#minefic

Your early lesson on Current Geopolitics passed by agonizingly slowly, your leg bouncing under your desk with barely contained tension. 

You bound into the gym, dripping and splashing water with every step towards the locker room. The storm outside hasn’t let up, the rain pouring down in sheets. The water bouncing off the hard cement building is loud enough to result in a dull roar echoing through the concrete gym. After a while it dulls into background noise, occasionally punctuated by violent gusts of wind. 

The rest of your cohort begins to filter in behind you, the locker room filling up with more and more girls as you all try to dry off and change. The stragglers are still splashing their way into the locker room while you’re already changed and headed to chat with your CO before warming up. 

You really can’t wait to find out what kind of contest you’ll be winning. 

But your anticipatory smirk falls off your face as you realize Captain Wen is nowhere to be found in the cavernously empty gym. 

That’s the other thing - you realize now as you’re actually taking the time to notice that the gym’s been completely emptied. The workout and fitness equipment is all gone - including the massive acrobatic gymnasium. The climbing wall? Gone. 

You’re frowning and crossing your arms as you take it in - it feels like someone’s been in your house. 

What remains in the echoing concrete space are some mats laid out with others stacked nearby, all ominously on display under the harsh gym lighting. You can see crates stacked together with other various equipment closer to the hangar doors at the back of the building. There are some target practice dummies amongst the pile, but you can’t make much else out. 

The only other thing of interest is the large, old school blackboard on wheels that stands behind the mats. You see your class’ roster neatly chalked into tidy columns, names listed by alphabetical order. 

A few of the other girls are clustered around the blackboard speculating quietly, but most mill around the periphery of the grouped mats. It’s quiet besides hushed whispers, everyone tense and waiting to find out what the hell was going on. 

You stood slightly outside the haphazard circle, arms crossed and foot tapping. You kept your eyes trained on that pile of equipment across the gym, certain you could gleam some clues about what was happening from there. 

“-Harper!” The terse whisper makes you stop in your tracks, already starting to walk in that direction. You pivot around innocently, hands up in surrender when you see Tara, one of your only real friends here, glaring daggers at you and motioning for you to come back. 

You join her at the edge of the mats, offering a sheepish smile. “I wasn’t doing anything!” 

“Liar!” She pokes you in the ribs, making you giggle and elbow her in return. “I’m NOT getting laps or patrol duty in this rain as a punishment for you getting into something you shouldn’t.

You sigh in relenting agreement, beginning to stretch by swinging your arms up and over your head. “Fine, fine - But, I want to know what the hell is going on. Where is Captain Wen? What happened to the gym?” 

You’re trying to keep your voice down so the girls in nearby groups don’t hear, but you’re getting more and more agitated, your voice rising. 

Wen is one of your favorite Officers at the Academy. She’s older; tall and stern with severe features that you’ve only rarely seen warm with a smile. She was one of the only adults who would give you the time of the day as a younger girl, indulging your unending desperation to prove yourself. 

She’d trained you from a young age, teaching you everything from gymnastics to tai-chi with the same rigid discipline she expected from all of her students. Your awkward child body never excusing you from her exacting standards. 

Captain Wen has looked the same since you were a little girl - her tall, lithe body always topped with a severe, silver-haired bun. It occurs to you in a shocking pang that she’s been old for as long as you’ve been alive and it was very possible…

You begin looking around the darkened gym with renewed anxiety, desperate for any clue as to what was going on. 

Thankfully, you didn’t have to wait much longer. The metal doors that connected the gym to the next wing of the Academy proper clanged open loudly, everyone in your cohort falling silent as the figure slowly approached. 

With the only lights on being directed at your small circle in the center of the room, you couldn’t make out the person walking over. They walked briskly, an air of irritation already buzzing about them with each heavy step. 

You have to fight the urge to accost this person with questions as they draw nearer to the group, instead keeping your distance to watch everything unfold in front of you. 

The man - and you can finally make him out as he crosses into the spotlighted circle - is carrying a duffel bag on his back, and holds a bottle of water in his hand. He ignores all of you, slipping between the students to get to the chalkboard. 

He drops his bag on the ground - it sounds heavy, you note - and lets out a long sigh, finally looking over the group in front of him. 

You narrow your eyes as you cross your arms over your chest and look him over from the relative anonymity of your placement at the back of the group. He’s tall and muscular, in a tightly fitted t-shirt and the same black cargo pants you all wore. His hair is cut short, cropped in the same traditional high-and-tight that most men sported here. But he isn’t clean-shaven like all the other men, still sporting an unkempt 5-o’clock shadow that looked days old. You even notice the glint of an earring as he turns to survey the group and feel your mouth drop open. 

The blatant disregard for uniform standards! And he was supposed to be an instructor? 

Before you start exploding with unanswered questions, he finally addresses the class. 

“Right -” He claps his hands together once, hard, making everyone jump. You shoot a look at Tara when you hear his thick, Cockney accent, mouthing what you really think: 

Bad. News. 

“This is Combat Basics. I’ll be taking over for Wen for the time being, here and in Conditioning.” 

Your heart sinks, your fears confirmed. You pipe up hotly from the back-

“What happened to Captain Wen?” 

There’s a few murmurs of agreement, and you can see the new Instructor glancing around to find the source of the question. You don’t move to reveal yourself. 

He clears his throat, looking slightly annoyed. “Dunno. Maybe the old bat finally retired.”

In the middle of your senior year at the Academy?! You suck in air, ready to argue, only to double over wheezing thanks to Tara’s harsh elbow into your gut. 

Spluttering, you look up at her. 

“Shut up, Harper!” She hisses at you, She eyes you significantly, and you know that the matter isn’t dropped, she just doesn’t want you to catch shit from this new guy. You nod at her with an eye roll. 

“Quiet back there!” You hear him snap from the front, frowning at the general restlessness from your section of the group. 

He lets out a long suffering sigh, tilting his head back and pinching the bridge of his nose. 

“All. Right.” He tries again, somehow with even less patience in his voice. “I will be taking over this unit from Wen. This is Combat Basics, so we’re going back to basics.”

He nods at the chalkboard behind him as he continues. “You’ll notice your rankings are gone.” 

You did notice, actually, lips pressed into a thin line with displeasure. That ‘1’ you’re used to seeing next to your name was hard-won and has been even harder to maintain. 

“I want to see what you all can do for myself.” He says, a slight smirk starting to pull at his mouth. “You’ll have real rankings in my class, based on performance alone. I do not play favorites, and I do not care who paid your way into this Academy.” 

You can feel hot shame bubbling up in your chest, swiftly transforming into affronted rage - a much easier emotion to address. Your class rank wasn’t influenced by your relationships with the instructors; It was earned by your personal blood, sweat, and tears over the last 3 years. You didn’t pull all-nighters in the shooting range for months to fix your tendency to pull left just for this chav to come in and demolish everything you’d worked for. 

You want to rip his trashy gold earring right out of his earlobe. 

“Today, you’ll spar each other one-on-one, knockout tournament style. You lose, you’re out. The ten finalists will spar me - not that I expect any of you to win, so the top 10 rankings will be decided on how long you can last.” 

Your teeth grind to stop yourself from scoffing out loud. Who the hell did this guy think he was? 

Getting to the top 10 would have to be your goal for the day, then. Because you really wanted the opportunity to hit this fucking guy. 

“Sir?” A boy pipes up near the front of the group, your brain searches for his name but comes up empty (not a threat, no need to remember). “Do you have a name?” 

A few of the others around him can’t hide their smirks and chuckles, and you roll your eyes. 

His gaze is cold and calculating as he takes in the group of boys. You wonder if he sees what you do - insubordinate, chuckleheads that thrive on adrenaline and don’t take this seriously. Or does he see what so many of the other instructors do? Growing, young men with a zest for life that will excel in their field of inevitable violence? 

“Tangerine. But you all call me ‘Sir’. Understood?”

Gasps and mutters ripple through the assembled students at his name, and you can’t help your own dropped jaw and raised eyebrows. He was infamous, to be sure, and what was he doing here? 

You’d heard of him as a bogeyman. He was supposed to be one of the most brutal, ruthless, and effective agents to ever come out of the Academy. His type didn’t come back to instruct. They lived and died in the field. 

Clearly, he had expected the reaction at revealing his identity, and didn’t seem phased by the shock in your class. He just repeated himself louder, more forcefully. 

“Understood?”

Your class got themselves together enough to chorus a loud ‘Yes, Sir!’ and he nodded once, satisfied. 

“Line up, alphabetically. Let’s get started.”

As things get started, you’re glad of your middle of the pack status thanks to your last name. It saves you from starting in the first rounds and risking tiring out by the time you’d get to spar Tangerine. You’re happy to let the competition thin itself out, as you wait your turn in line. 

Tangerine splits you all into five brackets - no seeding, no consideration for weight class or gender, just going straight down the line of you all. You end up starting in the third round of your group, only having to get through three more students before you can move up into the semi-finals. 

Watching the others, you notice most everyone is playing by the book. You watch the clean sparring happening around you with a look of consternation. They’re all too concerned with beating out each other that they’re missing the real test here. 

Then again, you’ve never given much consideration to the rabble around you - it’s always been a given in your mind that you’re better than them.

He’s the real competitor. 

If you wanted to have a shot at landing a hit on Tangerine, you would need to conserve as much strength and energy as you could. 

Your plan was to play dirty. Go for round-winning moves as quickly and efficiently as possible. You didn’t want to waste your strength on drawn out grappling matches on the mat. 

Tangerine winds his way between mats, observing the brawls without comment. Sometimes he’ll stop and watch a full match, cold blue eyes offering nothing as to what he might be thinking. He just nods at the winner and moves on to the next pair. 

You notice him watching you just as you sink your teeth into the meaty palm of a boy twice your size as he tries to get a hold of you from behind. Your mouth comes away bloody as the boy drops you, and you spit as you get back to your feet, holding his intense gaze. 

He merely raises an eyebrow and continues on to the next group without so much as a word. Your fury at his lack of acknowledgement at you, at your blatant disregard for the rules, drives you to sink your knee into your opponent’s groin as hard as you can, following him down with an elbow to the throat to cut off his oxygen and keep him down. 

You breeze through the rest of your group, coming out ahead in the top 20 students that would now fight for the chance to keep fighting. 

You’re pleased to see Tara also made the top 20, bumping her shoulder affectionately as you both wait for your turns to be up. She gets knocked out before you have a chance to spar with her - and you’re secretly glad. It wouldn’t feel good to pull her hair or scratch at her eyes, and you didn’t want the possible conflict of feelings to get in the way of winning. 

There’s more boys than girls in the top 20, but you can tell that their strength and size has been working against them. Forced to mostly fight each other, they’re beginning to slow down. The punches are packing less heat, the shoves not looking as strong. 

Your grin is razor sharp as you enter the ring against the same cocky boy asking Tangerine’s name earlier. It feels like child play to wipe the smarmy smirk off his face with the heel of your boot. He goes down with a broken nose, blood streaming down his face as his buddies walk him to the infirmary. 

As the others take note of your ruthlessness, they all start to let loose a little more. You’re not the only one with blood on your knuckles by the time the top 10 is settled. 

Tangerine grants you all a ten-minute break before the real games begin, and you take the time to clean yourself up a bit and sit on the cold gymnasium floor with your water. 

Tara sits next to you, examining your knuckles with a medic’s clinical eye. “Why are you pushing yourself so hard? It’s just Basics!” She sounds exasperated, used to your relentless pursuit of perfection. 

You shake your head fiercely, watching Tangerine as he starts warming himself up. “He doesn’t know who I am. And he disrespected Wen. I owe him one.” You tell her, meeting her gaze with a cocky grin. 

She just shakes her head, letting go of your hand with an eye roll. “Well, I guess I’ll be the one patching you up at the end of class today. Again.” 

You both laugh, and you’re glad to have Tara in your corner. She doesn’t understand you, not completely, but she’s here for you anyway. 

Tangerine whistles, loudly, piercing through the quiet chatter of the class and bringing everyone back to attention. “Alright, top ten!” He claps his hands, wrapped and ready for sparring, standing and waiting in the center of the largest mat. “Line up, let’s see how long you twerps last.”

You make a point of taking your time to get in line, wanting to watch at least a few others go first and get an idea of what you’d be working with. You weren’t the only with that idea, either, so you have to stomp on some toes and throw an elbow or two to secure your position at the end of the line. 

Your confidence slips ever so slightly as you watch him plow through student after student. He’s strong and fast, well-trained, and ruthless. You thought you fought dirty, but he’s using every trick in the book if it means winning. 

You watch him go for illegal grabs, jabs in the eyes or throat, sucker punches to the gut. He’s brutal. You know just by this small showing that he is deadly. 

The losers whine and complain as they limp off, licking their wounds. He never says a word in return, just calling “Next!” and making note of how long they lasted. 

Nobody has lasted longer than two minutes by the time it gets to you. 

“Name?” He asks you as you step up. He’s sweating, despite how unfazed he seems on the outside, he is still human after all. 

“Harper.” You respond, dropping into your fighting stance, purposefully dropping the respectful ‘Sir’ that’s expected of you. 

Your heart is racing madly, tension coiled tight in your chest along with the desperation of needing to succeed. You must win. You must survive. 

The timer starts with a beep and nearly makes you jump. You brace yourself, prepared for him to rush you, but he surprises you by keeping his distance. The two of you circle each other warily for a long beat. 

The goal isn’t to beat him, but to last the longest. The other students failed to grasp this, too desperate to prove their strength and prowess. Your strategy is to bait and wait. But he seems to know what you’re up to and is testing your patience to let him come to you. 

A few of the students are starting to catcall now, egging you on -

“C’mon Harper!” “Yeah, get him, Harper!” 

That infuriating eyebrow of his raises again, bringing your blood pressure up with it. Cocky fucking bastard. 

You’re both circling closer and closer, looking for openings. You decide to risk it all by opening with a feint - telegraphing a punch to his nose to disguise the suckerpunch to his gut. 

He surprises you further, catching both wrists with an iron grip even though he was only looking at the fist coming at his face. He clucks his tongue, all sardonic disappointment. “Patience, love.”

You hear the blood rush in your ears, feeling fury starting to overtake your more logical impulses. Is he teasing you?

You repeat a favorite move for when your hands are occupied, bringing your knee up - hard - to connect with his groin. But, he’s already released you and stepped out of your range. You compensate for the imbalance by pushing forward and sweeping a foot to try and catch him off. 

He stumbles, but doesn’t fall, and you try to take advantage of the opening with an upper palm jab to his nose - if it connected, his nose would surely break - but he’s faster than he looks and catches your wrist out of the air. He uses your momentum against you, pulling your arm up and spinning you so you’re trapped against his front in a crushing bearhug hold. 

You grunt, feeling the air forcefully pushed out of your lungs, even as you struggle to keep him from increasing the pressure on your ribcage. 

You swear to god he chuckles under his breath behind you and you see red. 

Your head dips forward and then whips back as hard as you can, resulting in a satisfying crunch of connection. It hurts you just as bad, but stuns him enough that you can break his hold and stumble away. You hear him snarl - the first bit of displeasure you’ve actually heard him voice during these fights - and see him shake his head to regain his bearings. 

That’s for Captain Wen.

He doesn’t look so unaffected anymore, you note with satisfaction. Actually, he looks kind of pissed. Good. 

Or maybe not so good, you think, as he careens at you with much less poise than before. 

Your wait and bait strategy finally comes into play now that he’s finally on the offensive - he wants to hurt you, you realize with a cold pang of fear as you dodge and weave between fists and jabs with the power of a semi-truck behind them. 

You block the hits you can’t dodge, and you feel the impact of every damn one rattle your bones.

Your breath comes in short, panicked bursts as he forces you further and further back to try to keep out of his range. Soon you’ll come up on the edge of the mat and you refuse to be disqualified for something as common as stepping out of bounds. 

You duck under an incoming fist, darting fast to the side and trying to get behind him. You send a targeted nerve strike to where his kidneys live - usually an instant downer for bigger guys than him - but he just roars and turns, grabbing at you to pull you down where he’s instantly on top of you. 

He’s calculated, even in his rage, sitting on your knees so you can’t kick out and pinning your hands down with all his strength. You struggle in the hold, but as the student assistant starts counting, you fear it’s in vain. 

He even keeps your hands pinned at your sides, leaving no flesh close enough that you can bite. No dirty tricks to help you here - you just aren’t strong enough. 

The crazed look in his eyes starts to fade as the count continues, and the calculating look returns. Like he’s seen what he needs to, and has come to his consensus. The shame and fury battle hotly in your chest and your nostrils flare with impotent rage. 

As the student calls “...8…9…10!” you hold Tangerine’s steady blue gaze with your own. And spit right into his face, hovering above yours. 

To his credit, he keeps the hold until the count is done, some of that fury settling back into his cold gaze. That feels better. He releases you when it’s all done, standing up nonchalantly, wiping his face with the hem of his shirt. 

The student assistant hesitates, but calls out the time. “Almost three minutes!” 

The class crowded around, watching the intense match, all burst out in shouts of joy or disappointment. Some are happy to watch you win, others mad that they didn’t last as long. 

You stand up and give a mock bow to the class, pumping your fist for your fans. Tangerine just watches you, arms crossed. He waits for the class to settle down before speaking. 

“So - Winner -” He addresses you, voice dripping with derision. “What was the lesson today?”

Put on the spot, still flush with adrenaline, you aren’t sure what he’s looking for. “Sir?” You question between heaving breaths.

He looks annoyed, like he thought you should know the answer easily. He speaks again, slow and measured. The class is hanging onto his every word. 

“You seem to be the only one who understood from the start. Was this class really just about rankings?”

That fucking eyebrow lifts again, a dare in a facial expression. Your eyes widen, surprised to realize that he was watching you from the start. 

“No, sir.” You reply, trying to force your labored breathing back to normal. You aren’t totally sure what he’s fishing for, but you decide to be honest. “It’s about winning.” It’s always been about winning for you.

He gives one nod, an affirmative. “And what happens - out there - if we don’t win?” He prompts. He wants more from you.

The answer hits you like a truck. “We die.” 

The class is silent, taking it in. The atmosphere of camaraderie and fun competition has quickly evaporated, leaving you all feeling like vapid, silly children. 

“That’s right. Win, or die.” He addresses the whole class, gaze sweeping across the group before he moves back to the chalkboard. He marks a ‘1’ next to your name, but leaves every other space blank. 

It couldn’t be more effective than if he put a literal target on your back.

“Who said I did anything?”

Nile narrows her eyes at her. That tone of voice elicits many things: trust is not one of them. Joe outright snickers.

Nicky says, voice low, “You know what you did.”

Joe mouths, “She does,” and then says out loud, “It’s not so bad, Nile. Nicky’s banned from football. And I’m not allowed to do any plumbing.” He says this like it’s a bad thing.

Nile suspects that they’ve also put an unspoken ban up against her audiobooks. Every time she puts one on doing her laundry, somebody comes up to speak with her, until she’s forgotten all about it. She also keeps losing the old iPod she found with the books on it, and whenever she finds it, it needs to be charged.

It’s ridiculous is what it is. She says so. “Andy is four thousand years old.” Andy raises her brows but doesn't comment one way or the other. Joe makes a so-so face, which really just means Nile’s wrong. She soldiers on. “I don’t care how bad she is, she should be able to cook!”

Andy shrugs around her bowl. “I can cook.”

“We’re all adults. We should have a roster. It’s not fair that it’s just Joe and Nicky.” Of them, Nile herself is probably the weakest: she can make a few comfort foods, but she’s never mastered the art. She’d like to, though. Part of it is wanting to hold onto the food she remembers before she can’t get it anymore and she’s forgotten, and part of it is that it’s just practical. But left to her own devices, she just eats whatever’s there. A roster will help.

And it wouldn’t feel right to leave Andy off it. Nile tells herself this is about fairness and house chores and not about the strange panic that takes over her whenever she imagines never eating her mom’s good again and then remembers that (a) Andy looks like she's maybe five years younger than her mom, and (b) she, too, is mortal. Which is dumb. It’s not like she thinks of Andy as anything like her mother. If anything she’s the bad influence friend everyone’s mom warns them about, but who everyone wants to—

Anyway.

“I don’t mind,” Andy says. Nile turns to Nicky.

Nicky says, “If you wish,” and then looks at Joe like he’s expecting Joe to speak up on his behalf.

Joe grins. “I have no objections.”

Andy’s turn on the roster comes up two days later. She spends the morning out of the house and comes back with two bags full of groceries. When Nile goes to help her with it, bewildered, it turns out one of the bags is half filled with low shelf life candy, and that Andy doesn’t need help, though she looks amused that Nile would offer.

Then she gets to it. She’s not what Nile was expecting, which was someone a little unsure of herself in the kitchen. She chops fluidly and fast, as good with a knife on meat and veg as she would be with it as a weapon, and she moves like she knows what she's doing.

But what she’s doing is—strange. At first glance, the dish is beef, with thick chunks of meat cooking in enough oil to thrill her grandma. But then she throws chunks of apple in alongside the potato. As it cooks, she starts rolling out some dough, with more eggs than make sense. Pie, Nile thinks, even if it's not a pie she knows of, but she rolls it out by hand into sheets of pasta, all while stirring the beef concoction. A bar of the dark chocolate she's munching on goes into the pot, followed by a concerning quantity of nuts. When she grabs an orange, Nile thinks it's for a snack, but she peels the whole rind into a neat spiral and tosses the rind into the pot before offering Nile a slice. When the pasta is cut, she just—starts flipping the sheets into the pot.

Nicky looks into the kitchen as he passes by and starts muttering to himself in Italian. When he opens his mouth, Andy only says, “If you’d rather do it yourself,” and Nicky walks away.

Oh, Nile thinks. “You won’t get out of the roster just by making bad food, you know,” she says, though she suspects she probably will. If it's terrible, she figures she’ll get takeout. She already saw Joe surreptitiously hide a bag of something in the back of the fridge. She hopes he got enough for her.

Andy only winks at her. Nile sits down.

In go raisins, cashew nuts, sticks of cinnamon, the stalk of some plant she doesn't even recognise, more garlic than even Nicky uses, and a whole tablespoon of turmeric. Then come the chillies: long, with the heads sliced off, thrown in whole. When the room starts smelling like heat, she cools it with cups of milk. More vegetables follow: large chunks of carrot and beet, strips of cabbage and slices of—ugh—eggplant go in along with a store-bought sauce she can't read the label of, spoons of cream, a quarter of a bottle of alcohol she's pretty sure isn't meant to be used to cook with, and—somehow—even more chocolate, and some of her favourite morning cereal.

This is the point at which Nile decides to stop watching. It feels a little like tearing herself away from a car crash, but she makes herself go look for her iPod. She finds it between two cushions of the sofa twenty minutes later, at 3%.

Andy calls Nile in to help carry the food out when she's done, half an hour later. Nile’s a little bit afraid of the monster she's created as she looks into the pot. It looks less than appetising, a deep brown that looks thick and has things floating in it and cheese melting on top. On the sides of the pot, she can see bright red oil floating in place.

When she carries it out, her iPod is already gone from where it was charging by the kitchen table. Nile glares at Joe and Nicky, who look back innocently (Joe) and distractedly upset (Nicky). It has to be Joe, she figures.

Andy serves them the frankenstew in deep bowls with toasted slices of Nicky’s last sourdough next to it. With no ceremony at all, she grins and says, “Dig in.”

Then, without waiting for the rest of them, she starts eating.

A little relieved that Andy isn’t going to leave them to eat it alone, Nile takes a small, tentative bite.

The dish is—not bad. She takes another bite, and then another.

The stew is delicious. Nile can feel her arteries clogging with every bite, immortality or no immortality, but she thinks she doesn't even care. It's hot enough to leave her tongue prickling after just a couple of bites, but she wants to keep eating it. It's sweet and salty and sour; the meat falls apart in her mouth but the nuts crunch. The pasta is not really pasta at all, thicker and softer and melting in her mouth like soft bread. The broth is creamy and thick, and none of the vegetables are too mushy or draw too much attention to themselves. It's the best thing she's ever eaten, she thinks. She never wants to eat anything else again.

When she looks up, she must look a little guilty, because Joe pats her arm comfortingly. “I know,” he says.

Andy hums around a mouthful and says, slowly, “It’s not as good as I remember it.”

Nicky looks despairing. He’s staring into the bowl like it insulted his mother. Maybe it has. “That’s what you said last time,” he says.

Nile considers things like nostalgia and pride and cholesterol and having more of the pot for herself, and slides Andy’s half-full bowl towards herself. “You’re off the roster, Andy. And you’re banned from cooking again,” she says authoritatively.

“I thought making bad food wouldn’t get me off the roster?”

Nile nods. This is worse.

Joe grins, ducks into the kitchen, and comes back with the box he had hidden in the fridge, which now that Nile looks closely says Andy Dinner. Andy laughs at her as she eats it.

since the newest revelations kiiind of broke my plot (which tbf is what i get for writing fic while the show is ongoing), let’s say we’re officially in au territory and nurse park isn’t moonyoung’s mom. cool? cool

also, for those who haven’t watched hotel del luna (obviously spoilers for hotel del luna ahead), mago is a god-like figure who does... stuff... and knows fate and stuff... and the tree is connected to the hotel owner’s life. if it’s dead, the hotel owner is immortal, but once it starts to bloom, the hotel owner dies when its flowers fall. 

also also don’t hate me too much xo

Bastard, she thought at him as Moon Kangtae walked away. She could picture it—words from her mind gaining physical form and launching themselves at him like bullets. One “bastard” through his shoulder. One “hypocrite” in his spine. One expletive no children's author should say in his upper leg. Her hand, stretching and stretching, grabbing him by the throat, until he told her what the hell his problem was, ideally with apologies and grovelling.

She stormed back towards her car, absolutely fucking starving. Who did he think he was? He'd been flirting with her since the day they'd met. Moonyoung wasn't an idiot. The leg up hers—the wink as he walked away from her the first time—telling her Sangin had called him—the way he'd followed her out and calmed her down on that day—the way he'd stopped that man from even reaching her, then turned around and checked if she was alright, even though they hadn't made any contact—

Forget about that hotel.

If it was just a front, why had he gotten so upset over her description of the castle? That there had been fear, recognition of sorts, something that proved to her that she was right, that she had seen it, that that hotel was more than a three-storey redbrick covered in ivy, that it was—

—there.

There, in the distance, lighting up the sky. A palace. Undisguised by the rain, lighting up every drop of water. A palace she had never seen before, but one she had, hadn't she? Forget about that dream? Well, it was no dream, and nothing Moon Kangtae told her to forget would fool her now.

She turned around and walked toward Hotel Blue Moon.

When Kangtae had returned to the hotel from Hwaseong, the hotel's tree had been alive with leaves.

Just little buds that barely brought greenery to it, but—it was more alive than it had been in the last many, many, many years. And that might have been enough to scare him, but. 

But then she had called, and he had gone, content to pretend the tree coming alive had nothing to do with the first person he had spoken to more than once in the years he'd been running the hotel.

It could be anything, he had reasoned.

But Mago—her he couldn't trust. A flower because she was pretty? If he didn't know what she was, he would have tried to crush her right there, throw her out of their sight, stop her interrupting the few hours of pleasure and entertainment and—moon forbid—relaxation he found once in a century or so.

By the time he reached his car, having taken the roundabout way to avoid running into her again on the way there, the moon had risen, and he could see the hotel shining past the other buildings, its crescent moon brighter than the moon itself, its towers taller than any other building in that direction. That was his hotel. A ghost light, shining ever-present on the skyline, always following him, always just there.

She had seen it. The short description of the palace had been enough to prove that; there was no way she would assume it resembled a palace otherwise, rather than those modern glass buildings that every other hotel in the city was.

He passed by two ghosts walking toward the hotel, one drenched and damp with eyes turned to the hotel like it was a beacon, the other with sockets in place of eyes—both a pallid blue that looked like death. He clenched his jaw and drove on. That was the problem. Kangtae rather liked Ko Moonyoung as she was. Pretty, and dangerous, and able to keep up with him... and alive. Human. So decidedly far away from his world, despite the way they had met, despite the ghost that had tried to pay him for revenge upon her. He would rather like, he thought, for her to stay that way.

So—no more meeting her, he supposed. Not if Mago was interfering, not if she could somehow see the hotel, if just in her dreams.

Not that it mattered. Ko Moonyoung was a human; Kangtae was the owner of Hotel Blue Moon. It had never been anything more than a little flirtation.

He stormed into the hotel angrier than the rain outside, and shouldered past when Jaesu tried to speak to him. He was in no fucking mood. The elevator took him to the top floor, and he grabbed one of his glass bottles before he strode onto the balcony. The rain itself shook around him.

Jaesu found him a few minutes later. "Why are you all angry again?" he asked—truly a man who didn't fear for his life. He tended to jump whenever one of the more gruesome ghosts came up to him, but he wasn't afraid of the one that could truly kill him. Kangtae scoffed.

"Mago," he answered, knocking back his drink. "What else?"

Jaesu crossed his arms. "Just Mago? It had nothing to do with that author? Again?" Kangtae ignored him, balancing his glass on the railing of the balcony and pouring himself another. "That writer means trouble, Mr. Moon. First you fought that ghost, and now the tr—" he cut off abruptly, apparently realising that he was treading on very, very thin ice.

Kangtae had nearly let someone drown in a frozen river once.

"Jaesu," Kangtae said, putting his drink away and glaring at him. "Stay out of what you don't know." He looked down to the ground, to the two ghosts just stumbling into the hotel, one in blue and one in a fluttering cream. "This has nothing to do with—" he started, and then stopped, looking down.

Cream. Like two balloons around her arms. She'd hovered so close to him the end of her skirt had brushed against his thighs. We match, she'd said.

All ghosts were blue from a distance.

The woman in cream grabbed the ghost's arm, and then both froze.

He was running downstairs before he realised, shoving past guests that tried to speak to him and the odd staff member that watched. This was his hotel—the stairs listened to him, moving faster than the elevators would, flying him through the levels until he was finally, finally, at ground, past the lobby, and outside.

Outside, where the blue ghost had her palms around Ko Moonyoung's shoulders. Moonyoung was a leaf in the wind, something resembling whimpers leaving her throat, as the ghost felt upwards and upwards, until her hands were at her neck and pressing, pressing.

Kangtae shoved the ghost away, nearly enough force to destroy her entirely. She stumbled away, hands scrambling for purchase, pits where her eyes should be, but he didn't care. Moonyoung fell, knees giving with the grip of the ghost on her, and he caught her, his arms around her, hints of blue around her shoulders and throat. Someone was shouting her name—maybe it was him.

Her eyes opened, finally, lucidity and recognition shining through. He could see the moon in them.

She said, "My lifejacket."

And then she went limp in his arms.