she'll feel about all this, yes. How ashamed Celine will be to face both her soulmates in the wake of her own worst self, absolutely. She's going to spend a long time cleaning up after the other Celine, once she gets home. But there's no version of her who doesn't love Miyeong.
In fact, that's half the problem, and the horror of it digs at her again, needles in her skin, a soft, terrible, "I don't know why she'd ever want to come back."
It's Mira's turn to take a sharp breath, and Celine, belatedly, hears the words that just left her mouth, creeping under her guard on a wave of exhaustion and fear and a loneliness she hasn't felt in decades and nevertheless utterly without excuse, and scrambles to fix it.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean â of course your Celine has a life here, I only â" Useless. "I just miss my home, that's all."
They're just crossing into the city, the music floating on unperturbed in the background, something mournful and driving in German.
"You're not a good liar," Mira repeats, and this time it has teeth.
And there's a moment, Celine searching for some conciliatory response that won't sound like the lie that Mira is absolutely right that it would be, and the song fades out, another rolls in, and Celine notices Mira's breathing.
In for four. Hold for four. Out for six, and she can still hear every number in Sang Hana's stern voice, in her own over and over through the years, and Celine reels, without knowing why.
When Mira speaks, it's incredibly, deliberately calm.
"Celine didn't cry at Eunbi's funeral." Her eyes cut sideways, brief and sharp. "She also didn't speak the whole three days other than the offering. She didn't remember to eat for a week unless we ate with her. Even once she was sort of a person again it took forever for her to smile about anything. It was Zoey who did it. Some pun in English that I'm not fluent enough to get, but Rumi said it was painfully dumb, and Zoey cried when she saw, and Celine doesn't do hugs but she hugged Zoey until she stopped."
Mira's jaw works, briefly.
"So maybe you don't give a shit, because you did your job and walked away two decades ago and you don't remember the first thing about what it means to be a Hunter. But our Celine does. She knows what it means to have a teacher, or be one. She's not going to abandon us, not me and Zoey and sure as hell not Rumi, no matter how tragic you think her scars are or how perfect you think your world is in comparison."
The car pulls to a stop while she speaks, and objectively it's smooth and soft but it feels wildly abrupt. Mira reaches into the backseat, grabs a canvas bag, and tosses it at Celine, voice still calm in the most tightly controlled, not-at-all-actually-calm way.
"Get meat, Celine never buys any when it's just her."
And then she's striding off into the market before Celine's door is even open.
