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Life is good.
(She will have to kill it.)
The mountain's winds still batter at the walls of the cabin like something starved and impatient. The sheer frost of deep winter creeps ever closer to all-consuming. Demons and their ilk still lurk in the dark beyond the most distant tree and deepest fold of the valley, waiting for the day their master drops the leash.
But inside a cabin too small for three and too big for two, life has been allowed to… blossom.
(To fester.)
A sock has been left to dry near the roaring hearth like a tiny ode to coziness. A cocoon of blankets spills half off the couch and half clings to it for dear life, all creased and warm and beckoning to any who spare it a glance. A weathered oak table is covered in enough crumbs and confections to weather two apocalypses and a famine on top.
The sight of it all does not make Celine's chest tighten into a fist, does not crush her heart in the cold certainty of needing it to be clean. To be orderly. To be satisfactory.
It makes her exhale.
(It makes her grieve.)
(Because she knows—has known since the first flutter of wrongness seeped through the Honmoon like blood through white linen—that this softness is living on borrowed time. That the world loans only enough warmth to make the taking of it all the crueler. That every good thing she has ever loved has existed merely in preparation for further loss, and that the women who raised her and the women before them and the women before them all understood in the joints of their bloody hands: you cannot keep what you are too weak to protect. And you cannot be truly strong without the strength that loss brings.)
(Her mother told her this. Her mother's mother told her mother. A chain of women with black hair and dry eyes and crimson blades stretching back to the time of emperors. Back into a history of duty none of them asked for and all of them inherited regardless.)
Sunlight slants through the small shutters and turns tiny motes of dust into wandering fae. The air smells of honey and caramel and whatever Mi-Yeong has craved into being. Something sweet and warm and sticky. The kind of sweetness that makes your teeth ache at the mere idea of consumption.
The kettle on the stove screeches softly, threatening to boil over beneath Kimmy's inattentive hand.
Kimmy, who is trying very hard to be normal.
She is doing it the only way she knows how: by doing everything all at once. By pretending that if her hands stay busy, then no one will notice that anything is wrong.
(But things are wrong, and no amount of motion will change that. Wrong in the way atrocities are wrong. Wrong in a way of dead families and burned chapels. Wrong in a way that was tangible.)
(The Honmoon knows it. Has known it for months. The great and terrible tether between the three of them chafing at a frequency that aches to the bone.)
(Mi-Yeong knows it too, though she has wrapped her knowledge in silk and called it hope.)
(Kimmy tries not to know. Tries and tries and tries, as if effort alone has ever been enough.)
(Celine—)
(Celine stopped trying not to know. Moved past the step of rumination and into scheming.)
Mi-Yeong sits at the table with her feet propped on the chair opposite, Kimmy dutifully working at a knot that has formed in the meat of her calf. Flour covers one of Kimmy's hands, lotion the other, and already her gaze is darting toward the kettle like it is an enemy on the march rather than a thing of steel and steam.
A dozen and more things to be done, and Mi-Yeong is in no position to help. Her deep blue cardigan is pulled tight around her shoulders and the great swell of her belly—now an undeniable fact of life—serves as something even she cannot persuade into line.
She looks radiant regardless. A figure the ancients would carve into marble and pray to for bountiful wombs and loins.
Her exhaustion is worn better than most wear jewelry, and the slight twinges of pain sit like the centerpiece of the most immaculate portrait.
(She also looks like a hollow woman. Like someone had taken a spoon to her very soul and left only a shell of flesh and meat and bone.)
(The thing inside her feeds, and feeds, and feeds. Taking not blood or marrow but something far less replaceable.)
(Celine can see it in the way Mi-Yeong's face has sharpened. In the violet crescents beneath her eyes. In how the Honmoon around her has sounded of wails and screams and something other.)
Celine, meanwhile, stands at the counter and slaughters oranges with a butcher's knife, trying very hard to make it look like she is thinking about nothing at all.
Because right now, the world needs no more nasty things conceived of ill thoughts.
(But thinking she is. Thinking so loudly it is a wonder the Honmoon does not scream it all out.)
(Thinking of the blade wrapped in oilcloth beneath the kitchen floor. About the tea leaves her mother's mother simply called death. About the old rites. The ones that came far before hospitals and the miracles of modern medicine. The ones where a hunter would kneel before her pregnant sister and press an ear to her belly and listen. For the song sung underneath the skin of all living things. The song all hunters wielded and that the human ear was never meant to parse.)
(Celine had listened. Weeks ago. While Mi-Yeong slept steadily and Kimmy was out gathering wood for the waning fire. She had pressed her ear to the taut skin of Mi-Yeong's stomach and listened.)
(What she heard was not human or hunter.)
(It was the sound of laughter reversed and too many teeth grinding. Glass in a throat that stretched for light years while a million and one eyes blinked. A sound that had burrowed into her skull and stayed there, festering, feeding on the flames of her devotion and dosing her in ice.)
(Celine had not slept since. Not truly.)
Outside, she is bright. Brighter than usual. Helpful. Domestic, more so than usual. All loose shoulders and easy smiles and doing whatever is needed of her. A woman content to serve, to orbit, to belong somewhere where she is needed.
Inside, a whetstone is being dragged over her mind.
(Inside, she is counting.)
(The number of days until Mi-Yeong is due. The weeks it would take Kimmy to forgive her. The small chance that forgiveness would come at all.)
(Counting how long she has been lied to.)
(Counting how long she has lied.)
Celine glances down at the oranges she is mangling and wonders if there isn't a little more she could be doing. Something useful. Something with a little less… knives.
Because the thing about a looming birth is that it makes Celine's skin itch worse than it ever has before a fight or a performance.
Hospitals and fluorescent lights and sterile hallways and life becoming alive and being vulnerable. It is something she has always dreaded.
Not because she is afraid they can't handle it.
Mi-Yeong has suffered far worse than pain in her life, and Kimmy has fixed more damage than a birth could ever cause.
No.
Celine is afraid of herself. Her own hesitation.
(Of failing her mother and her mother's mother. Of standing there with a black blade in hand and the knowing in her brain and love in her heart and failing to do what must be done.)
(All the stories said it started with love. The elders—when there was still breath in their lungs—had whispered it during nights when Celine was supposed to be asleep, their voices unmade with grief-induced madness and liquor and regret: that the strongest of demons did not invade through violence. They had no need for such crudeness. They came through want. Through the door a grieving father opens for a son who died too young. Through the need of the poor for a warm bed and a full belly. Through the want of a woman who desires something badly enough to let the world bleed against her longing.)
(Mi-Yeong had always wanted a family.)
(She had just finally realised the only way she would get one was through child.)
(And something had heard her wanting.)
Her fear—their fears, really—is all around them. If one knows how to look.
Not in the way the cabin is arranged. Kimmy has long since scrubbed the floors of stain and removed any shadow of neglect.
But in their choreography. The flow of a life that had once felt as seamless as breathing.
In the way Mi-Yeong's eyes flick up too fast when someone enters a room, her hand drifting to her belly not in surprise but in guarding. In the way Kimmy waits less and less time before throwing herself into the next task. In the way Celine asks Is it okay if I— before she touches either of them, even when she hasn't needed to ask since the day three became one.
Like they have been reduced to strangers again. Worse than strangers, even.
There was a certain mercy to the person you hadn't met yet. A hope of a bright future.
(Celine knew how to trust a stranger. Strangers asked her to hold the door open for them, not to love something she should be carving out of them with her dullest knife.)
The weeks had been akin to crossing a frozen lake. Slow, and careful. Pausing every other inch to listen for the crack that would swallow them whole.
(And underneath the ice, something was waiting to break free.)
It is easy for Celine to tell herself that life is good. That she is happy.
She is happy.
She is.
(Only in the way a soldier is happy on the eve of a battle she doesn't know she will survive.)
Kimmy finally breaks from Mi-Yeong's foot with a little dramatic groan of martyrdom and darts for the stove a second before the kettle commits to boiling over. The instant Mi-Yeong is left unattended, Celine slides into the opening.
"Mi-Yeong, my dear?" Celine asks softly, her voice a stark contrast to the citrine massacre beneath her weapon.
"Yes, sweetie?" Mi-Yeong grits out, flicking her long braid off her sweaty face.
"Is there anything I can do for you?"
(Anything at all, she wants to scream. Anything in this world or any world. Name it and it will be done. Even the thing you would never ask of me, the thing I will do for you because you could never dream of doing it for yourself, as your love has blinded you to the parasite nesting in the carcass of your dreams.)
Mi-Yeong's gaze slides to the plate. To the sea of orange juice, to the ragged quarters that look like they've been tortured by a master of the craft.
"Are you done slicing the oranges?"
Celine glances down and winces. "Define done."
Mi-Yeong's laugh comes like hot water on healing wounds. "Celine!"
Celine feels the sound of it rattle around in her ribs. Warm and dangerous.
Dangerous because it makes her believe—even if only for a second—that the wrongness does not exist. That the sound in Mi-Yeong's belly was just biology. That the Honmoon's wrongness was a trick of a demon her song could never hope to shatter. That it was all an illusion of training that had never prepared her to cut demons apart from the ones she cherished the most.
(But her mother and her mentors had been right about what happened to a hunter who could not control her wants. And her mother's mother had been right about the most dangerous demon being the one you couldn't fight. And every hunter who had ever been called cruel for her means had been proven righteous when her ends saved lives, saved the Honmoon that protected all.)
(The ones who hesitated? Who let ideas of morals and right and wrong cloud their judgement? Reduced to campfire tales and the tears of whatever was left of their trio.)
Kimmy returns from the stove like a woman returning from battle. Sleeves rolled up, cheeks flushed, brown hair sagging from its bun. She holds the kettle with a rag, reaches for a cup, then notices Celine with the knife aloft above supple fruit.
Her eyes lock on the blade.
Then on Celine.
(For one terrible moment and no longer, Celine wonders if Kimmy knows. If Kimmy has felt in the Honmoon the shape of Celine's plans.)
(But Kimmy only looks offended. At the oranges.)
(The want to not know has always blinded her.)
"Celine," Kimmy says, voice pitched like a parent telling a child not to drink paint, "how does this keep happening?"
"It wasn't my fault," Celine replies without thought, because usually it wasn't.
Mi-Yeong hums with a pained little smile. "Honey…"
Celine's ears warm as she scratches the skin beneath her eye. "I think they were rotten or something. It fell apart, uh, way too easily."
(Everything does, beneath a killer's hands.)
Kimmy's mouth twitches as if she is fighting a smile. "Bring it here."
Celine obeys like she has been ordered by divinity.
She sets the plate down in front of Kimmy with the careful solemnity of a priest.
Kimmy stares at the ruins for a beat longer, then makes a sound that is half sigh and half giggle.
"You did your best," Kimmy declares, already reaching for the knife and another orange that is somewhat ripe.
Celine sighs, forlornly dramatic. "Yeah… yeaaah… maybe not."
Kimmy pours three cups of steaming tea. Mi-Yeong takes hers with both hands.
Celine watches the way Mi-Yeong's fingers wrap around the mug. The way the skin stretches like the bones are trying to leap from their cage and leave only sagging, worn flesh behind.
(Mi-Yeong is still Mi-Yeong. Still bright and leaderly and infuriatingly beautiful.)
(But she is less of herself than she was in summer.)
(And Celine is the only one who has noticed.)
Kimmy slices the orange, picks up her tea, sets it down, then immediately forgets about it because she is watching Mi-Yeong so closely that it borders on surveillance.
Love and terror whimper into the air around her. Each feeling is so tightly woven together that Celine doubts the woman herself knows where one emotion begins and the other ends.
Celine sees it.
Celine pretends not to.
"None of that, okay?" Mi-Yeong says, her tone light and her eyes decidedly not. "Just because you can't slice an orange, or brew a pot of tea, or give a good foot rub, or clean, or—"
Kimmy pinches the soft skin between Mi-Yeong's big toe and second toe in warning.
Mi-Yeong continues anyway, seamless as always. "—doesn't mean anything. You're still our cute maknae. Always will be, too."
Celine's breath hitches without her input.
Sometimes, kindness hurts worse than cruelty.
"Promise?" Celine asks, hating how small and breathless she sounds. Hating how much she needs the affirmation. Hating, most of all, that she will be the one to break the promise of being there forever.
(Her mother never apologized. Her mother said: You will understand when you are older, and when you have something worth dying to protect. Then, and only then, will you learn that love will need to be tough at times if you want it to mean anything at all. That sometimes the cruel thing is the kind thing.)
(Celine understood now.)
(She wished she didn't.)
"Promise." Mi-Yeong's smile is as tired as it is bright. "Now. If you really want to be useful, sweetie…"
Celine goes utterly still. For she is needed.
The small crackle of the fire in the hearth drops from low murmur to nothing. Blood pumps in her veins fast as a raging river. Strands of the Honmoon seep into her arms and legs with the promise of power.
Her body answering a threat that does not exist.
(Or.)
(A threat that does exist, and has existed for nine months. One that Celine is fighting and will fight alone, because it wears the skin of a fetus like something with patterns could ever be human.)
Her whole body reacts like she has been called to battle.
Because she will always be ready to fight for her girls. Always.
(Even against them. Even against the thing they want to love. Even if it means standing between Mi-Yeong and her dream and refusing to let her die for it.)
Whatever you need, the stalwart elm of her being whispers into the Honmoon. Whispers to Mi-Yeong and Kimmy, the only ones who can hear.
(She keeps the rest to silence. The part that growls: At whatever the cost.)
Mi-Yeong tilts her head up to meet the standing Celine's eyes. "We need to pack a bag for the hospital."
Kimmy's whole body bobs in excitement. A tad too quick. "Finally."
Celine blinks, her tensed muscles drooping in confusion. "A… bag? Why?"
Mi-Yeong's eyes soften. "For the baby, Celine. Ya'know, the one inside me." A pause. Breath catching in Mi-Yeong's throat. "Our baby."
(Our.)
(Ourourour.)
(The word rings through the cabin and Honmoon like a bell struck in an empty cathedral at the end of the world. It bounces off the walls of Celine's heart and burrows into every crack she has spent months boarding up.)
(Our baby. As if the want for such a thing alone could bring it to reality. As if naming it Celine's and Kimmy's could override what they all know it to be. A seed of sin gathered in the wet dark of Mi-Yeong's womb like silt at the bottom of a river that flows uphill.)
(Her mothers mother knew demons by a different name. The Ill-born. A fitting name for a species that was wrong in ways that would take more than a lifetime to name.)
(Mi-Yeong wants her Ill-born so badly. So goddamn badly.)
(Celine wants to give her this one thing more than anything, like it would sew shut the wounds that Mi-Yeong had wrought with her own hand.)
(God, she wants to let her.)
(She won't.)
(Her mother's mother wouldn't, and her mother wouldn't, and so neither will she.)
Celine smiles.
She is sure to do it immediately. Like it is natural. Like it doesn't pull at the muscles in her face like she is a puppet strung up with strings of want and need and desperation.
"That's—" she starts, and doesn't quite know how to finish. "That's good. We should pack a bag. Definitely."
Hospitals. Fluorescent lights. Gloves and knives.
Mi-Yeong, cut open for the world to see.
(And a thing crawling out of her that is sure to bring ruin to all.)
(Unless someone is there to stop it.)
(Unless someone has already decided to end it.)
A shiver builds just under her skin. She ignores it with an almost saccharine smile.
(Not because she doesn't trust Mi-Yeong. Not because she doesn't trust Kimmy.)
(Because she would never let them make that choice. Because she has lived what happens when you make a mother choose between her duty to the world and the love for her child.)
(The mother always chooses the child. In the beginning. But when the world is burning and the child is not a child and a blade is being pressed into her hands, she will choose the world. Because what other choice is there? In the end, it is still her duty.)
(Celine will not ask Mi-Yeong to choose.)
(She already knows what choice she herself will make. She will just have to make it for all of them.)
(And she will carry the weight of it—the guilt and the grief and the hatred—just as every woman who came before her carried the weight of the world on her back. Silently, without complaint, and knowing that the world will never thank her for it.)
Kimmy picks up where she left off without a hitch. She is good at that.
"We probably shouldn't wait until, well, her water breaks to figure out where our socks are," Kimmy laughs out, eyes trying to be bright in spite of the fear smothering them. "Which is why—" She points at Celine. "Your mission, should you accept it, is very important."
Celine straightens her spine, bowing her head slightly in acceptance. "Whatever you need me to do."
"Folding."
"I'm sorry?"
"Folding! Like clothes!" Kimmy chirps. "We and the baby are gonna need clothes!"
"Folding?" Celine's voice jumps an octave. She looks down at herself and wonders what part of her says domestic chores, please.
Mi-Yeong's grin turns alarmingly smug as she sips her tea, always eager to push Celine past comfort. "Yep. Tiny clothes by the bucketful. Tiny blankets. Tiny hats. Tiny plushies." She tilts her head in a remarkably avian way. "What do you think all the packages were for?"
(For the child you will not rear, Celine is careful not to speak aloud.)
Seeing packages of tiny clothes hurriedly shoved through the door is not the same at all as imagining pulling them onto tiny limbs.
And right now, Celine cannot stop imagining these slips of cloth being filled by a baby.
(Her hands will not shake when the time comes. She has promised herself this. She is sure of it, as sure as she is of her name and the Honmoon and few other things. Her hands shook when she found out what Mi-Yeong had done. They shook when she took the black blade from its oilcloth and gave it a razor's edge anew. They shook when she took the tea leaves called death and the blade as black as night and prayed above them as the old ways dictated, for strength and for certainty in the trials to come.)
(Her hands will not quiver when it matters.)
(Celine is her mother's daughter. She is her mother's mother's granddaughter. The latest in a long, ancient line of women who loved like tigers and sang like doves and died like pigs.)
Babies are not fighters. Or performers. Or weapons.
Something softer.
(A small, terrible part of her is grateful Mi-Yeong is not having a baby. For it would be a cruel fate to be raised by liars and sinners and schemers such as them. Such as herself and her loves.)
She swallows thickly.
"That sounds…" Celine's smile feels like a mask nailed to her face with ten thousand tacks. "Nice."
Kimmy, giggling, springs for the closet, already humming like they are on a cheerful little quest and not teetering on the edge of damnation.
"Okay! We're going to need a lot!" she declares. "Clothes. Snacks. Chargers. Socks. Fuzzy socks. Like, a lot of fuzzy and cozy clothes."
Mi-Yeong's watchful gaze stays on Celine all the while.
There is love in it. There is also calculation.
Mi-Yeong has long been able to spot a lie as surely as she can sing, and she sings well enough for angels to weep and pastors to declare a new goddess.
(Can she spot this lie? This deception? Can she feel the ice building in Celine's chest? Can she hear the sound of a goodbye beneath Celine's laughter?)
(It wouldn't change anything if she did.)
(Celine doesn't need permission. Not anymore.)
Celine keeps her mask nailed in place with nary a grimace as her cheeks ache.
Mi-Yeong speaks softly. "Sweetie?"
"Yes?"
"You're doing great," Mi-Yeong says. Simple and honest.
(Falsely, a part of Celine cries. The tricks and charisma of the past coming back to take another stab at whatever remains of her.)
(Or perhaps not, her own voice purrs just behind her eyes. Perhaps she means the act of still being here is its own kind of greatness.)
Celine laughs, because that is what you do when you don't know what to say.
"Are you thinking I'm going to be that good at folding?" she jokes.
Kimmy, up to her knees in cloth, shoots back, "After I'm done with you, you will be! You're about to learn from the best!"
Celine smiles just a little wider.
(Life is good. Life is good. Life is—)
Outside, a wall of wind slams against the cabin. Reminding them the world beyond the door has been there all this while.
The force of it sends Celine's steaming cup of tea spilling off the oaken table. Kimmy squeaks mid-picking-up a onesie and throws the cloth across the room to check on Mi-Yeong, who sits half the room away from the spill.
Mi-Yeong's hand drifts to her belly. Reverent.
(Why? Celine nearly screams. What are you worshipping? The thing that is eating you alive? You are smarter than what the demons have reduced you to. Stronger than this. You taught me to never trust what I love the most. Was that not a lesson you learned yourself?)
Celine reaches for the onesie Kimmy dropped.
It is soft. Soft as silk and clouds and spring grass.
Still, it is coarse against her fingers. The full weight of what is to come bleeding into the material world.
Her smile does not falter and her hands do not shake.
(She has not wept in three weeks. Not since she pressed her ear to Mi-Yeong's womb and wrapped a black blade in oilcloth and prayed over tea leaves called death.)
She picks up the now-empty mug with one hand, ignoring the hot liquid cooking the surface layer of her flesh. Pain is an old friend and an easy acquaintance.
Out loud, she says: "Okay. Teach me how to fold."
(Inside, she is begging. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me for what I must do. For being the only one of us who knows that mercy and murder can be dealt in the same slash. Forgive me for loving you too much to let you keep the thing you want most. Forgive me for not loving you enough to let the world burn in your image.)
(Forgive me for doing exactly what we were put on this earth to do.)
Kimmy reaches for another bit of cloth on the ground, face already forgetting the spilled tea.
Mi-Yeong watches, smiling, cradling her stomach.
And the Honmoon hums through the cabin beams and the earth beneath the foundation and the ancient stone of the mountain itself, holding them together for a heartbeat longer.
Life is good.
(It really isn't.)
(It's only going to get worse.)