Blood cult au part nineteen (first, most recent, masterpost)
Currently: the wraiths are dead (mostly), and Rumi didn’t even kill Bobby in the process—many thanks to Zoey, who’s formally decided to drop out of med school and join Celine’s shamanic order. That said, Minji and Miyeong need a hospital, and Mira needs a little more than that.
Miyeong insists they go to different hospitals, "for opsec purposes, don't argue with me I'm in too much pain," and so they end up splitting into pairs. Celine and Miyeong make their way to St Mary's, Rumi stays with Minji at the university hospital just to be safe, and Zoey and Mira go back to the apartment once they drop Minji off, to get Mira cleaned up and put all of the "obvious shaman stuff" away and collect a change of clothes for Miyeong.
Celine isn't exactly surprised when the nurse asks Miyeong about patient privacy and she waves her hand, dismissive, and says "It's fine, she can hear whatever," but the trust warms her, anyway. Miyeong looks a little surprised when Celine wraps their fingers together after a particularly unhappy wince, but she holds on, and Celine texts Minji and Zoey one-handed and tracks the opiates kicking in by the intervals between the painful tightening of her grip.
There's a wait for X-rays, another wait for surgery, and as Miyeong's pain slowly subsides, Celine updates her on Minji — no concussion, her tongue needs stitches, she'll be able to come visit by the time Miyeong is out of surgery if Miyeong doesn't think that's an opsec problem too — and Mira, whose cleansing may require all four of them or retrieving a few things from Celine's office, but shouldn't be any more of an issue than Miyeong's surgery.
Miyeong is clearly relieved to hear both, but remains pensive, and Celine eventually prods, gently. "Worried about your knee?"
"... Yeonggi wasn't there."
"... ah."
"We can— wraiths do their routines from life, right? When they're not doing anything else? We can find him, I can find him, but I don't know..."
She trails off, and Celine waits. The chair isn't all that comfortable, and her arm's at a bit of an awkward angle, but she will wait a hundred years for Miyeong, if that's what Miyeong needs.
But what Miyeong says, eventually, is, "The wraith that Mira killed was a photographer from my magazine."
Minji has, many times, seen a patient’s loved ones being far more distressed than the patient themself. Thankfully, Rumi isn’t having a tearful breakdown at her bedside.
She is, however, silently staring and vibrating with energy as the doctor explains what he’s doing, such that Minji decides against reminding the idiot that she’s a nurse, and does in fact know what local anesthetics and absorbable sutures are.
(Doctors.)
Minji updates Celine (and Miyeong) and Zoey (and Mira) whenever she has a spare moment—it won’t be long, but it will be an annoying month or two of soft foods.
Discharge instructions taken, Minji levers herself up off the bed, trying not to roll her eyes at Rumi’s nervous hands, waiting to catch her—concussion or no, she isn’t exactly in perfect form.
To her surprise, though, the door is opening again. “Minji?”
Minji feels a pit open up in her chest as she recognizes the woman at the door. Hyeonsuk moved over to work at the university three years back, but that didn’t mean—
“Minji,” Hyeonsuk breathes, rushing in. “It is you.”
Rumi gets in the way before Hyeonsuk can go for a hug. She just stands, solid, silent, a wall in human form and she looks at Minji. Hyeonsuk makes a startled sound.
“It’s okay,” Minji manages, even if the words come out slurred around the anesthetic’s influence on her tongue. “She’s… my friend.”
Maybe the only one Minji has left.
She looks at Hyeonsuk, not quite in the eyes, unable to manage that over the horrible guilt. “My niece. She’s protective, since…”
(Accurately, she supposes, fitting Rumi into her family tree, a first cousin once removed might make more sense—Misuk-imonim will be so happy to have gotten another grandchild, she’s sure.)
Rumi bows heavily in apology as she steps back. “I did not mean to cause trouble.”
“No, no,” Hyeonsuk says. “I just—I saw your name and I needed to see if—we thought you were dead, Minji.”
Minji doesn’t know what to say to that. There is no good answer.
I should’ve been there is almost as bad as We killed the things that did it. She and I and a wondrous mudang and an American and a witch. I think Miyeong might’ve gotten one, I’m not sure. We killed them.
She doesn’t think either truth will calm her, anyway.
Finally, slowly, her body skips ahead of her turtle-brain and asks, “We?”
Mira cradles the pot in her hands like a lifeline. The mugwort had worn off a little while ago and a moving car is not the best place for shaman rituals.
It’s fine. If she focuses enough, she can map out the blotchy brushstrokes that comprise each sunflower dotted along the sky blue ceramic. She traces each petal with her finger, it gives her hands something to do other than shake. It gives her mind something to do other than think. It gives the wraith— Seven. There are seven sunflowers on this pot. Bobby had given Zoey this pot. Zoey had trusted Mira with this pot. I am Mira.
An unwelcome yet familiar sensation graces her fingertips. It slithers up her arms like a pair of eels and it pools itself in her gut like a heavy stone.
Mira’s eyes refocus, she looks down at the pot in her lap. Ash, she’s smeared ash all over Zoey’s pot. Her wrists burn anew. I am Mira and I ruin everything, the wraith she thinks. Something hot builds up behind her eyes as the scent of ash works its way through her system. She screws her eyes shut. Ice claws its way up her throat. For one horrific moment she wonders if her neck has been reopened.
Warm fingers brush against her bicep, chipping at the ice.
“Did you know kangaroos can’t go backwards?!” Zoey blurts.
Mira twists in the front seat to look at her incredulously. Zoey has her eyes fixed on the road, hands at ten-and-two, an expression of utter mortification on her face.
“They can’t?” Mira asks as the ice in her throat rapidly thaws. Satisfaction and warmth kindle in Mira’s chest as Zoey’s mortification falls away. “Nope!” Zoey says, her fingers tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel. (Mira absently notes that it’s one of her ‘happy rhythms.’) “It’s mainly because of the tail.”
“Huh!” “Pretty cool, right?” “Sick,” Mira agrees. “Do you have any more cool animal facts?”
Zoey’s eyes sparkle and the rest of the drive passes in the whirl of an impromptu lecture on the nature of turtle shells. Mira lets the wraith drown under the sound of Zoey’s voice and the sparkle in her eyes. Zoey believes I can keep this pot safe. That is why she gave it to me. She trusts me. Idly Mira examines the pot again. The ash streaks have only made the yellow of the flowers stand out all the brighter.
It won’t be too hard to clean, with a little water, a clean cloth and some determination. Maybe she hasn’t ruined it after all.
Minji can’t stop herself from shaking and twitching in rhythm as she gets them out of the hospital, her joy and her guilt warring within her until they force her body to move with their energy.
“Imonim,” Rumi says softly, touching her arm.
The title doesn’t quite add up until she turns to see Hyeonsuk approaching them, a jacket on over her scrubs and a bag over her shoulder, smiling tearfully as she talks into her phone. “Yeah, yeah, Sieun, she’s right here, I’ve got her, here—“
Minji takes the phone, and finds herself unable to breathe. Sieun. Sieun, her best friend, her Sieun. Dead Sieun.
There’s a ragged sound from the other end. Then: “Minji?”
“Hello,” Minji says, because that is what you say when you answer the phone, and a boulder like her will always follow its path.
(Sieun. Her best friend. Alive Sieun.)
“Minji,” Sieun gasps, “Minji, babe, I thought—you didn’t—what the hell? Where have you been?”
Minji stands, feeling so much as to be numb and silent, until Hyeonsuk takes her arm and starts to lead her and Rumi towards her car.
It shocks an answer from her, it seems. “Miyeong’s.”
Sieun laughs, wild and hysterical, and Minji smiles on autopilot, because Sieun’s reactions have long been her guide when she’s lost. And yet…
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I should’ve been there.”
Sieun deserves her honesty. Sieun can always take her honesty.
Hyeonsuk misses a step, and Minji nearly walks into her back. Oh. They’re at the car.
Rumi frowns heavily, some unreadable emotion underneath it as she reaches down to where Minji has, without noticing, dug her nails in and takes her hand, squeezing in slow, rhythmic pulses.
“…Please,” Sieun says, “tell me that you mean after. Because, Minji, the only damn thing keeping me together this last month is the fact that I might get to have this conversation. Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry for finally figuring things out with Miyeong instead of—instead of—instead of dying of smoke inhalation.”
Minji cannot answer her. Sieun deserves her honesty.
Sieun takes a sharp breath. She lets it out, controlled, and takes another. “Okay. So when Hyeonsuk gets you here, I’m going to hug you. And neither of us are going to feel guilty for surviving.”
Minji squeezes back in time with Rumi’s rhythm, trying desperately to anchor herself as she stares at Hyeonsuk’s car.
“I have lost too many people to lose you too,” she says. “Don’t you dare say no, Minji. Don’t you dare.”
“Okay,” Minji says. “Miyeong’s in surgery right now. I should leave a message, though.”
There’s a long beat. And then, again: “What the hell, Minji?”
Celine's voice is neutral, mild, when she asks, "Someone you knew well?"
Miyeong's not entirely sure how to answer that. She wouldn't have talked to Jeremy outside of work; they didn't have much in common, didn't like to spend their free time the same way. But they were friendly enough on the job, were always able to hold a conversation, knew how to get each other the angles or access they needed without having to ask.
"… well enough that I would have said he was a decent person," she finally says, because that's the real problem, isn't it? "He said— maybe it was stupid, but I asked him, during the fight, what deal he made. He said it was to protect him from bullies. Does that mean university? Grade school? Can a— how can a dumb kid make a deal with Gwi-Ma, how is that—"
Celine's thumb traces along the back of Miyeong's knuckles, a soothing, wordless acknowledgment. "A contract with the demon king can be broken, while one still lives. It isn't easy, or entirely safe for the advocate, but if your friend had regretted a path chosen in foolish adolescence, he could have stepped off it as an adult."
"How… could he not have? How could—"
Maybe it's the opiates or the adrenaline crash or maybe it's just Celine, sitting there with her hand wrapped around Miyeong's with all the patience in the world and not a single shred of judgement, but somehow, for once, it feels easy to say.
"I know bad people," Miyeong admits, picking at a bit of fuzz on the pilled-up fleece blanket the last nurse gave her, "from way too close up. I've done the whole dance, the makeup and the excuses and the giving up friends, I know what it looks like when nothing is as important to someone as himself. And I don't know, maybe Jeremy had some secret dark side, but Yeonggi— I know what Minji has probably said about him, and I won't pretend he didn't make some bad choices, but he wasn't evil, Celine. He wasn't the kind of person who sees 'summon a demon to the world to torture everyone forever' and shouts 'hey, sign me up!'"
Celine takes a moment, picking her words with extra care even by Celine standards, and says, "Gwi-Ma is a deceiver. Very few start their service to him with a clear vision of the end. But it doesn't take a particularly cruel man, to stay there, even once the end becomes clear. To justify only a little more cruelty, when you've come so far, when it's only happening to someone else." Her thumb soothes over Miyeong's knuckles again. "You could put it in psychology terms; sunk cost fallacy, moral acclimation. But in my order we simply say that every bad choice is practice for the next."
"… I don't think I care for that adage," admits Miyeong. "I've made a lot of bad choices of my own."
Celine just smiles at her, unjustifiably, impossibly fond. "The inverse is no less accurate; every good choice is practice, too. Which would you consider sheltering us, the last few weeks? Walking into deadly danger for the sake of friends? Choosing Minji?"
Miyeong has never been so thankful in her life to see an orderly as the one who walks in on the heels of Celine's question, readying her bed to wheel her off to surgery and sparing her any need to respond.
