"Follow Your Bliss"

tf did they put in these tonics

Currently: the crew are attempting to invade the city of Seoul. Via road trip. In search of demon wraiths. While everyone else goes in for snacks, Miyeong and Minji are in a gas station parking lot discussing exactly what Miyeong might get if Minji can’t name anything Miyeong has written.

Apparently, she learns, a marine biologist is one who studies the creatures that live in the ocean. The very first marine biologists lived thousands of years before even Rumi—men with names like Xenophanes and Herodotus. (Though Zoey’s opinion of the latter as a whole is not very high, he did write a very funny anecdote about a man being saved from drowning by a dolphin.)

Zoey breezes through Charles Darwin and Charles Wyville Thomson—perhaps Charles is a title she is unfamiliar with?—and the “theory of evolution” (???) before making a joke about “AAPI solidarity” (or, at least, it must be, as Mira laughs) and beginning to tell them of the people who live in the seas south and east of Jeju.

Rumi’s head in spinning in the best of ways as they settle onto the ferry and Zoey tugs her and Mira out of the parked car and across the massive, metal deck of the ship—how does it still float?!?—to watch the waves.

“I… sorry,” Zoey says, stuttering to a sudden halt as they look out on the gray, late afternoon waters. “I’ve kinda just… full bore Zoey, huh? I didn’t mean to…”

“Dude,” Mira says, leaning on the rail with effortless grace. “It’s cool that you know all this stuff. You should keep going.”

Zoey bites her lip, looking as if this has done the opposite of reassuring her, and flicks her gaze to Rumi, who does her best to rearrange her features from confusion to enthusiasm with a broad smile.

“Scholars that would study the deep are a brave group indeed, to not fear any of the monsters that lie below, or even the simpler dangers of drowning,” she says, hopefully encouraging.

Zoey lightens a little. Then pauses.

“We should get a good supply,” Celine muses. “There’s probably something Mira can have for dinner, somewhere in all this, but it’d be good to have some at the hotel, afterward.”

It’s hard to tell, but Miyeong thinks she seems a little relieved, like the shakes somehow represent something more than just whether a capable adult woman who can probably handle being hungry for a few hours will continue to have to do so.

And Miyeong did that.

She tamps down on the inappropriate pride, again, as they find their seats.

Celine, who confiscated Zoey’s literary trash at the gate on the argument that she’d paid for it, after all, plops the offending magazine down on the table between them. “I’d like to read it,” she says, polite and sincere and completely unexpected, “but you seemed a little upset about us seeing it. We can throw it away, if you prefer.”

Miyeong blinks at her. “That’s…”

Unbelievably considerate? Impossibly respectful of the privacy of a person whose entire job is to violate everyone else’s? Yet more proof that Minji is absolutely insane to even be saying Celine and Miyeong’s names in the same breath?

“… very kind of you.”

Celine furrows her brow a little, like she doesn’t agree, but she doesn’t say anything, just waits patiently.

“It’s not the writing itself, exactly. I won’t claim to be good at much, but I know I’m good at that,” says Miyeong. “It’s more the topic. Forever ago, when I first got into reporting, I used to have this idea that I was going to write about things that matter. It’s harder to ignore how very much that did not pan out, when people I actually know are reading my trash listicles about TikTok.”

And Minji claims to have read all of it.

Celine’s look turns a little piercing, suddenly. “Miyeong-nim, forgive me if this is too forward, but, are you all right? You’ve seemed to have something heavy, on your mind, since we left the convenience store.”

“You should probably cut it down at least to -ssi, if you’re going to be reading my listicle trash,” says Miyeong, to cover the odd combination of embarrassment and warmth at Celine noticing her discombobulation.

“As you like. Miyeong-ssi.”

Oh, that might have been a mistake.

“...It’s about Minji,” says Miyeong, in lieu of acknowledging that. “I've known her forever, we share a friend group. Well, we did. And she was friendly enough when we were all out together. But just us, one-on-one, our entire relationship has been her kicking me out of the hospital, and chasing me away from her staff, and yelling at me about privacy laws and patient privilege. I wasn’t lying before, I've genuinely never really thought she even liked me.

“If that’s not true, if it never was, if I’ve actually mattered to her, all this time, I don’t… I don’t know what to do with that.”

Her hair has turned into a puffball by now, too, after all that brushing Miyeong did, so she’d look like a bit of an idiot if she did step out there anyway.

She makes a valiant attempt at a braid—it comes out badly, with different ends sticking out, and absolutely won’t hold together for long, but it’s enough.

They’d agreed to meet in the food court, but Minji almost wants to just stay here.

It’s quiet.

But she knows that if she sits in the quiet long enough, she’ll be useless in Seoul. Celine and Rumi both talked about the wraiths’ emotional attacks, and if she lets her grief have her now—

So she calls her grandmother instead.

Her voice is good to hear, even as desperately hopeful as it is (as so many of Minji’s coworkers—the coworkers who took her shifts—will have left their loved ones). “Minji-yah? Is that you? Are you there?”

“It’s me,” she promises. “It’s Minji.”

She is here.

“Misuk-ah!” Halmeoni yells. “Come quick!”

And so Minji is passed to her aunt Misuk, and then her uncle Sanghun, and then her uncle Gwangyeon, and then their neighbor Jeongbin, and then, and then, and then, until it seems she has promised every person living within five kilometers of her grandmother that she is alive.

Prof of what Aunt Misuk said, when she first took the phone: “Mother has been worried sick about you, you know. She’s had all of us over at hers day and night, waiting for news. Aren’t you with that ridiculous reporter woman?”

(And Minji had tried to say that Miyeong wasn’t ridiculous, even if she sort of was.)

“Hmph,” Aunt Misuk had said loudly, ignoring her. And then, softly, “I’m glad you’re okay, Minji-yah.”

Day and night.

So Minji promises her grandmother that she’s okay, that she was nowhere near the fire.

And she gets out of the car and walks to the food court.

Celine and Miyeong are sitting at a table together, leaning in as they speak. Celine is giving Miyeong one of those—not armor-piercing looks, but… armor-removing ones? Focused and intent and sliding right under the walls. Miyeong is a little flustered, warm in the sunlight as she explains her thoughts to Celine.

Minji doesn’t know which of them she’s rather be.

Rumi is less pleased when the honored shaman suggests demonstrating an exorcism technique, after the food is gathered, and Rumi has to say, “I agree. You should all have as many tools for the defense of yourself and others as you are able to bring. I can… assist with this training.”

The others think nothing of it, from only that little, but the honored shaman narrows her eyes. Rumi feels much the same. She did not want Mira and Zoey to even know this part of her, has shamefully hoped that Zoey has forgotten her use of it while searching for Mira, finds that she does not wish to see the good regard leave the faces of Minji-nim or Miyeong-nim or the honored shaman, as well. She fears the fear they will show her, if they should know her tainted power firsthand.

But their safety is more important than Rumi’s comfort, or whatever connections she might have hoped to make in this new time.

So she explains, “I have the ability to influence the mind, as a wraith does,” as empty of emotion as she is able. “I worked with young mudang in my time, on occasion, and was sometimes asked to push them, for demonstration, so they could familiarize themselves with the feeling, and practice cleansing safely. I can do it for you, as well. If that is something you desire.”

“Oh!” says Zoey. “Your Jedi mind trick!"

Evidently, Zoey has not forgotten; strangely, she seems more excited than wary, though admittedly her words are difficult to parse.

“That sounds… useful,” says Minji-nim, with a much more sensible amount of caution in her tone.

The honored shaman’s expression has not changed, but when she says, “Are you certain, Rumi-nim?”, her voice is only careful, not cold. Rumi does not trust her own voice, but she nods, solemnly, and after a moment, the shaman gives a brisk nod of her own. “Alright, then. We need a volunteer.”

The others exchange glances. “So this is, like. Mind control?” asks Miyeong-nim.

“Not exactly,” the honored shaman tells her. “If it’s like a wraith’s, it’s more a lowering of inhibitions. If there’s something you want to do, or could be convinced to, if you didn’t know better, it becomes harder to care that you shouldn’t.”

“Okay, then. Hit me, I guess.”

“It is not a physically violent process,” assures Rumi.

“Oh, she just means—” Zoey starts, then catches Rumi’s expression. “Wait. You got that one, you’re just messing with us.”

Her delight, and Mira’s amused snort, give Rumi the strength to turn to Miyeong-nim, and reach for the foul heritage ever hidden beneath her skin.

“You seem tired, Miyeong-nim,” she says, she pushes. She slips into the dark, smell and sight turning distant as she wraps cold tendrils around the bright pulse of human life before her and presses for weakness. “Perhaps you should sleep.”

She’s only vaguely aware of the physical world— the way that Miyeong-nim blinks and slouches, the honored shaman speaking, it’s all behind fog— but Miyeong-nim’s fatigue is clear and heavy in her demonic senses. She pushes, just a little more, against the softening will in her hands.

And then a song blazes across the shadows, a brilliant flare like a storeroom full of oil going up under a spark, a deafening melody of righteousness, beautiful and terrifying in its power, its suddenness, the blinding brightness of it, coiling around Miyeong-nim, around Rumi, around everything, and for a moment, the cruel, dark, greedy thing that is her is truly afraid—

—but when she’s pushed back into herself, it’s almost gentle, as she blinks back into human hearing and feeling and vision. There is none of the thudding mental bruising she remembers from doing this before, only a prickling discomfort, as though her mind is a slowly waking limb.

“Of course,” the shaman is saying, “ideally you also use a bit of the root compound, and you can make quick bujeok on white paper, but if song is all you have, as you can see, you can make do.”

Her eyes meet Rumi’s, and there’s a shadow in them that Rumi does not like. The knowledge, perhaps, no longer an intellectual abstraction but a brutal, visceral truth, that she has dedicated her life to a demon.

But all the honored shaman says is, “Who would like to try next?”

So Rumi reminds herself, as she tells Minji-nim to stretch and the wispy breeze of Miyeong-nim’s will practices pushing her back, that this is to help them. She assures herself, as she urges Mira to stand and the soft pressure of Minji-nim’s song tries to tug her demonic fingers away, that they asked for this, with full understanding. She convinces herself, as she instructs Zoey to eat, that this will make them safer, and she does not force herself to look at their faces.

And then Mira’s chant crashes into her like a runaway goat, knocking her back into her own mind with a stinging, painful slap.

“Well done,” says Rumi, letting her pride show and trying not to wince too obviously.

She fails, and the honored shaman catches it. “We can practice simple repetition without you, Rumi-nim, if you need a break.”

Her stomach lurches, shame and horror and anger mixing together. “Why the fuck—why would you do that!”

Rumi bites at her lip, and Mira wants to scream. “I… did not mean to make you uncomforta—“

“Are you kidding?” (She’s not. Mira knows she’s not.) “That isn’t—we were hurting you!”

“Are you okay?” Zoey asks, which is—a much better way to approach this. Fuck. “Can we help?”

“It’s only training,” Rumi says, sounding genuinely bewildered. “The pain will fade in short order, but the skills you are learning are very necessary. If that is your only concern, I would be very happy to continue.”

Mira wants to scream.

(Mira cannot scream.)

“So you are hurt?” Minji asks, sharp as a tack. “What kind of pain is it? Where?”

“It is only a mild headache,” Rumi protests, holding up her hands.

Minji, thankfully, zeroes in like a shark after the scent of blood, starting to ask questions about if they’ve been giving Rumi a fucking brain injury. And Mira just

Can’t

Breathe.

(They were hurting her.)

(One year, when Mira was younger, her parents took her and Jaeho out to the beach. It wasn’t even a magic thing, just… a handful of good memories that Mira’s clung to for years.

She remembers going swimming, ending up almost rounding the point. Her father had to yell at her to come back up the beach to where he was waiting.

He’d called her into shallow water and pointed down at where it swirled up and down around their toes. “You see how the foam is getting dragged to your left, just like you were? That’s the current, Mira. You have to keep track of it so you don’t get pulled away again.”

“Yes, Abeoji,” she’d said, and stayed there in he shallows, watching the foam be pulled down the beach, wondering at how she hadn’t even realized, until Jaeho decided he needed to conscript her for his sandcastle.

That’s the best comparison she has to the feeling of Rumi in her mind: that quiet, invisible pressure carrying her away.

And they were hurting her.)

“I did not mean to scare you,” she hears Rumi saying, so fucking apologetic, and it’s all Mira can do not to be sick.

Rumi had seen this before, too many times, especially after encounters with wraiths. I did this. This is my fault. She has to— 

“Rumi-nim, are you dizzy? Are there black spots in your vision?” Minji-nim asks. 

“I am well, and my vision is sound.” Rumi gives a small smile and affixes her best ‘everything-is-fine-mask.’ “Severance is not like a strike to the head.”  

Rumi isn’t sure if Mira is breathing, Minji-nim steps in front of her, when had she moved? “Have you been hit in the head before?” 

“That is not relevant.” Rumi says, stepping around the physician.

Minji-nim will not be deterred. “It is extremely relevant.” 

Rumi looks to the honoured shaman for support and finds only concern in her gaze.

A warm hand grips her own, tentatively, softly, as if she isn’t half monster. Zoey. “I’m sorry we were hurting you, I—” Zoey glances around frantically at the others “—we didn’t realise it would hurt.”  

Rumi stiffens at the tide of extremely unhelpful, demonic, evil thoughts that spiral from where their skin touches. 

Minji is a little less appeased. She has enough of her own experience to not trust a jock about the significance of a headache, no matter what era she's from.

Mira is not appeased at all, but it does turn her ire off of Rumi and onto the shaman. "You knew."

"Yes," agrees Celine-nim, as Minji uses her phone flashlight to test Rumi's pupils. "I also know that Rumi-nim does not need me to make her choices for her."

"Oh, yeah, of course. She gets choices." Mira's growling, frustrated, and close to breaking. "I can't-- I can't deal with this, I can't deal with you, right now."

Minji turns to see her storming away, stiff and furious, fists clenched in tight knots at her sides. Celine-nim and Miyeong seem to feel about the same way Minji does about it-- concerned, but if Mira needs space, she should take it-- but Zoey and Rumi both border on distraught, Zoey in particular glancing anxiously between Rumi and Mira's retreating back.

"Go after her, if you think it will help," Celine says to her, and Zoey, clearly desperately relieved to have the decision made for her, dashes off after Mira.

There's a moment of silence at the table, in which Rumi stares after the other two in wounded confusion and Celine-nim stares at Rumi like she is not, in fact, remotely sure that she knows her own limits, despite her earlier claim, and then Miyeong nods her head Minji. "She good?"

"Seems to be." Minji sits back down, heavy and tired. "We'll keep an eye on her, though." She shoots Celine-nim a narrow look of her own. "Was that actually dangerous for her?"

It's Rumi who answers, as she takes her own seat, again, posture rigid and unhappy. "I have never taken lasting harm from it before."

"If it's any consolation," says Celine-nim, who doesn't sound like she really expects it to be, "Mira and I are probably the only two who actually hurt her."

Zoey takes measured steps as she comes closer, chewing the inside of her cheek. Don't be too much, she repeats to herself as she nears. Don't come on too strong.

She swears she could see the bridges she thought she'd been building between her and Rumi via marine fun facts and stories about dragons who literally eat the rich burning in Rumi's flaming cheeks when she grabbed her hand.

And now she risks turning those between her and Mira to ash with a wrong word.

The past couple of hours had been like a fantasy come true, and not just because someone wanted to hear about the differences between loggerheads and hawksbills; talking with Mira and Rumi she'd felt…like herself. Not the Zoey who ran interference between her feuding parents or the Zoey who constantly checked her tongue and chopped off bits of herself to create a version that matched what the other kids at school wanted (or, well, what she thought they wanted).

Just Zoey. Who knew too much about music and ocean life and enough miscellany to probably do really well on a quiz show. And was…liked anyway.

But, clearly, from the look on Rumi's face- and Mira's too, a stormcloud darkening her gorgeous (nope, nope; not thinking like that; dealing with a crisis here) features- she'd read the room wrong. Again.

She sidles up to her, mindful to keep their elbows from touching, and tries to sort out what to say.

That was random. No.

Celine was being an ass for not saying that to begin with. No, but true.

Rumi was being an ass for not saying we were hurting her. Definitely not, though also true.

"That sucked."

She winces at the sentence that just popped out of her like she had no control over it. Absolutely not, why did she say that?!?

Mira turns, and looks at her, sunlight sharp on the frames of her glasses.

Zoey's stomach knots, waiting for what she knows is coming.

Why couldn't she just stop messing things up?

Why did she have to be so….Zoey?

"Yeah, it did."

She blinks, startled. It's…oddly encouraging, to hear agreement. It loosens something in Zoey.

"And, like, you're right! We should have gotten a say!"

Mira nods, flaring her nostrils as she huffs an agreeing breath.

Bolstered, Zoey continues. "I mean, how were we supposed to know?"

…And there it is, the look that says Zoey messed up. Mira's lip puckers and she turns back to the waves. "You weren't. I should have figured it out."

…Oh, that's right; she was technically part of a now-decimated evil cult (or, well, cult-adjacent; she's not sure if Mira ever officially joined; unless being born into one was enough? did you inherit lifetime membership?).

"I'd been taught about exorcising like this before." She tapped a nail against the railing. "Like, as a precaution, in case one of Appa or Jaeho's wraiths went rogue. I've done these, I knew they're meant to hurt, and- ERGH! I should have figured it out!" She slams a fist on the railing, sending a metallic thud vibrating along its length, then shakes out her hand. "I'm such an idiot."

Zoey grabs Mira's hand, squeezing it, trying to soothe the sting from her outburst with her thumb. "…I don't think so."

Mira snorts. "Yeah, someone who was fucking raised around this stuff and learned to write sigils before her name had no way of seeing this coming."

Zoey files away that personal history tidbit for later, when questions are appropriate. "No, really. You'd never really done any before. And theory and practice are, like, totally different."

Mira lifts a brow. "If they were that would make theory useless."

"I mean, it kind of is when you're out in the field," Zoey shrugs (not exactly one-hundred-percent true, but true enough).

"…Should I be worried you're a med student?"

"Oh, definitely," Zoey nods, like that was a very sensible assessment.

Her parents would have some words for her about that, but Mira laughs, and right now that's all Zoey cares about.

Magic meant getting woken up at midnight when her father was in a mood, or burning her hands on a sealed bedroom door, or watching yet another small business fold under the Kangs’ oh-so-welcoming umbrella.

But Zoey makes her sort of get how people can call someone magical in a good way.

She’s angry too, clearly, but she’s still grinning as she leads Mira towards the food court again, ready to find a way to actually do something useful instead of just stewing in the mess until she screams.

“Now, obviously these places are gonna have ice,” she says, light and easy and somehow this fucking chill less than a week after getting kidnapped and nearly murdered, hands on her hips as she casts a surveying glance over the room. “The real trick is figuring out how to get a bag to put it in.”

A smile tugs at Mira’s lips, sure, but it’s a fair point. There’s a freezer case full of ice cream over at the one place, if nothing else, but all the food is pre-prepped—sandwiches in plastic boxes and the like. There’s no reason for anyone to have a bag.

Zoey nods in the other direction, where there is at least something resembling cooking happening. “You know, I skateboard?”

Mira did not know this. It’s a good image, Zoey mid-air and free on her board. “No…?”

“Uh-huh,” she says, pulling in her chosen direction. “Lotta scrapes and bruises involved. I used to go screw around on my board when I had a free first period in high school, so I’d always end up waking myself to the nurse like five minutes before second started to beg for ice.”

This image—fifteen year old Zoey, helmet in hand, a sheepish grin on her face and a blossoming bruise on her arm—is somehow even more charming.

Mira snorts.

“Uh-huh,” Zoey says. “Look, way better than when I had a free seventh—she wouldn’t even be there half the time, which feels, like, vaguely illegal in retrospect—but, point is, I was in there a lot. And sometimes she’d run out of bags.”

“What would she do??” Mira asks.

“Stick it in a glove,” Zoey says cheerfully and, with seemingly no self-consciousness at all, skips up to the counter.

Miyeong-ah,

You once said energy is wasted on the youth. We were none the wiser. Rumi needs no guidance — yet. Who knew a game of tag could bond three little girls so dearly? She wouldn’t let them go, even in sleep.

Thinking of you always,