Chapter Text
The first time Mira stood at the gates of her father’s mansion and found that it did not open, she was thirteen. She was seven minutes late and she curled up at the foot of the gate with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
It was not so unexpected, because before this there were already threats, and before threats there was no dinner, and before that there was contempt. Mira never considered it an impossibility that one of Abeoji’s threats would one day come true.
In the morning, a servant came to fetch her and told her that her father wanted to see her. She went obediently like every other time, because she was foolish and a coward, the memory of a palm smacking across her cheek far too present. Abeoji looked exactly the same as he did, behind his mahogany desk in an armchair made entirely of leather, fitted in a black and white suit and tie even though he was at home. He scrawled with a fountain pen on a stack of documents, ignoring her presence just as she did not acknowledge him.
“So.” Abeoji put the pen down, the metal body clacking against its designated tray. “You were late. Seven minutes.”
His fingers folded into one another, resting atop the paperwork he hadn’t moved, looking up at last. Mira watched him back in the waiting way she had learnt to, holding her breath, nails digging into her palms, saying nothing. He scoffed at her silence, stood up, and slapped her across the face.
She was careful not to bite her tongue or the inside of her cheek, she did not fidget. She did not reach a tentative hand to her smarting cheek and she did not unstick from her spot no matter how fast Abeoji’s study swam before her eyes.
“Apologise.”
Mira’s voice worked faster than her brain could, words tumbling out of her mouth that felt like nothing more than a record player with a stored up message. “I’m sorry.”
Abeoji’s gaze narrowed. Mira’s throat went dry, fumbling for a better sentence.
“I apologise, Abeoji. Please forgive me.”
She forced herself to breathe in the silence that followed, not daring to lift her eyes from the black canvas of Abeoji’s tie, fists tightening like she could dig herself into the ground with her nails in her flesh.
“You will have no dinner tonight,” Abeoji said, calm as if this was nothing more than a mere inconvenience, returning to sit behind his desk, retrieving the pen to resume his work. “Leave.”
Mira fled the study without another word, passing no one on the way to her room. The hallways were always working, yet her path remained remarkably clear when she did not want to be looked at. Her brother’s door was shut tight, Minho never came to greet her, and if on a normal day he saw her in passing he only nodded and moved on.
In the full, body length mirror glued to her bedroom wall, Mira inspected the red blooming over the left side of her face. Nothing was new, nothing about it felt different, all she could say was that this time there were grey lines under her eyes and now that she was thinking about it, she had not slept. But it was the same, and Mira understood with no amount of fanfare that this would become something of a common occurrence to her from now on. She stomached the fact, grabbing her backpack sitting on the chair at her desk so she could do her homework. Abeoji would not let her go to school like this, thankfully Mira had more brain than he believed she did. Not that it mattered, only Minho could get a perfect score. Mira’s hair was pink and loud, so her perfect scores meant nothing.
She did her homework under the light of a lamp the second time, still with nowhere to go and now needing something to do, just in case the sun came up early and she missed the servant who would come out to get her.
Soon, it did not matter if Mira was late or not, the gates would stay closed if Abeoji felt like it. She waited, glanced down at the watch on her wrist that showed she was in fact two minutes early, then turned and went back into the city. She did not have to sit and wait all night, she had discovered, no one noticed if she disappeared, only to wind back up at the gates the next morning.
When Abeoji found out at last that Mira was not simply stranded outside the gates like she was supposed to be, and instead spent her time wandering the nooks and crannies of the city, she knelt in the middle of his study for a full day and night. By the time he cast her out of his sight, her stomach had long been viciously empty and her knees ached so badly that they had gone numb, her ankles and legs felt like nothing at all. Still, she thought, it was worth it. The city held no contempt for her, neither did it expect anything of her for simply existing in its space. Yet she always came back to her father’s home, because there was nowhere else to go, and if she had no family she would perhaps have enjoyed it, but with no home she did not think she would survive.
Then Mira left.
It was another night of kneeling before Abeoji with sharp spines shooting into her knees and the weight of her body crushing her ankles. There was a faint tingle on her cheek and a dull throbbing over the bone.
“Get out of my house, you will be watched. If I hear that you are not still standing outside, you can forget about coming back.”
And that was that. Mira’s home had not truly been home for a long time, she stopped waiting for it to be. She was fifteen and had done a hundred and one different things to spite Abeoji, and would rather rough it on the streets than cave and go running back with her tail between her legs.
By extension, Mira left of her own accord.
That very same night, Celine found her, sitting on a park bench under a flickering lamppost wondering if she had been presumptuous in throwing away the only bed she had, refusing to regret it anyway. The woman appeared out of nowhere, one moment simply there, watching her and the space around her with something like awe. Mira debated making a break for it.
“Are you here by yourself?” The woman’s voice put a jam in Mira’s tracks, stern suspicion in her words and in her eyes as they studied her face, staring at the swell of dark red Mira knew was there. When she gave no answer, the woman frowned. “Is there anyone I can call for you?”
The answer wanted to speak itself immediately. Abeoji. Mira bit down on it and wrangled it into submission. This woman was not one of her teachers, this was not Mira getting into fights, there was no calling Abeoji here. Besides, she had just left, so there would be no calling Abeoji ever. Instead, she shook her head and imagined that that was enough to be left alone.
The woman did not leave. The light hanging over them flickered two more times.
“You should come,” the woman suddenly spoke, quiet in the way Mira recognised was her sizing her up, nodding towards a car parked by the roadside not far away. It was all black with tinted windows. Frankly, it was a bad idea. Get in a car with a woman she did not know and be driven to god knows where.
The woman noticed her pause, seeming to contemplate. “Kang Celine,” she offered after a moment, extending her hand with her palm turned upward.
The name settled in Mira’s head, ringing loud and familiar in a way she could not place. When she did, her eyes nearly jumped out of her head.
Kang Celine.
The face was known now. A woman in her early forties whom everyone knew.
The Sunlight Sister, Kang Celine, the one who built a company from the ground up. That Kang Celine. Didn’t she reside on Jeju island? Or was she here for business, as she often was? More importantly, she was standing in front of Mira like she was happy to be talking to her, she was asking Mira to get in her car and go with her for whatever reason Mira could not fathom.
“Kang Mira,” she said before she could stop herself, body working on its own as it rose from the bench, shaking Celine’s offered hand. She grimaced, because she had not stood earlier and she still did not bow.
Celine did not mind, she took Mira’s return of her handshake as acceptance of her offer, leading Mira towards the car. Mira did not correct her, for she had little to lose and there was just as little chance that Celine would turn out to be a serial killer. Celine put her in the passenger seat, rounded the car to the other side, and for some reason started the car with much vigour. Mira eyed her subtly, once again reassessing her choices. Even the rich and powerful occasionally turned out to be crazy.
The car was not the end of it, at one point the endless road in front of them split into two, then again, then the wall of trees lining either side of the car fell away. An engine roared close overhead, descending into a vast, fenced off area where the noise morphed into an aircraft rolling down a landing strip lit by dots of orange along the way.
Kang Celine really did live on Jeju island.
For inexplicable reasons that Mira did not understand, she never paused even when Celine got out of the car, letting herself be herded into a private lounge where she sat waiting idly while Celine got her phone out to text.
A second car rolled up outside minutes later, almost identical to the one Mira had sat in, the difference being that this car had a chauffeur driving it, a middle-aged man who opened the door to the backseat with a polite dip of his head.
Out stepped a girl with a braid in the most beautiful shade of purple Mira had ever seen.
It was bold and thick, the braid, it was also ridiculously long, reaching past the girl’s knees. Then there was her face, undeniably gorgeous, wide-eyed and full-lipped. Mira stared. It was rude. She stared some more and was still staring when the girl strode through the sliding glass door and immediately her eyes latched onto Mira’s. The other girl’s eyes went wide, mouth falling open before she closed it, breaking into a loopy grin.
“Nice to meet you, I’m Ryu Rumi,” said Rumi, tipping forward in a casual bow, seemingly more excited to meet her than Celine had been.
Wasn’t that just something, Mira faintly mused, a Sunlight Sister, and now the daughter of another. What kind of dice had she rolled with the universe?
“Rumi had a feeling we’d find you today,” Celine said, smiling warmly as though that were not the weirdest thing one could say to a stranger.
They were both strange, it did not take long for Mira to decide. Rumi was everything that Mira might’ve been if she had ever been allowed to do things that were not just studying. Rumi could touch every instrument under the sun and be good at it. Rumi liked to garden and talk about plants. Rumi was perfect. She was also the one Mira ignored the most.
It might have been unfair towards the girl in retrospect, but Mira was used to never speaking a word to her own brother who used to live across the hallway, she did not know what to do with a person who did everything possible to get to know her. And when Mira did not understand something, she grew suspicious.
Every other day, a tutor would climb up the hill, staying a couple of hours each time to teach. At first it was just Rumi, then it was also Mira and according to Celine who said the tutor told her so, she was faster than Rumi, which was an alien thing to hear.
Rumi was nice, Celine was nice, they were too good to Mira, who had done nothing but take up space in their hanok at the top of a hill for nearly a month now, the peace lasting so infinitely that it began to sit wrong in Mira’s gut. It was a restless thing, never staying still for long, never quieting for long enough. One day, it simply planted itself at the forefront of her mind.
She had to leave.
No, she did not. She was fine here, things were boring. She did not need to leave.
One night after Rumi’s lights were long out and Celine’s footsteps had gone quiet, Mira slipped out the window of the room they had given her, the thought of remaining in the hanok having burnt halfway through her insides. Regret caught up with her not hours later, crouching by the still body of a small lake with the moon reflected on the water surface, wondering what on earth she had done, and why. Why why why. The question bounced around in her head, going unanswered no matter how hard she wracked her brain. She could have stayed, there was no real reason for her to go, they would have let her stay because they were just like that and that was impossible. There was a nagging little devil in her ear that would not hear of it. Nobody was just like that-
“There you are,” a voice said behind her, footsteps approaching on the grass.
Mira’s head snapped upward, alarmed by the knowledge that she had not heard anyone coming until just then, stiffening when she saw that she had been caught. Celine raised an eyebrow at her reaction, but said nothing, instead shifting closer. Mira winced purely out of reflex and immediately hated herself for it.
Celine’s lips pursed throughout the silence that followed, watching her closely. Mira looked upon the picture of calmness and did not trust it, if it were Abeoji, there would already be a new bruise forming just below her eye.
“Rumi told me you were missing, she’s waiting for you.”
Celine was not like Abeoji, she did not anger like he did, she was out here in the dark telling Mira to go back to the hanok with her when all she really ever had to do was wait, and in the end Mira would have gone back, because she was still a coward who feared that she did not belong with Celine or Rumi. And, if she did not have a place here, then by morning she would have had an answer. Except the answer was staring her in the face now and there were still hours before dawn.
“Sorry,” Mira blurted, unsure of what she was apologising for, only that it felt right to say even if Celine never acknowledged it.
Almost a month later, she did it again, the feeling of being out of place gnawing insistently at her chest until she found herself going down the hill from the hanok, furiously wondering if there was indeed another thing wrong with her. Once, Celine had not minded too terribly, twice, perhaps not. Mira might have done a stupid thing.
The third time, it was two months past and just the same. Celine stopped coming to find her, but when the sun peeked over the horizon and Mira turned up at her doorstep with her jaw clenched tight, picking at the hem of her shirt, she rose from the wooden porch and gestured towards the open door without a word.
Really, Mira tried hard after that not to venture out of the hanok at ungodly hours, especially since every time she walked in through the front door, Rumi would be sitting at the kitchen table, head propped up on an arm and waiting. Every single time, without fail, as if she could tell whenever Mira went too far from the hanok. But Celine on the porch turned into Celine and Rumi on the porch, and then it was just Rumi. Mira did her best to pay no heed to the thing that wanted her to get out of bed at night, suppressing the need on the grounds that it was not exactly a need, but an irrational want.
She came to one morning with an obnoxious pounding in her head and a horrid scratchiness in her throat, and Rumi saying very seriously that she would wander around town with Mira at the witching hour if she wanted her to. It was the most insistent Rumi had ever been in the last half a year Mira had known her. That night, as she lay in bed unable to sleep, she remembered the feeling of breathlessness like suffocation, and a high whine that might have been her screaming. That could not be, though, because if there was one thing Mira was sure of, it was that she did not scream, even if there was also the memory of a wild and all-consuming panic.
Rumi kept her word every time, her room door opening before Mira had even stepped past the threshold of her own. It was so uncanny that oftentimes Mira wondered if Rumi was secretly spying on her thoughts, somehow. The other girl still liked talking about plants, most times a night by the lake would turn into a plant-identification journey around town led by Ryu Rumi herself. Mira never complained, there was nothing to complain about, hearing Rumi’s voice was better than listening to her own thoughts.