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옷깃만 스쳐도 인연이다.
It's inyeon even if your clothes brush.
— Old Korean proverb
I. the beginning
(the first time you see her, you have no names.)
There's a sound, and your head turns toward it. Not words — those don't exist yet. Just a voice, humming something that isn't quite music, but feels like it should be.
You've never heard anything like it.
Something in your throat wants to answer.
—
You don't have language for what she is to you.
The others in your group have sounds for mother, for danger, for food.
There's no sound for this.
—
She shows you which roots won't kill you. You show her how to trap fish in the shallows.
Her hands are scarred from something — fire, maybe, or claws. The marks are darker than the rest of her skin, spreading up her arms like clouds.
You trace them with your fingers, and she lets you.
—
You sleep curled together when it's cold.
This is how it is.
—
The sickness comes with the rains, and it takes her in three days.
You wait eight days for her to wake up.
She doesn’t.
—
You walk into the river.
The water is cold, then warm, then nothing.
—
(Somewhere, the universe notes: This is the first time.
It won't be the last.)
II. 400s CE, Baekje Kingdom
There is singing from the river bank.
You watch from the raised walkway of your family compound — yours a noble household serving the court, merchants who trade with the Chinese kingdoms — and something in that voice makes your chest tight.
The morning air is cool, and the mist rises from the river in soft curls.
Your hands are already bruised from practice — your father woke you before dawn to drill footwork, blocks, and strikes.
He has no sons, so you must serve. You must be useful.
The woman drawing the water from the bank moves carefully, keeping her face angled away from the other servants.
But you can see it: the wine-dark birthmark covering half her face, temple to jaw.
The other servants avert their eyes as she works. They won't drink from the same dipper. They won't stand too close, as if it’s something that could spread.
You cannot stop staring.
—
She teaches you the river songs over stolen weeks.
When you harmonize, something in the air shifts.
—
“My father consulted the shamans when I was born,” you tell her, once. “They said my hands were made for both war and peace.”
She laughs, soft and sad. “When I was born, they said my mother must have angered the spirits.”
“It looks like spilled ink,” you tell her. “Like a map.”
“Of where?”
“Somewhere we could go together.”
—
Bandits come.
Your body moves before your mind catches up. You've drilled these techniques a thousand times in your father's courtyard, but you've never done it for real.
You’ve never felt the resistance of actual flesh, never heard bone break, never seen blood that isn't from training.
You break the first one's arm, the snap sickeningly loud. You push the second on the ground.
The third one… he runs.
When it's over, you're shaking. Your hands are sticky with blood that isn't yours.
Rumi stares at you, breathless. “You fight like a warrior.”
“My father taught me so I could be useful to him.”
“No,” she says, taking your trembling hands in hers. “You fight to protect.”
The words lodge in your chest, heavy with truth you can't explain.
—
“Jeonsaeng-ui inyeon,” you whisper to her one afternoon. “A connection from a past life.” The shaman's wife taught you the phrase. “People meet again, life after life.”
“You believe in that?”
“I don't know. But I believe in this. In you.”
She kisses you then. Soft and careful, like she's afraid you'll disappear.
You kiss her back, like you're trying to memorize her.
When you pull apart, you're both crying.
—
Your father announces your betrothal on a cold morning.
A magistrate's son. He’s from a good family, and it’s expected. Strategic alliance, he says.
You are fourteen years old.
“No,” you bite out.
His hand cracks across your face. “You exist to be useful. This is how you will be useful.”
—
There’s no tears and no anger shaking her core, and she just sits very still.
She unties the red cord from her wrist, and presses it into your palm. “Keep this. So you remember.”
“Remember what?” Your tears – you can’t even stop them from flowing.
“That someone loves you. That you weren't always just a tool.”
“I'll find you again. Somehow.”
She sings the water song one last time. You try to memorize every note, every breath, and the way sunlight catches in her hair.
—
Years later, word comes of a woman who drowned in the river. Low-born, with a marked face. They say she walked into the water at dawn wearing white, singing.
You don't ask if it was her.
(You already know.)
—
You die at thirty-eight.
No one knows about the red cord they find clutched in your hand when they prepare your body.
III. 1160s, Goryeo Dynasty
There is chanting in the palace gardens.
Fourth in line, no real power. They call her the marked one behind her back, but she’s Princess Rumi to the public.
Colors spreads across her skin in patterns — clouds of light and dark that shift in the sunlight.
In the Goryeo court, they call it the Buddha's touch.
But you've heard the whispers outside, too: Unmarriageable, cursed. A sign the bloodline is weakening.
You can't look away from her, or from the patterns on her skin.
She sees you staring. Her expression shifts — defensive, tired, waiting for disgust or pity.
You smile instead.
Her eyes widen.
—
You find her in the pavilion after the spring ceremony.
She's reading Buddhist sutras, fingers tracing the characters with reverence.
“I'm Mira,” you tell her.
“I know who you are.” Her voice is wary, but not unkind. “Your family wants you to marry General Choi's son.”
“My family wants many things I don't want.”
“We don't get to choose, do we?” She sets down the scroll. “Women like us. We're just pieces on a board.”
—
It happens slowly, then all at once.
Tea in the garden. Walks through the palace grounds. Your families approve because friendship between noble houses strengthens alliances.
But late at night, hidden in the library where she reads sutras and you practice calligraphy, her hand covers yours and you know—
You have held this hand before.
You have lost this hand before.
She hums while she reads, absent and soft, and you find yourself humming a harmony you don’t remember learning too.
—
She reads to you from the sutras. “All conditioned things are impermanent. When one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.”
You hate that passage.
“What if I don't want to turn away?” you ask. “What if I want to hold on? What if we've been finding each other for lifetimes and I'm tired of letting go?”
She sets down the scroll, and she kisses you, soft and certain.
“Then we hold on,” she says. “For as long as we can. And when we can't anymore—”
Jeonsaeng-ui inyeon, you finish.
She smiles. “You know that phrase?”
“I don't know how.” You touch the prayer beads at her wrist. “But I know it's true.”
—
A rival clan accuses Rumi's family, and it’s politics wrapped in religion wrapped in poison.
They use her vitiligo as evidence: proof the bloodline is corrupted.
Rumi eats something at a state dinner that makes her sick.
It’s framed as an accident.
(It's not.)
—
On the third day, the screaming stops.
They let you see her once, briefly.
You lean close and whisper against her hair: “Find me again. Please.”
But she's already gone.
—
You never marry the general's son.
You enter a Buddhist temple instead, and become a nun. Your family cuts you off entirely.
You copy sutras. Every character you brush is a prayer, and every red mark you make on the page is a promise.
Find me again, you write in margins no one else will read.
IV. 1620s, Middle Joseon
There is music from the street corner.
A bipa, with something that sounds like hunger.
You're dressed in your brother's clothes, escaping your father's compound.
He beat you for three days when he found out about your training. Your ribs still ache.
But you slipped out anyway.
—
The bipa player is young — maybe twenty — with hollowed cheeks and clothes mended so many times the original fabric is barely visible. His mother and sister wait in the alley behind him.
The little girl can't be more than eight, so thin you can count her ribs.
You drop your mother's jade hairpin into his hat.
His eyes go wide. “This is— I can't—”
“You can. Feed your family.”
You walk away before he can refuse.
—
Then you hear it.
You follow the sound, past the respectable shops, and right into the district your mother pretends doesn't exist.
The courtyard house where kisaeng entertain yangban men is bright with lanterns even though it's barely dusk.
That voice makes something in your chest crack open, even more than your ribs already have.
You don’t know the words; don’t know the song.
But your voice knows how to answer hers.
—
She has tattoos. They’re deliberate and artistic, with flowers and birds across her collarbones that move when she breathes, and on her shoulders, peonies and phoenixes in purple and black ink.
When her eyes meet yours, she falters. Just for a second.
Just long enough for you to know she feels it too.
The madam appears at your elbow. “You buying or leaving?”
“Buying.”
“That one's expensive.”
You pour all your stolen silver into her hand.
—
Rumi leads you to a private room. The walls are paper-thin, and you can hear everything happening beside you.
“So.” She kneels across from you. “What does a yangban boy want from a kisaeng?”
“I'm... I’m not a boy.”
Her eyebrows rise and she leans closer, studying your face, and her hand lightly brushing at your bound chest. “No. You're not.” She tilts her head. “Then, why are you here?”
“I heard you singing.”
“That's foolish.”
“Probably. But for the first time in so long, I don't want to die.”
She nods, and breathes out as slowly. “I know that feeling.”
—
You come back. Again and again.
You steal jewelry, and sell these possessions that don’t belong to you. Your brothers don't notice you're gone — too busy preparing for civil service exams.
“My parents sold me here when I was nine,” she tells you. “These tattoos mean no respectable family would ever take me back.”
“They're beautiful.”
“They mark me as cheonmin. No matter what I achieve, I'll always be this.”
“That's not all you are.”
“Then what am I?”
“Someone I've been looking for. Someone I'd cross lifetimes to find.”
She goes very still. “That's a strange thing to say.”
But you both feel it.
—
Rumi writes poetry for you. All of these beautiful verses about inyeon and red threads and souls that recognize each other across death.
You kiss her behind the gibang, and she tastes like persimmons and hope.
—
One night, a trio of mudang comes to the gibang.
Shamans aren't welcome in the capital officially — the Confucian elite banned them, calling them superstitious and obscene — but people still seek them out.
They perform, and put on a show in the courtyard. Singing and dancing, drums and bells, all elegance and power and courage and hope.
One of them sees you, and her eyes lock on yours across the courtyard.
After the ritual, she approaches you and Rumi.
“You.” She points at you. “You see them, don't you?”
“See what?”
“You have the gift. Both of you do.” She looks at Rumi now. “You sing to drive them back. You fight to protect. That's what you're meant to do.”
“I don't understand,” Rumi says, the confusion tugging at her eyebrows.
The mudang shakes her head sadly. “You will. When it's too late, you'll understand. It's always coming.”
She leaves before you can ask what she means.
—
The crop failures start in spring.
By autumn, people are desperate.
And desperate people need someone to blame.
—
The accusations start– whispers about shamans, and about women who consort with demons.
You see him again — the bipa player.
He's not on the street corner anymore. He's too clean, too well-fed.
“You,” you call out. “You're doing well.”
“Yes.” He touches his instrument protectively. “I got into the palace.”
“That's wonderful.”
“Is it?” His voice is strange. Hollow.
He runs before you can stop him.
—
Your father finds out about your theft.
The beating is methodical. When it's over, you can't walk.
They lock you in the women's quarters.
You count the days. Wrap strips of cloth around your fingers in figure eights until they go numb.
—
Then, the disaster hits.
The remaining crops turn black overnight.
People riot. Blood runs in the streets, with cries of demons in the air.
And the accusations focus at the gibang; at the kisaeng with tattoos.
—
In a rare break of her silence, your mother tells you: There will be a burning tonight. The authorities are cleansing it.
Your blood turns to ice. “Cleansing?”
“The demons have to come from somewhere. The shamans, the cursed — they'll be dealt with.”
You wait until she leaves, before you tear fabric from the window screens. Then you tie them together and lower yourself from the second floor.
You fall the last six feet, and your ankle rolls painfully.
It doesn't matter.
You run.
—
The gibang is already burning when you arrive.
You push through the crowd. Someone grabs your arm, and you break their nose with your elbow, and keep moving.
You see them then. The shadows. They're everywhere — swirling around the fire, feeding on the fear and pain, growing darker with every scream.
“Please, let me in,” you beg the soldier.
“No one goes in,” he snarls, raising his blade towards you.
You punch him, and steal his woldo. Then you cut down two more, and only manage to run in through a set of doors before the others overwhelm you.
They hold you back while the gibang burns.
You scream Rumi's name until your voice breaks, and you struggle until your strength gives out.
The shadows grow fat and dark. They swirl like smoke, and in their depths you see something worse. Something ancient and hungry, feeding on suffering.
And you realize: this is what you were supposed to fight. This is what shamans have always fought. This is what you and Rumi were meant to do together.
But you didn't know. You weren't ready.
And now it's too late.
—
The trial is quick, and the sentence quicker. They execute you by beheading.
As the blade falls, you think of purple ink on pale skin.
Next time, you whisper. Next time I'll understand.
—
(They found her body in the ruins three days later.
She'd run back inside to save the others.
They found her in the music room, arms wrapped around two younger kisaeng, trying to shield them.
Around her wrist: a red thread, knotted eight times.)
V. 1894, Late Joseon
There is humming from the kitchen compound.
Your family's fortune is dust. The yangban status the family clings to is all that remains — that, and debts your father can't pay.
You're sixteen when your father sells you.
Not marriage — that would require a dowry you don't have. Just... sold, to pay his gambling debts.
Your mother doesn't cry; just watches as they take you away.
Your father is already drunk.
—
The girl in the kitchen is too educated for her position.
You catch her reading the family's books when she thinks no one is watching. Medical texts, poetry, philosophy. Her fingers trace the characters like prayers.
When you clear your throat, she jumps. Bows low. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't—”
“No, it’s okay. It’s just me.” You step closer. “What are you reading?”
“Poetry. About inyeon. Connections across lifetimes.”
“Do you believe in that?”
She looks at you then — really looks — and something in her expression makes your breath catch.
“I think I have to,” she says softly. “Otherwise none of this makes sense.”
—
She has burn scars covering her left side.
Neck, shoulder, arm. The tissue is rough and ridged, pink and white in patterns that remind you of clouds.
“House fire when I was eight,” she explains when she catches you staring, and you duck your head, embarrassed for getting caught. “My family decided I was too ugly to marry off. Bad luck to keep around. So they sold me to a medicine woman who needed an apprentice. When she died, I ended up here.”
“You're yangban-born?”
“Was.” She touches her scars absently. “That was before. Now I'm just... this.”
“You're not just anything.”
She smiles, sad and small. “You're kind. That's dangerous, you know.”
“Why?”
“Because I could fall in love with you for it.” She says it like a joke but her eyes are serious.
The flutter in your stomach grows deeper and lower.
—
You teach her things, and she does the same back.
Sometimes she sings while she works. You find yourself harmonizing from the other room.
—
The occupation is coming — everyone knows it. The language might help you both survive when everything falls apart completely.
So you teach her to fight, and she teaches you Japanese. Your fingers touch over the foreign characters in the dim light of the evenings that are meant just for the two of you.
She kisses you behind the crumbling pavilion the family can't afford to repair.
“We've done this before,” she whispers against your mouth. “I know we have. Loved and lost and tried again.”
“How many times?”
“Not enough.”
You kiss her harder.
Never enough.
—
She shows you something she's been making in secret: a bracelet woven from red thread, intricate and beautiful.
For you. For luck. For inyeon.
She ties it around your wrist. “So maybe next time we can—”
“This time,” you correct.
—
The family finds you in the pavilion, her head in your lap, your fingers in her hair.
“Unnatural,” the matriarch spits. “Cursed!”
They dismiss Rumi that night, with no severance or reference. Just thrown out into the streets, with nothing to fend herself with.
You try to fight, and they lock you in the storage room until you calm down.
Through the door, you hear them: She'll die in the streets. Let the cursed thing starve.
—
You break the lock a week later.
Your hands are bleeding. You don't care.
You search for her: streets, markets, the missionary hospital.
A body in the river, someone finally tells you. Two days ago. Burn scars.
Typhoid. She died alone.
—
You go back to the family compound, and head straight to the kitchen. You find the sharpest knife.
Then you find the matriarch in the garden.
You're sixteen years old and you've spent lifetimes trying to protect someone you love, and you've failed every single time, and you're so tired of failing.
The knife goes in easier than you expected.
They execute you three days later.
As you face the firing squad, you hold the red bracelet — the one Rumi made for you, the one you've been wearing this whole time.
Your thumb counts the threads; eight strands woven together.
Next time, you whisper. Next time I'll be fast enough. Strong enough to save you before—
The shots ring out.
—
(Your younger self — the one who watched her father sell you — would have been surprised.
That quiet, obedient girl who did what she was told.
But you're not that girl anymore.
You haven't been that girl for lifetimes.)
VI. 1907, Japanese Occupation
There is song, in the basement safe house.
The yangban status your family clings to means nothing now — Donghak rebels burning estates, foreign armies fighting on Korean soil, the old order collapsing around you.
Your father works for the colonial government. It keeps your family fed while people starve, and keeps you safe while others disappear.
You hate him for it.
And you hate yourself for eating the rice his collaboration buys.
You're not like him. You've been training with the resistance for two years now, learning to fight, to kill, to do what needs to be done.
—
Your parents don't know. They think you're attending flower arrangement classes with a proper teacher.
Your hands — they know violence like old friends.
Then you hear her voice rising among the resistance members, and suddenly you understand why people risk everything.
She's teaching them a protest song, her voice clear and defiant. You join in on the second verse without thinking.
Your voice finds the harmony, like coming home.
—
She has a birthmark across her cheekbone, dark as ink.
They call her Rumi, though you suspect it's not her real name. No one uses real names in the resistance.
She runs forged papers and forbidden messages. The birthmark should make her memorable, easy to catch.
Instead it makes Japanese forces look away in disgust.
She uses their prejudice as a weapon.
—
“What are you doing here?” she asks when she finds you in the basement after a meeting.
You're cleaning blood off a knife – not yours.
“I heard you.”
She laughs, lightly. “That's not an answer.”
You look up, and you study her face — the birthmark, the sharp eyes, the way she holds herself ready to run or fight.
You want to say: Because I know you. Because eight thousand layers of inyeon and I finally found you again.
Instead, you say: “I want to help.”
—
Your family notices you're gone more often.
Your brother joined the colonial police. He watches you with suspicious eyes, and asks questions you can't answer.
“Where do you go in the evenings?”
“Friend's house.”
“Which friend?”
“You don't know her.”
—
(This is true.
You don't know her either, not yet, but you will.)
—
Rumi teaches you the work she does.
You teach her how to fight properly.
“Where did you learn this?” she asks after you've disarmed her for the third time.
“My older brother used me as target.” You reset your stance. “But… also… I just... know. Like I've done it before.”
“Like you've protected someone before,” she says quietly, and you think you feel something slide into place.
—
“Why do you do this?” you ask her one night, hidden in a safe house while Japanese patrols search nearby.
The boots echo on cobblestones, and the two of you stay quieter for a moment. Finally:
“This is my home.” She says it simply, like it’s the only truth that matters. “They can occupy it, but they can't make me abandon it.”
“But the risk—”
“Some things are worth the risk.” She looks at you in the dim light. “Don't you think?”
“What things?”
“Inyeon.” She traces figure eights on your palm, and her finger catches on your calluses. “My mother used to say we're all connected by invisible threads. That every person we meet, we were meant to meet. That every love we have, we've had before.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I didn't.” She laces her fingers through yours. “But then I met you and I kept thinking — why does this feel familiar? Why does your hand fit mine like I've held it a thousand times before?”
And in that moment, you kiss her. Breathless, desperate, pressed against the wall while outside people hunt for you both.
“This is dangerous.”
“I know.”
“Not just the resistance. This. Us.”
“I know.” You kiss her harder, your lips and tongue marking constellations on hers.
Jeonsaeng-ui inyeon, she whispers.
“You know that phrase?”
“My mother taught me.” She smiles against your mouth. “Life after life. Generation after generation.”
“Promise?”
Promise.
—
Your brother follows you.
You don’t realize it until it’s too late.
—
The raid happens at dawn.
You fight; the only thing you know how.
You kill four colonial police officers before they overwhelm you, just wild slashes in the name of protection and self-preservation.
Your brother is one of them.
You watch him die with your knife in his throat, and you feel nothing.
—
Three days of torture, and they want names.
You give them nothing.
On the fourth day, they bring her in.
“Tell us. Or else.”
She looks at you. Bloodied, broken, barely conscious.
Don't, she mouths.
It takes all of you, but you still tell them nothing.
So: They kill her in front of you. Slowly.
You scream until your voice breaks.
—
They execute you at dawn, eight days after her.
You're eighteen years old, and you welcome the end of the darkness.
Your last thought isn’t next time.
It’s: I’m coming. Wait.
VII. 1951, Korean War
There is crying in the refugee line.
No — singing, soft and broken, trying to comfort a child who won't stop sobbing.
The war has split everything. The country, torn families, ravaged futures.
You're volunteering at the aid station because it's better than sitting in the house your parents have in Seoul, listening to them argue about which side will win, about your upcoming wedding to a lieutenant from a good family.
Your family survived the war intact — well-fed, comfortable; your yangban status protecting them even as everything else crumbled, with the tenuous connections to the government, but connections nonetheless.
They talk about refugees like they're diseased animals. Communist sympathizers. Dangerous. Can't trust them.
But something draws you here. Some instinct you don't understand, like you're looking for someone.
Then you hear that voice and you know it somehow.
—
She's emaciated, with frostbite scars covering her hands and feet.
Black and white tissue, eight fingers remaining, and missing toes. She can barely hold chopsticks, can barely walk, but she's singing to a child who isn't hers.
You don't mean to, but you start humming along. She stops mid-verse, and looks up at you.
“Oh,” she says when she sees you. “It's you.”
“We've never met,” you start to say.
But the words dry up because she's right.
It is you.
—
Your father says: “You need to be more careful about the company you keep. These refugees — you can't trust them.”
You smile and serve tea and say nothing.
At night, you sneak out to see her.
—
You bring her to a small room you've rented in the city. It's not much, but it's private. Most of all, it’s safe.
For the first time in months, Rumi cries. Not from pain or fear, but from relief.
“I never thought I'd have this,” she says. “A room. Someone who—”
Who loves you, you think in your head, and it knocks you off your feet, because you don't know how or why, but you feel like you’ve loved her forever.
—
You go to your parents the next morning, and you tell them you're canceling the wedding.
Your mother slaps you.
Your father doesn't look up. “You will marry the lieutenant. This is what is best for the family.”
—
Rumi is gone.
Another worker pulls you aside. “Police came yesterday. Said she was being investigated for communist sympathies. They’re deporting all suspected sympathizers across the river.”
“No.” Your blood turns to ice.
The easiest accusation, impossible to disprove.
In the South, it’s a death sentence either way.
“Who reported her?”
The worker hesitates. “Someone with influence. Someone connected to the government.”
—
You know.
You know exactly who.
—
You try everything.
No one can find her. Or no one will say.
Deported back North, someone finally tells you. Three days ago.
They don't survive. The North executes returnees as traitors.
—
You volunteer at refugee stations for the rest of your life. Every new arrival, you look for her face. Every voice you hear, you listen for hers.
You never find her.
VIII. now
You meet her and you know, though you couldn't say what you know or how.
Not love at first sight.
Something older than love, something that tastes like grief held so long it's become part of your marrow.
—
You avoid her for weeks, and when Zoey asks why (“She’s pop star royalty! Actually, I heard someone call her a nepotism hire, and I glared at them, so hard.”), you say you don't know, but you do.
You're afraid that if you get too close, you'll remember exactly how to lose her.
—
She finds you anyway.
“Why won't you look at me?”
Because every time I do, I want to cry and I don't know why.
But you don’t say that.
“I'm looking.”
“No. You're looking through me, like you're seeing someone else.”
—
(She isn't wrong.)
—
But avoidance only works until it doesn't.
She starts leaving tea by your practice mat, the kind you like but never told her about.
She laughs at something Zoey says and the sound makes your chest ache with familiarity.
She falls asleep on the couch during movie night, and your hands remember the weight of caring for her.
Small things. Inevitable things.
You’re not falling in love with her.
You're remembering how.
—
“I don't want this,” you tell Zoey one night.
“Want what?”
“Whatever this is with her.”
“You mean the fact that you're obviously in love with her?”
“I'm not—”
“Please. Everyone can see it.” Zoey's voice goes softer. “Why are you fighting it?”
“Because it will end badly. It always ends badly.”
Zoey looks at you for a long moment, and you can see her trying to piece together what she thinks is happening.
Maybe she thinks you're scared Rumi doesn't feel the same way. Or that you've been hurt before and can't risk it again.
Or some other perfectly reasonable fear that lives in the realm of normal human experience.
“I don't think you get a choice,” she says gently. “About feeling it, I mean. You only get to choose what you do about it.”
(She has no idea the choice was made lifetimes ago.)
—
The nightmares aren't memories so much as warnings etched into your DNA.
She's awake too, staring at the ceiling. “Bad dreams?”
“Always.”
“Me too. Isn't that weird? I keep dreaming about drowning, but I've never even been in deep water.”
You have, you want to say. I've watched you slip away and couldn't reach you in time.
Instead you just say, “Yeah. Weird.”
She stays in your bed that night, but you don't kiss her.
(You don't know if you're more relieved or disappointed.)
—
“Eight thousand layers of inyeon,” Zoey says one night, after catching you staring at Rumi during vocal warm-ups. “That's what my grandma says it takes just to meet someone.”
“What?”
“Destiny. Fate. Some old Korean lore.” She grins, but her eyes are serious. “How many layers do you think you and Rumi have?”
You don't know how to answer that.
(The number feels infinite.)
—
HUNTR/X debuts.
The world explodes overnight.
—
You fight demons together. That's kind of the packaged deal.
Once, Rumi throws herself between you and a demon's attack. She takes the hit meant for you.
(You've spent lifetimes trying to be the shield.
You don't know how to be the one shielded.)
“We protect each other now,” she says when you try to apologize, your hands checking for hurt.
We. Not just you.
—
The truth is this: you've been bracing for loss your entire life.
Training harder won't stop it. Being stronger, faster, better won't prevent the inevitable unraveling.
Some things you cannot protect.
Some people you cannot save.
Some endings are written in your bones before you even begin.
—
So when her secret spills out onto that stage, when the patterns spread across her skin like ink in water, part of you isn't even surprised.
Of course.
Of course she's the thing you were supposed to fight all along.
The cruelty of it is almost elegant, almost beautiful in its precision.
—
Your gok-do materializes in your hand, and her eyes meet yours across the wreckage of the performance.
This is the part where it ends, your body remembers.
This is where you lose her, where everything you've built turns to ash.
But this time, you're the one holding the blade.
—
And you see him, too — not the demon standing in the wings, but the bipa player from a Joseon alley.
The one who walked into the palace, clean and well-fed, his soul surrendered to the demon king while the gibang burned and Rumi died screaming.
History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and the rhyme is always a screaming loss.
—
A voice whispers:
You thought you found a family? You don't deserve one. You never have.
You know it's Gwi-Ma's voice, trying to break you the way he broke Rumi.
But that doesn't make it less true.
Black sheep. Problem child. Too aggressive, too queer, too wrong, too out of control.
Every family you've tried to build has ended in fire and blood and loss.
Why should this time be different?
—
Except—
Her voice cuts through the end of the world, like light through water.
Not hiding anymore. Just broken and whole at the same time.
Show me what’s underneath, I’ll find your harmony.
—
That's what you've been trying to do.
For how many lifetimes? More than you can almost remember.
How many more that you can't?
—
The harmony finds you before you find it, pulls you onto the stage like gravity, like coming home.
Your voice knows where hers is going.
It always has. It always will.
—
When it's over, when the world is saved and the Honmoon hums overhead in colors that were never meant to be gold, she says quietly:
“The patterns didn't go away.”
“I know.”
“Does that bother you?”
(birthmarks like spilled ink–
vitiligo patterns catching light–
tattoos that move when she breathes–
the rough landscape of burn scars–
frostbite damage mapping her hand–)
“No. Never.”
—
The dreams change.
You still see the river, the fire, the grief.
But now there's also this:
Her laugh when Zoey tells a terrible joke.
The three of you tangled together on the couch.
Her hand in yours while she sleeps.
—
You think about jeonsaeng-ui inyeon, while she breathes against your shoulder, steady and alive.
You remember a river, cold and ancient.
—
Eight thousand layers just to meet someone.
How many more to keep them? How many more to hold?
—
But you're here now. She's here now.
And that will always be enough.
—
(And in another time, in another place:
There will be singing from the river bank.
There will be music in the palace gardens.
There will be a voice in the practice room.
There you are.
Finally.
There you are.)