Welcome To The Clinic

(reposts)

HE IS A DUDE!

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

poppy will scold her for being louder than her show, and tell her that “if you’re gonna be a needy little slut for my pussy, can you at least be quiet while i’m watching something? 🙄”

after that, celine has two goals: number 1, stay quiet enough while fucking her that poppy won’t get annoyed and punish her, and number 2, fuck her to the point that she stops caring about her show entirely and won’t mind her volume. the two of them make a game of this for years and years, although they obviously have to cut down on it for a while after hayun is born. once she’s started school, they’re back at it (although with covers for the couch).

miyeong walks in on them doing this a few times, even before they get together. it drives her insane late into the night, haunting her with images of celine buried inside poppy and trying to stay as quiet as possible while poppy tries to not let her attention slip, images that fuel her fingers pumping inside herself. even when they’re in their low contact period, she imagines it. throughout it all, a fantasy begins to form, one that she doesn’t get to live out until they finally get back together.

she catches them right at the start of their game. “can i join?” she asks.

they’re evidently pleasantly surprised by her interest, and wave her over. “what side are you on, then?” poppy asks, smirking. “team distraction,” she scratches underneath celine’s chin. celine, in turn, kisses her hand. “or team volume control?” she points at herself.

miyeong delivers her a smirk of her own, far more devious than the one on poppy’s face. “oh, popstar, i’m on team sabotage.”

they stare at her, wide eyed. “sabotage?” celine asks, confused.

miyeong nods, and reaches for her pants, tugging them down to midway up her thighs. her partners stare at her now exposed pussy hungrily. celine moans quietly at the sight of it. poppy’s eyes are fixated on it.

perfect.

“i’m gonna masturbate, and you two have to keep up your game. poppy, you keep your eyes on the tv and your hands to yourself, and cece, you gotta keep quiet.” she places a hand on her chest. “you guys just have to pretend i’m not even here!”

she smiles at them. “simple, right?”

they nod, mouths agape. she’s pretty sure she can see some drool in the corner of poppy’s.

“good! now,” miyeong grabs poppy’s chin and tilts her head so she’s facing forward, “pay attention, popstar,” and then grabs celine’s to close her mouth, “and don’t make a sound, cece.” they follow her commands, even now. she may be decades younger than them now, but her unnie instinct to lead and their instinct to follow, it seems, never truly went away.

she moves that same hand down to her pussy, and shudders as her fingers push past her own entrance.

already, she can see poppy’s eyes flickering over to her and back to the screen, and celine desperately biting her lip.

oh, this is gonna be fun.

(it takes them fifteen minutes before they pounce on her. she’s almost impressed it took them that long.

Yes that is the implication isn’t it :)

Ooooooo what if dead!Celine's huntrix see her digging out of her grave >:]

They just... visit the grave and hear someone desperately screaming and shouting and it's hard to breathe and see a literal hand burst of out the soil

Celine dragging her shirt over her face so she doesn’t breathe in dirt as she smashes her way out and digs and bleeds and digs and who would’ve thought six feet could be so far?

And she’s some kind of crazed as she breaks the surface and drags it back down and

Trainees at Sunlight Entertainment still get Chuseok off, even after the... change in management. But they get less time off than they did than they did before, just the three days, and a demon attack forced Rumi, Mira, and Zoey to miss their flight to Jeju. All the other flights were sold out and had been for months, so they'd had to catch a (packed) train and then take the ferry, at which point they'd been so late that none of the stores were open and there wasn't anywhere to buy food for the grave offerings. Rumi couldn't cook them herself because she'd never learned how, she’d always thought she’d have more time, that she needed to focus on learning to fight and could learn the recipes and rituals later. But now Celine is dead, and Rumi will never again sit and make songpyeon side by side with her in the kitchen and she will never learn how do to the traditional Hunters’ gut rituals because there is no one left to teach it to her and without someone to advocate for her with management she wasn’t able to get to the hanok with enough time to clean so it is the first day of Chuseok and the graves are still overgrown.

Rumi dumps the weeds into the wheelbarrow and grabs another handful. It’s slower going than she remembers it having been in the past with Celine even though she has Zoey and Mira with her now. Part of it is that neither Zoey nor Mira has any real experience with gardening but honestly, most of it is that they’re tired and they’re hungry. Every day is a full day of idol training, and then after that they have to sneak out for additional combat practice – Rumi trying desperately to remember what Celine taught her, how Celine taught her – and trying to help Mira summon her weapon (Zoey had managed to summon her shin-kal from the Honmoon just a week before… before that night. But it’s been months and Mira still can’t pull anything more than a stick that rapidly falls apart back into Honmoon threads and so she’s been forced into combat with nothing but her fists and it’s so dangerous, Rumi knows it’s so dangerous, but what else can they do?) and they’re not eating enough for idols let alone idols with a demon-fighting sidejob but the management won’t listen to her and all the other idol groups know that they’ve received favoritism and so there’s this constant tension hanging over them in all their classes and whispers in the hallways and…

There is a dull thump from within Celine’s burial mound.

“Did you… hear that?” asks Mira, holding up her pruning shears like they can somehow serve as a weapon.

Zoey and Rumi meet each other’s eyes. Zoey gulps and nods.

There is another thump, louder this time. Rumi’s palm feels clammy around the sickle. “Mira, get behind me,” she says. She keeps her gaze fixed on the grave, but in the corner of her eye she can see Zoey backing away and summoning her shin-kal.

The sound of something shattering rumbles through the ground and the soil on top of the mound immediately slumps inward. Rumi holds her breath as the suddenly disturbed soil begins to ripple, then shake, then churn. A single pale hand shoots out of the dirt, then another. They grasp the turf on either side of the mound and Rumi can see the tendons in those familiar wrists straining as they heave.

Something white and round bursts out of the grave and Rumi stares at it in baffled horror for a moment before it is pulled down to reveal Celine’s face. The white thing is her shirt; she’s in the same outfit she was wearing when she died and her throat is whole, unblemished, untorn.

Rumi makes a ragged, wretched sound, holding out the sickle with shaking hands—Celine no longer owns one of those. “C-Celine?”

“Would one of you mind helping me up?” Celine asks steadily. She could probably push her way out, even from this awkward position, but she’d rather not if she doesn’t have to.

Zoey half-starts, and then stops, holding her shin-kal between them with trembling hands. “Why should we do that? How do we know you’re not—Rumi?”

Rumi doesn’t seem to have any better guess as to what Celine could be, but she still tries to hold herself between them, even while keeping Mira behind her—Mira is surprisingly accepting of this, for all that she’s looking over Rumi’s shoulder, eyes wary and narrow.

“I’m afraid I’m not,” she says, as gently as she can, pushing up, gritting her teeth against the pain bursting up from her hands. “Your Celine, that is, though I’m a human Hunter, which you can test any way you’d like.”

“The hell does that mean?” Mira asks, raising her pruning shears as if they’re the best weapon she’s got.

Celine manages to get a knee out of the grave and onto the ground, crawling forward. Rumi stutters back, into Mira.

Celine’s heart breaks a little more.

“I’m not your Celine,” she says, carefully, sitting up and trying to avoid any hint of aggression to her body language. “I’m prone to moving between worlds. I’m sorry.”

“Prove it,” Rumi says, shaking and brave and Celine sees her Rumi and sees Sarang and sees every other Rumi she has known all too briefly and it breaks her heart. “Prove it!”

“We are Hunters, voices strong,” Celine sings, the same mantra that was Rumi’s lullaby, the same words that have always come to her when she has nothing left to remember, and the Honmoon of this world lights up around her, ragged and starved and still so familiar. “Slaying demons with our song.”

The sickle, the pruning shears, the shin-kal—all of them fall. Rumi clutches her hands over her mouth to muffle a scream.

Rumi only pulls back once she’s gotten herself back under something approaching control, sobs reduced to sniffles. This close, looking up, she can see the differences – this Celine has more gray in her hair, more weight to her frame, and unfamiliar wrinkles. She is also frowning, and her hands come up to cup Rumi’s cheeks and swipe her thumbs along her cheekbones, leaving trails of dirt as they do so. “Aegiya, your eyebags look like bruises. How much sleep have you been getting?”

“We haven’t,” says Mira from behind her, and Rumi can hear the exhaustion in her voice.

Celine’s frown sharpens. “You should be resting, then. Let’s return to the hanok.”

“We can’t!” exclaims Rumi. “It’s the first day of Chuseok, and we haven’t— the graves are still overgrown.”

“The thing about graves,” says Celine, her voice wry, “is that they’re not going anywhere. They will still be here if you return to clean them later.”

Rumi boggles at her. She remembers spending countless hours in this graveyard as Celine painstakingly tended to the graves, first playing and later, when she was bigger, doing her part to help out with this sacred duty to those who came before. “It’s disrespectful!” she says, and then, because that’s not enough, she needs to explain, she continues with, “To my mother. To you.”

“If I was angered by disrespect I would never have gotten anywhere with Mira,” says Celine, which is another reminder that she is not Rumi’s Celine, who never had a chance to get anywhere with Mira, not really. She lightly grabs Rumi by the shoulders and says, “Rumi, every Hunter in those graves knows the weight of the duty you carry on your shoulders. And every one of them knows, as you do, the danger of heading into battle stymied by sleep deprivation. They would not want you to weaken yourself for their sakes – our duty to the dead comes after our duty to the living, always.”

And Rumi does not know how to say it. How much she misses Celine, how much time they spent together in this graveyard, tending to it in quiet companionship. How much of a punch in the gut it was to come to visit Celine’s gravesite only to find that it had been covered with weeds in the months she had been in Seoul. How much of a failure it felt, that she couldn't keep Celine and couldn’t even upkeep her resting place, the place Celine had spent so much of her life maintaining fastidiously. How wrong it feels for her to be telling Rumi to leave it alone now. “But,” she tries, “you spent so much time…”

Celine sighs. “For the first four years of your life, Rumi, I didn’t tend the graves at all.” Rumi blinks at her, shocked. “It was too much, trying to take care of an infant and maintain enough popularity to sustain the Honmoon and address demon incursions and begin laying the groundwork for what would become Sunlight Entertainment. Money was tight enough those first few years that I didn’t have the funds to hire someone to come clean up in my stead, either.” Celine smiles sadly, staring at Miyeong’s grave (right next to hers). “Part of the reason I spent so much time here when you got older and I got my feet under myself again was because I was trying to prune back years of neglect.”

Rumi boggles at her. Celine didn’t talk about the early years, except occasionally to pull out embarrassing photos from when Rumi was a toddler, and she’d never mentioned any sorts of struggles with money.

Zoey chimes in, a hopeful lilt to her voice as she says, “Does this mean we can go take a nap?”

“Naps are great,” says Mira. “Count me in on team nap.”

Mira doesn’t really get why she’s thinking like that, but she does notice that Celine’s worse off of anything of them, covered in gravedirt, with her hands all bloody and torn up from digging.

“You should take care of yourself first,” she says.

Rumi’s eyes get wide as she looks down at Celine’s hands, snd Zoey says, “I’ll get the med kit!”

It’s under the couch, right where they left it, a little dusty, just like everything else.

“Celine,” Rumi says, and she takes Celine by one unbuttoned shirt cuff and tugs her to the couch.

“I can—“ Celine starts. And stops. She sighs. “Thank you, Zoey. Rumi, why don’t you go get some water for everyone? You shouldn’t fall asleep dehydrated.”

And Mira watches. Rumi can get twitchy when she doesn’t have something to do, and Celine isn’t saying it to get rid of her. She’s quiet as Zoey wipes down her hands and starts pulling splinters, even as her jaw tightens and tightens and tightens. She asks reasonable questions about what they know about medical care and makeup.

She’s good, just the way Rumi always said Celine was.

And, apparently, some other Mira trusts her.

And Mira watches.

Rumi is soaking in Celine’s presence, desperate for it. She didn’t wash her face while getting the water.

So Mira gets up.

Rumi and Zoey both turn, pause. It makes other trainees make fun of them sometimes, how hyperaware of each other they are, a three-in-one.

“I’ll be right back,” she says, and they relax.

It doesn’t even take her a minute to go and wet down a paper towel. Her own hands are dirty from the gardening, so she pauses to wash up, incredibly glad that she was smart enough to get her press-ons off before going out.

The ridiculously mundane thought makes her snort. Her life is insane.

She takes the paper towels back and gives them to Rumi. Celine stands up, making room—her hands are done—and Rumi grabs her dirty dress shirt and looks at her wide-eyed and—

“We can fit four,” she says.

“Totally,” Zoey agrees. “I sleep in a fetal position anyway.”