Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

PART 1: LOONA 1/3

Heejin didn’t remember when she became aware of her place in the universe, she only knew that she had created it. Earth, the people in it, and her own divine dimension for her to reside between Earth and the Cosmos. She called this dimension the Cosmos anyway for convenience's sake, because truthfully, who was going to tell her she couldn’t? Everything in the universe existed because of her. Heejin existed to make things right, to create light and time and life and call it good. And it was good, but it wasn’t long before it all became so boring. 

She spent most of her time on Earth among her creations because, well, the Cosmos was pretty empty with just her in it. She liked being around people, to see them so happy doing what they were supposed to be doing. She enjoyed the things they created on their own, like music (her favourite was jazz). But even residing in her favourite city, Paris, France, couldn’t change the fact that she felt like something was missing in her black and white universe. 

Boring is the name she gave to what she was feeling. See, the thing about being a god and the creator of the universe is that you could decide what something is and have it be the truth. You have the power and control. So she chose the word boring to give to the festering dissatisfaction she had towards the world she created, and the frustration she felt towards the way things never seemed to stay the way she wanted them to stay. It wasn’t so much that something was missing, but that there should be something there. She intended for this world to be purposeful, to have a direction, to be perfect, but her intention seemed to be lost on the people of Earth. 

The people she created too often took advantage of the life she gave them to do the wrong things. There were those that became violent, aggressive, and committed atrocities she never could have dreamt of when she first made this world. This wasn’t a part of her plan, so it left her quite shocked. How could there be evil in the world when she had designed it to be good? She observed, however, that for every horrible person that fell to evil chaos, there would be many more to rise up against them in the name of good order. This is how Heejin came to learn that life was all about a balance between chaos and order. 

She had already realized her place in the universe, but now she realized her purpose. She was meant to maintain this balance. Good and evil, order and chaos, black and white, like the bright full moon in the dark night sky. That was what the world was, and from then on she worked on accepting this truth. 

But as time passed, the presence of evil in the world chipped away at her resolve, bit by bit. It mocked her and laughed in her face. It wore white but had the face of a wolf waiting for the right moment to pounce on its prey. It seemed to say, “The good world you created can never be truly good, and if it can’t be good, it will always be bad. One day I will swallow the moon and all the good people left will fall to evil and chaos. That is the fate of your good world.”

These thoughts wore down on her, sinking her slowly into the Earth she roamed and threatening to bury her completely, until one day she just couldn’t take it anymore. She needed a solution, to create something that would fill in the space between good and evil with the possibility for more goodness. Something in between black and white.

So she decided to create colour. 

Colour would be the goodness to take up the space between white and black. It would make her world a better place by invigorating the people of Earth with beauty and artistry. Each colour created in her image would add so many variations of goodness to the mosaic of her universe that it would be impossible for chaotic darkness to overpower them all. It was going to be a difficult task.

She was going to need some help. 

She started by creating only three colours: red, yellow, and blue. They eventually took on names and bodies of their own and helped her spread their colour throughout the universe. She moved back to the Cosmos and turned it into an otherworldly testing ground for her creations and their colours. There was one thing she kept colourless as a reminder of the past and what she had created out of nothing: a black and white rabbit whom she took with her to the Cosmos.

Overtime, Heejin became good friends with her colours, and the Cosmos became a nicer place to live. She gave her colours gifts, abilities that she felt would aid in their mission.

The colour red was the first to appear as the life that filled her people’s bodies, a colour that didn’t penetrate the black and white world unless it bled out of them. Red was the evolution of her universe hidden just below the surface, waiting to be made into reality. It was timeless to Heejin, so she gave red the power to move between time itself.

The colour yellow was dynamic and couldn’t be contained to one configuration. It could be anything from bright light, to the warmth of the sun, to the tang of sour lemons on your tongue. So she gave yellow the power to take any form, to become whatever she needed to be.

The colour blue was first given to the waters that flowed over so much of the world, and the reflection of their blue was so powerful that it was enough to colour the sky without divine infusion. Two immense dimensions of Earth, so far away from each other yet covered by one colour. So to blue, she gave the gift of being able to move between places at a moment’s whim. 

Her colours used their gifts responsibly and valiantly, and as they spread their goodness throughout the world, they seemed to fix the evil that had been seeping into her creation. She liked having people that could help her keep her universe in balance and whose purpose it was to spread good order throughout the world. She found that she was far less lonely than she was on Earth, but maybe that’s because she was not alone anymore in her divine mission. She became optimistic about never again having to worry about chaos overtaking her and her universe, and she held onto this feeling like it was a god of its own, like it was her purpose and her pillar to uphold.  

Things felt right, and Heejin saw that right was good.

Then one day, after nearly a century to the date since she had decided to add colour to the world, Heejin was returning home after another long day of managing the goodness in the world. She was coming from the observation deck, the point in the Cosmos through which she and her colours could watch what was taking place on Earth. Things in the universe were going well, as they had always been, so she retired to her house in the Cosmos, which she had fashioned to look exactly like her old flat in Paris. The inside was modern Parisian chic and unabashedly eclectic in colour, with each room completely dedicated to one of her three colours. A red checkered couch sat within blood red walls in her living room, the bright pale yellow of her kitchen matched the hues of the lemonade on the counter, and the blue of her bathroom reminded her of the many oceans covering Earth. 

She kept her bedroom white and claimed white as her own colour since she didn’t embody one herself. White was like the blank space she began with. On Earth, they called white a symbol of purity, and that’s what she wanted to maintain: a pure and good world. She didn’t really need a bedroom because she didn’t need to sleep, but she liked the idea of having a personal space that was her own. Besides, her bunny spent most of its time there while she was gone, and she wanted it to have a place where it could feel like it belonged. 

She drew a bath as soon as she got home, another human necessity that she didn’t have to abide by but one that she enjoyed as a leisure activity. It was one of the best ways to enjoy her creation. Immersing herself naked in the warm water stimulated her senses; she could perceive every part of her that felt human and every part of her that felt like the god she was. Her bedroom might have been where she felt the most sure of her place in the universe, but her bathroom was where she could best connect with her creation. Which is why when she was decorating, she added three coloured light bulbs directly above her bathtub, red, yellow, and blue. She liked to close her eyes and let their saturated light shine down on her from above, let the colours swim and twirl behind her eyelids, bathing herself in another element of her creation. Her baths became a necessary ritual in measuring the balance of her universe. 

Once her smooth porcelain tub had filled up three quarters of its volume, she undressed and slipped into the steaming water. Clothes were another habit from Earth, but her colourful friends made them so much more fun that now she found joy in deciding what she was going to wear each day. That was one of the first things they bonded over, discovering how they could express themselves as divine beings with bodies. She was thinking of these memories, warm like the water she was submerged in, when she first felt it. 

It wasn’t a physical feeling per se, nor even one that came from deep inside her. Something was different. Something was wrong. She remained frozen in the hot water, trying to pinpoint exactly what she was sensing and where it was coming from, when she realized it was coming from the light that danced behind her eyes. Her eyes shot open and she stared up at the bulbs hanging above her, searching for the one that first lent light its beautiful colour. 

But the yellow light bulb had gone out.

Chapter Text

Hyunjin knew coming to Earth wouldn’t be easy, but she didn’t anticipate it to be this lonely.

It had been two weeks since she had left Heejin and the other colours in the Cosmos, and the universe had not imploded. Things had occurred since then, things that might not have been great in the grand scheme of things, but nothing major. That’s what Hyunjin was focusing on. She would just have to wait and see how the other things ended up.

The first thing she did when she got to Earth was get a haircut. It was just a trim, but still, it helped her transition to this new phase of her life. The second thing she did once she got settled into her new place, a small house in Japan just outside the city, was adopt several cats from a local shelter. She always liked cats; they had been her favourite animal to become. She liked the nimble way they came and went without a sound or a command, and she saw something in their quiet independence that she tried to see in herself. They were good company to keep, too. Something to keep the loneliness at bay while she tried to work through everything else.

Huh, maybe that’s something, she thought to herself.

She walked over to the kitchen table and turned over a piece of paper she had left lying out. Grabbing a pencil from a mason jar that held mostly paint brushes, she sat down to add to the words in front of her. 

Since coming to Earth, Hyunjin had started a list. On this list, she wrote down anything that she thought might explain why chaos still permeated the good world Heejin had created, the good world her and her fellow colours were supposed to keep good. So far she had “fear of change”, “selfishness”, and “dwindling patience”. She now added “loneliness” to the list. Thinking about the biggest problems in the world helped her avoid thinking about the people she had left behind. 

No, not left behind, she reminded herself. At least not for good .

This was only temporary. Hyunjin had set out with the idea that as soon as she could figure out a solution to fix the things going wrong, she would return. But deep down, she hoped it wouldn’t take that long. When she lay awake at night, worlds away from the only family she had ever known, she told herself that if she could at least figure out a way to make them see that things needed fixing, that would be enough. 

The first time she had spoken up, things didn’t really work out. 

“Heejin, I need to tell you about something.” Hyunjin had pulled her aside after dinner one night, when the other girls had gone back to their living spaces.

Heejin had looked at her tense shoulders and the worried expression knotting her eyebrows and responded kindly, “Yes, what is it?”

It was sort of hard to explain, which is why she hadn’t tried to discuss the issue with the other colours. Besides, no one else had seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary but her, so they might not be tuned in to exactly what she was feeling. But Heejin would, she would understand everything. She tried as best she could to put into words the feeling of uneasiness that had slowly been creeping into her nerves. 

“I think something is starting to go wrong on Earth. I’ve been seeing a lot more bad stuff going on.”

“What kind of bad stuff?” Heejin asked, busying herself with clearing the table like this was just another casual conversation.

Hyunjin trailed behind her as she began to put things away. “Well, the thing is, it isn’t the usual evil we’re used to seeing, like lying, stealing, cheating, or killing. You know, the basics that they made laws about down there?”

Heejin nodded her head but remained focused on the task in front of her. “What is it, then?”

“People are… getting more distant with each other. And there’s this weird kind of sadness that I’m seeing that doesn’t ever really seem to go away. It’s strange, I don’t know how to describe it.”

Heejin paused. “Can you try?”

Hyunjin nodded and shut her eyes, focusing on feeling what the people on Earth felt in hopes she could explain it. Her ability to shapeshift didn’t stop at the physical dimension. Feelings were forms too. After a few moments, she opened her eyes and spoke. 

“The problem is it doesn’t really feel or look like sadness, I guess. It’s more like there’s a hole in their happiness, something like despair at the center of their joy just big enough that it casts a shadow on all the good feelings they should have towards their lives. It’s almost like people have become miserable, but they’ve decided to live with it.” 

She had seen Heejin’s face fall for the first time. Her eyes lost their light, her rosy cheeks went pale, and her mouth seemed to fumble for words. Then just as quickly as it fell, Hyunjin watched it bounce right back. 

“I’ll look into it tomorrow. Thank you.”

Hyunjin went home that night with a huge sense of relief at finally telling Heejin what she was witnessing. But the next day, when Hyunjin and the other colours from the Cosmos met Heejin in the observation area, Heejin didn’t acknowledge any of what Hyunjin had said the night before. When Hyunjin took a private moment to pull Heejin aside and ask her if she did in fact look into it, Heejin smiled and told her that everything was fine.

“What do you mean?” Hyunjin asked, stunned. “You didn’t see anything wrong?”

“Everything is in order,” said Heejin. “If it wasn’t, I would be able to feel it. Everything is good, as it always is.”

Heejin’s words should have comforted her, but they didn’t. And what she was feeling from Earth didn’t stop, it only grew worse, until it ripped her from the Cosmos and dropped her in the middle of a new world, where she now had to make sense of the claws that tore her apart from words she could write on a piece of paper. 

She stared at the first entry she made on her list, which had since been crossed out. 

Nothing to believe in  

One of the first things she learned when coming to Earth was that everyone had something to believe in, and it actually didn’t matter much if that belief was in a divine creator, or in a friendship so strong it could collapse in on itself. 

If faith wasn’t the issue, perhaps it could be the solution, she thought, twirling the pencil in her hand.  

Suddenly, she heard the clash of porcelain shattering on the ground. Her head darted up towards the back door of her small house that led to the yard her cats liked to play in. Did one of them tip over a vase of flowers? 

Plants were another thing she had surrounded herself with since coming to Earth. They were just another thing to take care of, but one that seemed to contribute to the balance of her own universe. Besides, she never realized how much she liked the colour green until she had an abundance of it. 

Hyunijn stood up slowly and wandered over to the door, which was slightly ajar to let some air in and let the cats come and go as they pleased. Sure enough, right beneath the windowsill, there lay the broken body of a white vase, its pieces scattered like feathers on the floor. She looked down the hallway that led to her bedroom, scanning for any fluffy, guilty parties, but she found none. Pushing the back door open wider, she snuck her head out to see if the furry felon had tried to escape that way. Two of her cats were lounging by the fence on the far side of the yard, spread out in the sun. They didn’t look like they were running from anything, and Hyunjin knew what running from something looked like.

Must have just been the wind , she thought to herself.

Then a flash of colour caught her eye.

Lying on the ground just outside the door was a beaded bracelet of many colours. At first, she thought this was something one of her cats had found on the street and brought back to her. But as she leaned closer, she became mesmerized by the colours. They were so simple yet so wonderful, in a kind of way that made her afraid to blink in case their brilliance went away when she opened her eyes. She hadn’t seen any colours like these on Earth, only in the Cosmos. Her eyes shot back to the broken vase on the floor, shining white like fresh snow crystallized into thick chunks of ice. She had bought that vase from a tiny garden shop on a street corner because, despite the bubbling bile of guilt she had been trying to swallow, its pristine white colour reminded her of-

“Hi,” said a familiar voice from behind her.

Hyunjin stood and whirled around, her two braided pigtails whipping the sides of her face with the force at which she spun. There was Heejin, standing in her kitchen, her hand resting on the piece of paper Hyunjin was just writing on.  

“Hello,” she replied, feeling out of breath. “How did you find me?”

“We’re connected, remember?” Heejin said, a polite smile painted on her face, like the look of a friendly neighbour who knocked on the door to ask for a small favour. “Couldn’t you tell I was close?” 

When Hyunjin didn’t immediately answer, Heejin lifted her hand next to her left eye and tapped her fingers right underneath her eyelashes. Hyunjin’s hand flew to her own eye and she looked away from Heejin before answering.

“No, sorry.” She swallowed hard. “I didn’t.”

“Oh.”

The warm tingling that lit up the outer ring of each colour’s pupil had noticeably vanished when she had returned from Iceland. At first, it scared her. She felt like she was stranded in the middle of the ocean with no way of knowing where the nearest shore was. She felt disconnected from where she came from and from the rest of the girls in the Cosmos, but she had to believe that the sacrifice taking her farther away from them would bring her closer to fixing things, closer to the truth of what was happening. A truth that maybe now, because she had left the Cosmos to come after her, Heejin would see for herself. 

Hyunjin looked back towards the girl in her house. The top half of Heejin’s dark hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, and she wore a white blouse with a black and yellow checkered skirt. Heejin had always loved to play with colours in her clothes back in the Cosmos, they all did, but somehow this yellow felt different. It felt like a threat and a cry for help at the same time. Before Hyunjin could comment on the colour, Heejin commented on hers.

“That’s a nice sweater.” 

Hyunjin looked down at the fuzzy yellow pullover she wore and managed to stutter out, “Yes, well, it’s a nice colour.”

Heejin slowly nodded. “So you didn’t leave because you were unhappy with your colour?”

What?  

“No, of course that wasn’t it.”

“I understand if it was. You know, recently, I’ve thought a lot about how I prefer pink-”

“It’s not that,” said Hyunjin. 

“Okay, good.” 

Heejin smiled, and there was a pause before her next question, which came out so quietly Hyunjin could only barely catch the words. “Why did you leave, then?”

Hyunjin stared back in disbelief at her creator, her leader, her friend. “Do you- do you really not know?”

Heejin let out a small chuckle. “Hyunjin, I have no reason to pretend I don’t know the things that I know. I made everything, so I know everything. I’m just trying to understand-”

“But you don’t know everything,” said Hyunjin. 

For a split second, Heejin’s face fell like it did when Hyunjin first came to her with her worries. Then it lifted right back up a second later into the same kind smile and bright eyes that she always wore like clothing. 

Ever since her creation, Hyunjin had known Heejin to be a positive person. She was always trying to see the good in her creations and what she could bring to them, always trying to make things right. It was the first thing she came to admire about Heejin, and Heejin made her feel like she played a role in this optimism as one of the people created to help her. She felt it in the way that Heejin never tried to position herself above the other girls even though she was their creator. She heard it in the laughter they shared and the conversations murmured over the good food she always prepared for them. She thought she saw it in Heejin’s eyes, the way they looked so happy when gazing at one of her colours. 

But ever since the first time her face fell, Heejin’s smile seemed drawn with an artist’s shaky hand, and the warmth in her eyes seemed to be coming from a single lightbulb in an empty room. Did she actually see the sadness that Hyunjin saw? If she really did, then why would she try to pretend that everything was fine? 

And if she still couldn’t, then why did Hyunjin have to be the only person feeling all of this pain and suffering?

She stared at the girl across from her who was waiting patiently to be told what was wrong. Her kind smile never faded. It never faltered. Hyunjin wished it would. 

 “I’m sorry, but you don’t know everything.” Hyunjin repeated to the god standing in her house.

“But I know you,” she asserted. “And I know you left because you were unhappy about something.”

“Well, you’re wrong.” 

Hyunjin had never spoken so bluntly towards Heejin before, but it infuriated her that Heejin would think she had left the Cosmos for a selfish reason. “I left because I needed to. I couldn’t just wait for things to get worse. The people in this universe need help and I am supposed to help them.” 

“ We are supposed to help them, together.” Heejin strode forward and held out her hand. “I need you to come back with me.”

Hyunjin stared at the hand beckoning her back home. She wanted so desperately to be able to believe in the good world that Heejin saw, to believe that nothing could ever go wrong as long as they were together, to be able to forget the pain she had been feeling, but she couldn’t. She knew that it was too late. She knew that a new pain would only replace the old pain. If she took Heejin’s hand and tried to live life the way she lived it before, the feeling that she had failed everyone else would rot her from the inside. 

“No.”

Heejin didn’t pull away, but her hand trembled. 

“Are you happier here?” she finally asked.

Hyunjin couldn’t answer. Instead, she lowered her head into her hands and let out an exasperated sigh that ended in a choked sob. She was tired of feeling so alone with the burden of maintaining the good in the world when the people around her couldn’t see the shadows of chaos creeping in from every side. But what good could she really do without them?

As she cried, she felt Heejin rest a hand on her hunched shoulders. 

“Do you know why I needed someone with the ability to transform into anything?” Heejin asked her.

Hyunjin let out a shaky breath in response, and Heejin continued. 

“It’s because I knew that I could never fully experience what it was like to be human, so I would never fully understand them. And how could I give them what they needed if I couldn’t understand them?” 

Hyunjin looked up at the girl next to her, looking so human but being so different on the inside. Despite differences, tears had begun welling up in Heejin’s eyes, and it was the first time Hyunjin had ever seen her look sad. Perhaps she wasn’t so different from the people of Earth. 

“Leaving wasn’t easy, you know,” sniffled Hyunjin. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too.” Heejin smiled through her tears, a real smile for the first time in a while. “And I’m not leaving you anytime soon.” 

“What?”

“There is a new threat of chaos in this world,” she said with newfound surety. “It may be one that I don’t fully understand yet, but I know that we need to fix it. I’m going to stay, and we’re going to figure out together how to spread goodness back into the world.”

“Really?” Hyunjin wiped away her tears. “But what about the others?”

Before Heejin could answer, something behind Hyunjin caught her attention. She froze, mouth half open, before slowly closing it shut. Hyunjin didn’t know if it was because the back door was still open, but she felt the temperature in the room suddenly drop. 

She turned to see what Heejin was looking at, but instead of freezing at the sight of it, her heart sunk deep into her chest. Heejin’s presence should have immediately reminded her of what she had done since leaving the Cosmos, but it somehow had the opposite effect. Now, she remembered, and she knew she couldn’t avoid the consequences any longer.

One of her cats had wandered in through the back door with a dead animal in its mouth. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for cats to bring home prey they had caught from outside, but what this cat dropped at her feet was something different. The limp, lifeless body of a white dove joined the shards of porcelain littering the floor, and from the sharp breath she heard Heejin take in, Hyunjin could tell that she knew this was no ordinary bird. 

“Hyunjin,” she said quietly, her wide eyes fixed on the damage. “What did you do?”

Chapter Text

“Do you want to be friends?”

It was the first thing Haseul heard that didn’t sound like it was coming from underwater. Haseul had grown so used to being alone that she tended to drown the rest of the world out, so that she didn’t have to hear the chatter of everyone being friends around her. She was attending an international high school in Taipei, so it helped that most of said chatter was usually in a different language. But friendliness was something that seemed to transcend basic grammar and syntax. It manifested itself in giggling at inappropriate times and loud, rude exclamations. A friend’s voice sounded like it came from a voice box closer to their soul when they talked to you as opposed to talking to, say, a teacher, in which the voice box used came from somewhere closer to the brain. These sounds swarmed around her at all times, forcing its way through the air and into her ears until they felt stuffed with noise white like cotton. Perhaps Haseul wouldn’t have found these things so annoying had they ever been directed at her, but they never were. 

Haseul had been the only Korean girl at this school for over a year now, and even though she attempted to block most of it out while she was living though it, she was sure she would have remembered this girl standing in front of her if she’d seen her before. She was Korean too, but she looked younger than Haseul, and not just because she was shorter. Her dark hair framed her round face in a way that made her cheeks seem even more full, and her big lips protruded out in a cute, permanent pout. 

“Why are you asking me?” asked Haseul.

The girl cocked her head to the side as if she was really considering Haseul’s question and trying to answer honestly. “Because you look like you could be a friend,” she answered simply, then the girl stuck out her hand. “I’m Yeojin.”

And from then on, it was like Haseul had been pulled from the depths of the sea she resigned herself too, and the world became more colourful. At first, her and Yeojin would only hang out in the school yard since they were both already there, but it wasn’t long before they started meeting before and after school as well. Haseul got into the routine of meeting Yeojin at her dorm room door, since her residence hall was closer to the main buildings, and they would walk to and from school together. Soon, they were ordering meals to eat together and singing along to their favourite songs even if their mouths were full. They began planning day trips into the city and picking out matching outfits from the shops they visited. Haseul completely transformed from the quiet girl who used to sit alone at the back of the room into a loud, giggly girl who was rarely seen without her other half in tow. On their city trips, they would bring a video camera to capture their memories so that they could watch them later when they were swamped with school work and studying together in the dorms. 

“A movie of better days,” Yeojin would sigh over piles of textbooks and papers. 

But the truth was that to Haseul, everyday with Yeojin felt like a better day than the last, even if all they were doing was labouring over math equations together. She had finally found a friend. 

Haseul discovered what it was like to be close to someone; to share happiness, to share pain, to talk to someone in a tone that was different from how she greeted her teachers or peers in the classroom. It was an amazing feeling, but as soon as her happiness threatened to spill over, an overwhelming sense of worry came to suck it all away. It wasn’t long before Haseul became terrified of losing her one and only friend, and returning to the lonely and empty girl she used to be. 

Not only that, but because Yeojin was younger than her, she felt that she had to protect her from the harshness of the world. Yeojin’s hope that things could turn out alright for her is what brought them together in the first place. Haseul’s eyes had already found a home on the ground, or if not a home, then a place to shelter in for the time being, like her dorm room or the dying rain tree she sat under in the schoolyard. She was far from looking up in the hopes she might finally spot a friend. She didn’t want Yeojin to lose that hope as she grew, for that would surely be the thing to tear them apart. Their relationship was something more than friendship, and Haseul came to consider herself someone like Yeojin’s older sister, or even her mother. They were practically family. 

The only issue is, they weren’t.

Haseul avoided thinking about it, but there were some days, after she walked Yeojin home and proceeded to walk back to her own room, when the terror of it all consumed her. It would be better if they were family, even better if Haseul was a part of Yeojin’s family that was far away from here, because then at least there would be something to connect them, to make sure that despite whatever the future held, Haseul wouldn't lose her. There was no bond other than friendship, and Haseul wanted that to be enough so badly, but she knew it wasn’t. She had friends from back home, friends she thought she would have forever, and she couldn’t remember the last time each and everyone of them called because she didn’t know it would be the last time. But they all dropped off eventually, and there was nothing to ensure they would ever see each other again because nothing, not even basic obligation, held them together. There was nothing that could prevent Haseul and Yeojin from growing apart and out of each other’s lives one day, and it kept Haseul up at night. 

She never let it show around Yeojin, how irrationally scared she was over the possibility of losing her. She didn’t want to smother her and scare her away. Haseul actually found it was easy to forget her worries when she was around Yeojin, and she cherished those moments when she was present and enjoying herself. It was really only when she was alone did she feel the hair on her neck rise at the perceived threats made by the world against the one good thing she had found. 

Then one sunny Friday when Haseul and Yeojin had made plans to go into the city for the weekend, something changed. 

“I’m sorry, Haseul, I just can’t go.” It was the beginning of exam season, and Yeojin explained that she was overwhelmed with school work. This wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, as Yeojin was a dedicated student. But when Haseul proposed a joint study session, Yeojin shook her head. “I think I need to be alone today in order to really focus. We’ll plan another trip after our final exams, okay?”

Haseul nodded, but when Yeojin closed the door, she stayed standing outside of it for quite some time. Yeojin never wanted to be alone. Why this sudden change? Did something happen, or was this just time running its course? Was this the beginning of the end?

Haseul tried to calm herself down by going on a walk. Maybe this was a good thing. Friends can take time alone from each other; it was natural. She was starting to sound obsessed. It was crazy to be worked up over this. I mean, it’s not like she was angry at Yeojin, so who was she getting all upset at anyway?

Her walk turned into a train ride into the city, and suddenly she was walking the same streets that she and Yeojin frequented, like her body was in autopilot as her mind raced ahead. It felt wrong to be here without Yeojin, and that scared Haseul. Was she so dependent on this other person that she couldn’t be alone? She seriously couldn’t expect to rely on Yeojin to fulfill her happiness forever. Maybe that’s why Yeojin needed a break. Haseul was putting too much pressure on her, and Yeojin was starting to feel it. All of Haseul’s worst nightmares were coming true after all, and it was all Haseul’s fault.

Just as she was about to burst with anxiety, she spotted the cream-coloured cat that hung around a section of the train tracks. Yeojin always insisted they stop to pet this cat whenever they saw it, so as if by reflex, Haseul knelt down to pet it. Its soft fur helped ground her, but the way it nestled its head into her hand brought the tears she had been holding back to the surface, and she let them flow over her cheeks as she moved her hands over its tiny, fluffy body. Finally, when she felt like she’d cried all of her tears out, she stood and continued walking down the street. 

She only moved maybe a hundred meters away when she heard a voice calling out from behind her.

“Excuse me, I think you dropped this!”

She tried to quickly wipe the tears off of her face, but her efforts weren't very effective at it. When she turned around, a Korean girl who looked to be around her age wearing a cream-coloured sweater was holding up her satchel a few feet away.

“Oh, yes, thank you. I must have put it down when I was petting the…” Haseul trailed off as she looked behind the girl to find that the cat was gone, probably having run off to be pet somewhere else. “Nevermind. Thank you.”

As she took her bag from the girl, the girl seemed to notice that something was wrong. “Are you okay?” she asked, her brows furrowing with concern.

“I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

For some reason, her asking twice made Haseul feel the same way she did when Yeojin first asked her to be friends, like this girl was actually interested in how Haseul was feeling. 

“I’m worried about losing a friend,” she admitted. “I don’t really know what to do.”

The girl nodded slowly, then ran her fingers over her hair. A beautiful yellow ribbon that Haseul didn’t notice before swung about on top of her dark locks. “Can you tell me more about this feeling?”

And Haseul did. She told this random girl all about her friendship with Yeojin and her worries about it ending. For whatever reason, she felt a strange connection with her, but Haseul was probably only imagining that to make her feel better about the absurdity of this whole situation. The girl listened to her entire story, and at the end of it, she asked her a question.

“What if you feel so afraid of losing this person because you really are meant to be together in this life?”

“But that’s the problem. If we were really meant to be together, wouldn’t we have been born sisters or something? To make sure we could never be apart?”

“It sounds like you don’t need a connection like that, though. Your bond is already strong.”

“I’m afraid it isn’t strong enough.” Haseul thought she had cried all of her tears out, but new ones threatened to spill over as she came to realize her new deepest, darkest fear as she spoke to this girl. “Or what if it is, and somehow I’m destroying it?”

The girl opened her mouth to speak, but upon seeing Haseul’s tears, closed her mouth and turned slightly away. Then her brow furrowed, and she looked like she was debating whether or not to say anything more. Finally, she gave a small nod, and turned back to Haseul.

“What if there was a way to ensure your friendship could be made into an eternal bond, cemented in the fabric of the universe itself, by becoming something more?” asked the girl. “Would you take it?
“Becoming something more…?” Haseul was confused by the girl’s words, and the intense way she looked at Haseul as she spoke them, but she focused on the question she was ultimately asking. “Yes, I would take it.”

“Okay,” the girl said. “Then come with me.” 

Chapter Text

When the girl told Haseul to follow her, Haseul expected to be led to a place nearby. She did not expect to be in Iceland the following day, sitting in the passenger seat of a bright yellow truck as this girl, who had since introduced herself as Hyunjin, drove her out to the middle of nowhere.

“Remind me again why we had to come all the way here?” Haseul asked.

Now, believe it or not, Haseul was a decently smart girl. The only difference between who she was and what she was doing was desperation, and a sense of certainty that she could trust this strange person. Although perhaps that feeling was just a symptom of her desperation. 

“Iceland holds a special kind of spiritual energy that should help with what we’re trying to do,” said Hyunjin, breaking Haseul out of her downward spiral. 

“Okay, you’ve told me that, but you haven’t told me why,” said Haseul. “I mean, do you even know why?”

Hyunjin took a deep breath and kept her eyes on the plain, flat field they drove across. “Think of it like the point of intersection between two colours. Iceland is named after ice, which is one of the purest natural forms of the colour white. But as you can see,” Hyunjin gestured around the grassy field spotted with mounds of snow and ice. “ Aside from the ice, it’s mostly green.”

“And what do colours have to do with this?”

“A lot, actually. But it would be too confusing to explain it all to you now.” Hyunjin muttered the last part under her breath like Haseul wasn’t supposed to hear it. Then she continued muttering, “And if I can make green, I should be able to make orange.”

Other than the proven ability to inspire blind trust, it was hard for Haseul to figure out anything else about this girl. She seemed like she was used to being by herself a lot. She was nice, but she didn’t try to fill the silence with small conversation like most people would. She also clearly didn’t feel the need to explain herself unless Haseul asked.

Soon enough, Hyunjin slowed down in the middle of the field and parked the truck. “Alright,” she said. “I think we’re here.”

Haseul turned to ask her exactly where “here” was, but just as she opened her mouth, she thought she could see a pale, warm glow coming from the girl’s left eye. She blinked, and when Hyunjin turned to her, it was gone. Had she imagined it?

“You can get out now.”

“Wait, get out? Here?” Haseul looked around at the vast emptiness of the landscape. “Then what?”

Hyunjin shrugged. “Look for something that looks like it will lead you somewhere else, I assume.” 

“You assume?”

“I’ve never done something like this before, but I have a good feeling about it. If it goes the way I think it can go, you and your friend will be connected forever to something bigger than yourselves. And I suppose we’ll be connected, too.” Hyunjin looked away from Haseul as if she was shy about that last part. 

Haseul could feel doubt finally creeping in, but it focused its energy on one potential mistake in this promise. 

“What if it doesn’t go the way you think it will?” asked Haseul. “Will something happen to me? Will something happen to Yeojin?”

Hyunjin hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t know for sure, but it can’t be worse than whatever you think is happening between you two now.”

Worse than her greatest fears? 

Haseul sat there, letting the words hit her along with the gravity of the entire situation. She had let a stranger take her to the middle of nowhere all on most likely false promises that this trip would fix her friendship with Yeojin. A friendship which, when she rationalized it, might not be so broken to begin with. Was she selfish to go all this way to make sure they would never grow apart? What if one day, Yeojin wanted to leave her; would Haseul be taking that choice away from her now? 

Haseul had the sound mind to demand that Hyunjin turn this truck around and bring her back home.

But when she looked out at the vast icy field, she remembered how her life before Yeojin wasn’t so different from the cold emptiness in front of her. As selfish as she was to want to hold onto her friend, deep down, Haseul knew this wasn’t just about keeping her friend for herself. There was the part of Haseul that desperately wanted to protect Yeojin from the same loneliness, the same fear of its return that drove her here. Hyunjin had said that she and Yeojin would be connected to something bigger than themselves, to each other, yes, but also to others. This might be the only way to make sure that neither her nor Yeojin ever sink to the depths of that cold, lonely sea. 

Haseul got out of the truck. 

She held onto the girl’s promise, carving it into her weary heart so that she could really live by it. 

“Meet me right back here after you’re done, okay?” Hyunjin called out the window.

Done with what? Haseul wanted to yell back, but she knew it was pointless. 

She started walking down the road, a rough path that looked like it was paved with coal. The black rock crunched under her feet as she strayed farther and farther away from the yellow truck. She let her eyes wander over the landscape, searching for anything that stood out to her, but it was just so empty. How was she supposed to find something to lead her to where she needed to go if she could see everything for miles, and there was nothing there?

Suddenly, as she turned her head, she saw something flash in her peripheral vision. Whipping her head back towards the source of the twinkle, she caught it again, and then ran forward to find out what was reflecting the light. When she spotted it, nestled among the darkness of the coals like a shard of clean glass, she gasped. 

She reached out her hand and held the jewel up to the light, watching as it shimmered. It was a small diamond. If she gained nothing else from this trip, at least she wouldn’t be returning to Taipei empty-handed. 

Just as she went to pocket the precious stone, another flash caught her eye a few meters away. She stumbled forward, following the source of the reflection yet again, and found another small gem among the black coals. Then another, then another. After she plucked the fifth one up from the soot-coloured ground, it occurred to Haseul that perhaps this wasn’t luck in the form of a few expensive souvenirs. 

Maybe this was the trail she was meant to follow.

So she trekked across the barren land, following the diamonds, deciding to keep only the first few she found in case she needed them to find her way back afterwards, Hansel-and-Gretel style. Finally, after what must have been the fiftieth diamond she came across, she glanced up to look for the next one and saw something in the distance that she hadn’t seen there before. Using her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, which was getting lower in the sky, she squinted at the large, looming structure and began walking towards it. Where did it come from? Had it just blended into the horizon until she was finally close enough to make out its shape? 

It took her until she was almost right in front of it to even recognize what it was, but when she did, the realization blew through her like a cold breeze over bare bones. It was the long-abandoned exoskeleton of a crashed plane. 

What was this doing here? 

And how did I miss it before?  

She turned around to face where she had just come from, expecting to see the yellow truck not too far off, but her heart dropped when she saw that it was no longer in sight. She hadn’t even been walking for that long. Did Hyunjin drive away and leave her here? 

The loneliness that Haseul had been fighting off ever since Yeojin asked her to be her friend suddenly came back like she was the ground struck by the plane, and the force of it almost knocked her over. But she held her ground and turned back to the massive, decaying beast, dying alone so quietly in the middle of nowhere. 

If she truly was all alone, then at least she was going to find what she came here for. She owed Yeojin that much, even if she didn’t deserve it herself. 

Haseul entered the hollow body of the plane, being careful to step over any sharp machinery that protruded out of the ground like stubborn flowers poking their way out of the snow in early spring. Her eyes roamed around the dull, gray inside, speckled with punched-through windows and other holes that made it look like large, metal-eating caterpillars had been there. She peered out of one of these gaps, and took a moment to appreciate the sunset that had begun to turn the sky into a blended mixture of pink and purple hues. She wondered how the sky looked on the opposite horizon, but when she turned to look out the window on the other side of the plane, she froze at what she saw. 

About two hundred meters away, staring up at the sky, a person stood dressed in all white. 

White . This was one of the colours Hyunjin had mentioned in the truck. Could this be someone that Haseul was meant to find here?

Haseul bolted out of the plane’s carcass and began running toward the figure in the distance. As she got closer, she could see that this person even had short, white hair, and it looked like they were dressed entirely in white feathers. When Haseul had halved the distance between them, she called out to the person. The white feathers quivered in the breeze as the person turned their head to look at her. 

Haseul’s feet stopped before the rest of her body could catch up. At the sight of the person’s face, she tripped and fell to the hard, icy ground. 

Impossible , she thought to herself, but she couldn’t get the image out of her mind. It was an image she was only used to seeing in a mirror, or in pictures her and Yeojin took together. 

This person had her face. 

How was that even possible? Panting, mind reeling, Haseul whipped her head up to get another look at this girl, but she had turned away from Haseul and had started walking leisurely in the other direction. Haseul struggled to her feet and continued to run after her, although she wasn’t sure what she would even do when she caught up to this strange creature. 

What are you supposed to do when you come face to face with yourself in the middle of nowhere? 

As Haseul ran, the few diamonds she had collected in her small pockets began to spill out and fall to the ground. She slowed her running only for a moment to collect them, but when she looked back up, the girl in white was somehow farther away than she was only moments ago, even though she still just seemed to be walking. So Haseul resumed running, opting to leave any diamonds that fell out of her pockets behind. From then on, she didn’t let this girl out of her sight.

Eventually, when Haseul was only a few meters away from her, the girl in white abruptly stopped. Haseul stopped in her tracks too, waiting with uncertainty to see what the girl would do next. Haseul had felt a growing sense of dread and fear ever since she caught a glimpse of the girl’s face, and now that she was so close to her, these horrible feelings only became amplified. Why did this girl have to look exactly like her? Why was she here?

The girl in white stood facing away from Haseul, but slowly she began to turn around. When her eyes met Haseul’s, it was as if the weird sense of terror Haseul had been feeling towards her suddenly solidified in her body, its every edge becoming clear and sharp. 

This feeling was not new, but it also was unlike anything Haseul had ever felt before. She felt within her all of the loneliness from when she had not known Yeojin, but as if it had never subsided even for a second. She strove for some memory of Yeojin to make her feel better while she stood there, suspended in her suffering, but she couldn’t grasp onto any. She couldn’t remember any. Suddenly she realized why this feeling was so foreign yet so familiar, and why it hurt so badly. 

This girl was making her forget Yeojin, and soon it would be as if they had never become friends. 

Haseul didn’t know what she had to do, she just knew she needed this to stop. She reached into her pockets and pulled out the last remaining diamond. Holding it in her left hand, she felt the fingers on her right hand close around something at her side, something that wasn’t there before, but she didn’t stop to question what was happening this time. 

She was done with wondering why.

The next few moments happened so quickly that Haseul could hardly feel them. The slingshot in one hand and the diamond in the other felt like they barely grazed her fingertips. The only thing she could feel was the source of all her happiness being sucked away, and when she raised the weapon in her hands and took aim with the diamond, all she wanted was to never see her face reflected like this again. All she wanted was to see Yeojin’s face, smiling up at her, just one more time.

The elastic snapped as it released and the diamond struck the girl in the heart. She seemed to fall in slow motion and disappear as she collapsed. All that remained by the time she hit the ground was a pile of white feathers. 

Haseul stood there for a few moments, letting the aching fear and emptiness melt around her like warmed ice. Then she walked towards the pile of feathers, some of which had already started to blow away, and knelt down at the grave of her reflection. Within the pile, she recovered the small body of a dove, and held it in her hands. Running her fingers over its tiny, smooth body, she took a deep breath and let her mind catch up with her body. 

And when it did, she finally understood.

Haseul saw it all, how the universe was created, how those in the Cosmos helped maintain it, and how she was now a part of their divine purpose. The green around her suddenly became unbelievably vibrant, so vibrant, in fact, that even the grass covered by snow and ice seemed to glow though the sleet. She swore she could taste the green, and although it tasted bitter, there was an undeniable sweetness to it that lingered on the tip of her tongue. 

She felt the existential dread of the chaos that permeated this world, but she also felt the goodness overflowing from her, fighting back against it. It was as if the happiness she felt when she was with Yeojin and the terror she felt over losing her had tangible weights to them, and while before they may have seesawed back and forth on their scales, now Haseul could see which lay heaviest on her heart, and it was her happiness. 

She couldn’t wait to see Yeojin again, to feel even more joy by being with her friend and knowing that they truly would be friends forever.

* * *

Haseul was practically beaming with excitement when she arrived at Yeojin’s dorm room on Monday. She ran from that field once she gained the divine knowledge she was looking for. She didn’t end up finding her way back to the yellow truck, but Haseul didn’t even care; she had made it back to Taipei in the end. Besides, she was sure Hyunjin would turn up eventually since they were now supposedly connected as well, like she had told her in the truck. 

Haseul had just gotten back from Iceland last night, and she could already feel something in her heart buzzing as if to tell her that her friend was close by. 

She knocked twelve times on the door in the pattern that had become their secret knock. 

Could Yeojin feel it too? She must be able to. Haseul wasn’t exactly sure how it had all affected Yeojin, but she was excited to help her understand. 

There was no answer. 

She knocked again. Not even the faint sound of footsteps shifting about the room. 

Finally, after trying a couple more times and even trying to whisper that it was her through the lock, she pulled out the spare key that Yeojin had given her in the event of an emergency. Since they didn’t know anyone for miles, the extra key the school provided them for their emergency contacts had been swapped with each other. She put the key in the hole, turned the lock, and opened the door.

“Yeojin, I’m coming in!” She announced, but as she pushed against the door, she realized that she was talking to an empty room.

Yeojin was nowhere to be found.  

Chapter Text

Yeojin enjoyed being a wanderer.

In fact, she thought it one of her best qualities. It was definitely the thing that seemed to bring her the most happiness. When her parents told her they were sending her to an international school in Taiwan, she was upset and scared at first, like any tween girl would be. But when she got to the school, she realized that there was so much space to explore. She would wander around campus if she felt homesick, or sad, or just needed to take her mind off things. Wandering became her first real friend, something to rely on to make her feel better, something to do with herself. It was one of these wandering trips that led her to Haseul, the only other Korean girl in the school. And ever since that day, they had wandered together. 

Yeojin liked being friends with Haseul. It was much easier to wander when you had someone to watch your back. She felt protected by Haseul. She had almost forgotten how much she’d missed this feeling since leaving her parents. Haseul took care of Yeojin, and in turn, Yeojin tried to take care of Haseul. 

When the two met, she could tell right away that the girl had gotten used to her loneliness. She seemed to wrap it around herself like a thin blanket and drag it everywhere she went, never letting herself slouch too close to the others in case it slipped off her shoulders. Yeojin saw Haseul sitting underneath the big tree in the yard one day, her posture trying to hide the parts of her that her shoulder-length hair couldn’t cover. She looked like she was trying to melt into the roots. 

Yeojin had planned to wander about the North side of campus and feed the squirrels that scurried out of the trees bordering the grounds, but she changed her mind when she saw Haseul. Or rather, in that moment, she supposed that she had gotten used to a kind of loneliness too. She felt it like the hot end of a poker prodding into her heart. 

Well, if they were both lonely, then they might as well be lonely together. 

Yeojin tried to be the best friend Haseul had ever had. It was pretty easy because she genuinely liked to spend time with Haseul, and oftentimes Yeojin felt that she loved being friends with Haseul just as much as she could feel Haseul loved being friends with her. But sometimes the older girl would look at her, with all the hope and fear in the world swirling around her deep brown eyes, and Yeojin would feel the full weight of what her friendship meant to Haseul. In those moments, her heart would race like it was trying to run away. Then the moment would pass, and she would try to put that feeling out of her mind, the feeling that told her to bolt.

It wasn’t exhausting being her friend. It wasn’t even hard. It was just a little dangerous for the both of them. 

Yeojin hadn’t been able to do much wandering ever since the final exam period started. It was the first time since coming to school here that she actually had to buckle down and stay focused. It was hard, learning how to discipline herself, but a part of her was proud for setting such a rigorous study schedule and actually sticking to it. The other part of her, though, was constantly gazing out the window. That part of her felt trapped. That part of her felt sad, too, but it must have just been the boredom seeping in. She would soon be just as carefree as she was before, free to wander around with her best friend.  

She was walking back to her dorm room after her last exam when it happened. 

Everything around her grew so bright she had to shut her eyes, but whatever was blinding her didn’t feel like light. 

It felt like fire. 

Intense, orange flames scorching her skin. She didn’t understand what was going on, but she knew that it hurt. Closing her eyes didn’t even do anything to escape the heat because it felt like the fire was burning from inside of her, an inferno so big it was impossible to imagine it ever dying down. Its flames only grew bigger, like they were trying to reach out for something, something… or someone. 

She thought of Haseul, her friend. She would be able to help! But as she thought of her, the flames only spread. Were they reaching out for Haseul? Somehow it felt like Haseul was a part of their wavering, but there was so much more that the blaze burned for. Why did she feel this way all of a sudden? Why was this happening?

Despite her fears, the fire eventually quelled enough that she opened her eyes again. Nobody else had stopped moving. Nobody else looked like they were burning alive. Although, the world still had an orange glow to it, and this only scared Yeojin more. What if an even larger fire ignited within her? She couldn’t bear thinking about any of this while her brain was still smouldering, so she did what any sensible young girl would do if their whole world was lit on fire.

She dropped everything and ran.

Being so young, only barely a teenager, she couldn’t have known that the youthfulness spurring her forward was the very thing she was afraid of losing to the flames. She didn’t know that a pile of ash could work just as well as sand in an hourglass, and that maybe this was her sign that life, as the way she knew it, was about to change. There is an innocence in being able to run away from your problems rather than face them straight away. Yeojin clung to this hopeful naivety as she ran and tried to blink away the glowing world.

There are only two possible outcomes when running away from your problems, and neither involves escaping them for good. The first outcome is that you end up right back in the face of the problems you were running from, and the second is that you get lost along the way. The latter may seem like an escape, but it’s really only temporarily delaying the inevitable. Those most likely to get lost are the ones who think running is any kind of solution. So when Yeojin ran out of energy and found herself in the middle of a tall, dark forest, she decided to stay there for a while until everything stopped being on fire, as she believed everything eventually would. 

Yeojin was lost, but lost was not a horrible place to be. 

She didn’t know how long she had been running for, but as soon as she stopped, a billowing wave of exhaustion hit her like the smoke from a bonfire blown by the wind. She practically collapsed to the ground, then dragged herself over to a large patch of soft, green moss. The green of the forest was nice to look at. If nothing else, it seemed to be free from the orange tint that engulfed everything else around her. Perhaps if she waited until the sun set and the sky got dark, the orange glow of everything would go away, and she could be left with only the green. She buried her face in the spongy moss and shut her eyes tight, intending only to rest them for a short while before figuring out her next move. But like being lost, falling asleep comes easy to those who think that avoiding what’s coming is a solution to prevent it altogether, and Yeojin was asleep in seconds. 

Yeojin let her mind take over from where her feet left off, and it wandered as far away as it could from whatever her reality was becoming. She dreamt that she was lying in a bed even softer than the moss beneath her, in a dress just as green. When she sat up in this bed, she was immediately greeted by three handsome princes who came bearing gifts. Delighted, she accepted them, and instructed the first prince to be a gentleman and fit the pretty pair of shoes he had given her onto her feet. She dangled her legs over the edge of the bed, gazed down at the beautiful silver shoes and smiled to herself, mostly because the shoes didn’t glow; they sparkled.

 She had finally escaped. 

But when she turned her gaze back to the prince putting the shoe on her foot, she found herself staring directly into the eyes of a large frog. The prince’s body and clothes were still the same, but his face was a frog’s face with a crown now cartoonishly small atop his ginormous green head. Startled and partially revolted by the creature, Yeojin jumped up off the bed and ran away, leaving her beautiful new shoes behind. 

She had somehow ended up in a large, beautiful mansion, with no recollection of how she got there. If her mind was less scattered she might have noticed the way the clocks showed a different hour every time she glanced at one on the wall, but she was too focused on finding her way out. It seemed like no matter how many hallways she turned down or doors she went through, she couldn’t find an exit. Every so often she caught a glimpse of the three princes’ portraits along the wall. Was this their house? Had the frog invaded and taken over while she was busy looking at the shoes? Questions rushed by her as she ran away from the frog prince but she didn’t stop to answer them. And every time she thought she had successfully escaped him, his big green head would peer around the corner. 

A few times she stayed still, just to see what he would do. She would call out to him, “Why are you here? What do you want?” He never answered, only continued walking toward her. 

One time he got very close, so close she was almost in danger of being kissed by this frog prince, but she turned and ran at the very last second. Is that what he wanted? To kiss her? She screwed her face up at the thought of it. It was disgusting, not to mention just morally wrong. She gave no indication that she wanted to be kissed by this frog, so why was he following her? Why was he trying to involve her in something she had not consented to be a part of?

Although she grew tired of running from this frog prince, she kept running anyway. It felt like she had been running all day. Eventually, the light coming from the windows started to dim and get dark. She had tried escaping the house through the windows at one point, but they wouldn’t open nor break when she tried bashing the panes with a jewelry box. Not only that, but the windows didn’t seem to lead anywhere like an outside. There was only the colour white outside, for as long as the eye could see.

She had been running circles in the house for what felt like forever, but as the place darkened she somehow stumbled into a room that she was sure she hadn’t been in before. It looked to be a dining room, but the decor in this room didn’t match the rest of the mansion’s bright, kitschy aesthetic. Dark tones shadowed the place, and the only pop of colour seemed to be the fruit served on each of the plates. Yeojin walked quietly alongside the table, peering at the food in front of her. A red apple, a green apple, a piece of pineapple, a single strawberry, and one cherry. She wasn’t particularly hungry, which was strange considering the amount of energy she expended in just a single day, but the fruit looked rather tempting. She was reaching for one of the plates when the frog prince showed up in the doorway. She jumped at the sight of him, turned to run away again, but found that there was only one way out of this room and the creature was blocking it. 

Oh no. Not only was she lost, she was now trapped too.

The frog prince approached her slowly. Yeojin backed up until her back hit the wall. He got closer, and she braced herself for whatever this frog wanted with her. If only someone were here to save her. If only Haseul were here. But she couldn’t be here, because by running away from everything else, Yeojin had also run away from her friend. 

She felt something spark in her heart, right where the burning feeling had started the first time. Although she was scared of what this reigniting might do to her, she held onto the idea that maybe it would bring her closer to Haseul, or Haseul closer to her. She felt the flames grow as she thought of her friend, and it hurt; it burned so fiercely in her core that she had to fight to keep standing. Why did it hurt so much to think of Haseul? 

Then a thought occurred to Yeojin, although she had no intention for it to occur, and it was so unlike her to think it that she wasn’t even convinced it was her own thought. It felt more like a rogue crackle of sparks bursting from the fire that filled her body. It was the heat spreading across her skin and the sweat prickling on her temple. It felt like steel forged in flames. 

Perhaps it wasn’t you who betrayed Haseul. Perhaps Haseul has betrayed you.

 No. 

Right as the frog prince’s lips were close enough to touch hers, Yeojin ducked to the right and lunged at the table. She grabbed the first thing she could, which happened to be the green apple, and turned to throw it at the prince. It bonked against his large head, and he fell quite dramatically to the floor. Then Yeojin ran out of the dining room and down the familiar corridors of the mansion with its princes’ portraits on the bubblegum coloured walls, through kitchens and bathrooms and the bedroom she woke up in. She would keep running until she couldn’t anymore, and then she would find a way to run again. All the while the fire inside of her blazed on like it was angry that it was being ignored. Too bad. 

If she was really burning to death, then she would suffer for as long as she could in the flames before letting them engulf her. Whatever was happening could wait. Not yet. Not now. 

“Hello?”

The soft voice made her stop in her tracks. She whirled around, trying to find the source of it. Was it the frog prince? Had he woken up already?

“Hello? Are you okay?”

The voice was light, airy, and of a pitch much higher than what Yeojin believed a frog would sound like. Whoever was speaking wasn’t in the mansion. The voice seemed to be coming from outside. 

“Excuse me?”

The girl shaking Yeojin awake finally succeeded. Yeojin’s eyes shot open, and she breathed a sigh of relief at having finally escaped her dream and in turn, the frog prince chasing her. Everything still felt a little like it was on fire, but Yeojin tried hard to ignore it. Instead, she focused on the girl kneeling over her. 

The first thing Yeojin noticed about this girl was her blank expression that in no way matched the concern present in her voice moments ago. The second thing she noticed was the pretty, light pink hair framing her vacant stare.

Chapter Text

The first thing Vivi remembered was a bright light, like the light of a blank screen being powered up. 

“I need you to find someone,” Heejin had said. “Someone who is lost.”

That was the second thing Vivi remembered.

Heejin had called Vivi her angel even though no wings sprouted from her back. There seemed to be a lot of holes in her rushed explanation of things, pockets and puddles in the foundation of how things are. She would trail off or stop mid-sentence before repeating words she had already told her, words that were safe, Vivi supposed. Vivi side-stepped around these holes gracefully. All she really needed to know is that Heejin was the creator of this universe and she had created Vivi to help with a problem. The problem was that one of her friends had gotten lost, and Heejin needed Vivi to find them and bring them back to the Cosmos. 

“Something is going wrong, Vivi, and I need your help.” 

Heejin told her that she was the first special being she had created here on Earth, but she hesitated around the word special, like it wasn’t quite the right word but she couldn’t think of anything else. Vivi had been quiet while Heejin explained everything, nodding along to show her understanding. Just before they went their separate ways, Vivi spoke.

“Where are you going?”

The girl turned around, her long hair swishing to the side. She smiled a friendly smile, but her eyes were too clouded for warmth to shine through. “I have to find someone myself. I think it all began with her.”

Vivi nodded, but she did not understand. 

Heejin told her that she would know when she came across this lost person, that she would feel as if the dark side of the moon revealed itself and everything would make sense. Vivi wasn’t great with metaphors; she figured they were best for people who had been around a bit longer than her, who understood things enough to find other things to compare them to. So every night while Vivi wandered, looking for this lost soul, she would stare up at the moon, studying it, trying to understand it. Trying to imagine what it would feel like to see the other side.

She had been letting her feet take her wherever she felt was right, but it was not without hesitation that she entered this huge forest with its looming trees and shady corners. It had all been for good in the end, though, because she had come across the person she was meant to meet. She was dressed head to toe in orange, but the kind of orange that leaves become when they change colour, flame-stippled and patchy in places. She was curled up among a bed of moss, resembling the near-perfect shape of a crescent moon. A pinprick of sunlight made its way through the trees then, hitting Vivi right in the eye and reminding her of the light that welcomed her into the world. 

This was the dark side of the moon, in all its illumination. This was the lost girl Vivi was meant to find. 

“Hello? Hello, are you okay?” Vivi gently shook the girl awake. “Excuse me?”

The girl’s eyes opened slowly, like she had forgotten she’d even fallen asleep. When her eyes settled on Vivi, she looked even more disoriented.

“Were you in the…” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “Oh, it was all a dream.”

Whatever dream she’d had must have been really intense, but then again, maybe it was exhaustion in general that seemed to cloud her brain. Anyone tired enough to fall asleep in the middle of the woods cannot be in the best frame of mind. Vivi waited patiently for the girl to regain her composure before asking her any questions about Heejin and the Cosmos. 

“Who are you?” she asked, and Vivi gave her name, glad to be able to do something for the mysterious lost girl. 

“What’s yours?”

“Yeojin,” she said quietly. “I like your pink hair.”

Vivi’s eyes lit up, and she tucked the soft pink strands behind her ear. “Thank you. I like your orange clothes.”

Instead of accepting the compliment, Yeojin glanced down at her fire-coated attire with wide eyes as if noticing the colour for the first time. “It wasn’t all a dream,” she murmured to herself, sounding less confused than just disappointed. 

The girl sighed and put her head in her hands. 

“Is something wrong?” Vivi asked.

Yeojin looked up suddenly, as if she just remembered she wasn’t alone. Vivi tried to make her face look as friendly as possible so that Yeojin would feel comfortable telling her about what was going on and why she left the Cosmos. Yeojin studied this friendly face for a moment, then let out another deep sigh.

“Something has happened, and I don’t understand any of it, and I don’t know what to do.” Tears welled in the girl’s eyes and Vivi suddenly took notice of how young this girl looked. She was definitely younger than Heejin, who appeared to her as someone in the middle of their teenage years. Although in actuality Vivi was only a couple of days old, she had been given the body and most of the mind of a teenage girl as well. This girl was barely a teenager, and she had somehow come to bear the burden of an entire universe. 

Perhaps that is why she left the Cosmos. 

“Is this about a friend?” Vivi asked, approaching the topic with much care. 

In the back of her mind she knew that her mission didn’t end with finding the girl, it ended with bringing her back to Heejin, but how could she do that if she didn’t know the reason Yeojin ran away in the first place? 

Yeojin looked a little surprised at the accuracy of Vivi’s question and nodded. “It has something to do with her. I can feel it. But I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Well, what have you done about it so far?”

“I’ve been running away.” She glanced around at the forest floor. “And falling asleep, it seems.”

Vivi nodded, trying to convey to Yeojin that she knew exactly what she was experiencing even though the details were vague and she had only been a person for a short while. Her experience may be limited, but Yeojin didn’t have to know that. “What if you tried talking to your friend instead of running away from her?”

Vivi monitored the emotions that crossed Yeojin’s face. There were so many all at once. Flashes of pain, worry, confusion, and even anger, all within the span of a few seconds. Vivi took a mental note of all of them and tried to formulate a response for whichever one Yeojin chose to respond with. 

“The thing is, I don’t know if I want to.” To Vivi’s surprise, Yeojin didn’t respond with anger, bitterness, or pain. She was just tired. Even Vivi knew that tiredness had a way of dulling any emotion down to nothing. “It’s not just that I feel like she’s a part of what’s happening. I think it’s her fault.”

When Heejin asked Vivi to find someone, Vivi had made the assumption that this someone was a friend. Why else would she be so concerned over losing them? But now, she wasn’t so sure. What if it was Heejin’s fault that this girl had gotten lost? 

Yeojin looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to say something. Vivi didn’t know what to say. 

Just then, another stream of sunlight trickled through the trees and splashed her in the eye. She blinked away the bright droplets that temporarily floated in her vision, then took a look at the forest as if seeing it with a new pair of eyes. 

The dark must be revealed for things to make sense. It must be brought into the light.

“Yeojin,” she said. “You said you don’t understand what’s happening to you. How will you ever understand if you don’t speak to the person who might have the answers?”

“But if it is their fault, then that means everything changes,” Yeojin huffed, wrapping her arms around her knees and slouching into her short frame.

“Everything already has,” said Vivi gently, looking up at the crowded trees that kept them from the light of the outside world. “Staying here won’t make that not true.”

Yeojin was silent for a few moments. Vivi followed her gaze, which lingered on her orange outfit before pivoting from dark green tree to lighter green tree. She tried to guess what the girl was thinking. Vivi was just about to say something else, worried that Yeojin might just stay like this until she fell asleep again, when Yeojin mumbled, “I wouldn’t even know how to get out of here.”

Vivi beamed. “I do. And if you come with me out of this forest, I can take you right to your friend.”

They left the forest together. It wasn’t difficult finding their way out, Vivi just retraced her steps from where she entered. Her stomach grumbled as soon as they exited, and she was sure Yeojin must be hungry too, so she suggested they find something to eat. Yeojin stayed quiet as they walked to a restaurant in a nearby town, but Vivi didn’t put pressure on her to speak. She was just relieved to have found the person she needed to find and to have gotten her out of those woods. 

They had been walking for some time when they ended up in front of an ice cream shop. 

“Is here alright?” Vivi asked. “We could keep walking too, but…”

That’s when she noticed the look on Yeojin’s face. She seemed confused, almost like the forest was a dream and she had woken up again to some disorienting reality.

“Where are we?” she asked. 

“Hong Kong,” she answered. 

Vivi looked around, trying to figure out what could be wrong about where they were. As she turned her head, her pink hair swishing to the side, her eyes caught on a building across the street. 

It had a sign out front, one of those retro neon signs, but it was dark. She couldn’t explain why, but her eyes lingered on the sign for a moment longer than they looked at anything else. Long enough for the sign to suddenly switch on. And as the bold colours began coursing through the glass tubes, saturating the brightness of the already sunny day, she felt something within her switch on as well. 

The sign advertised the name of the roller rink housed inside the building, but the lights may as well have spelled out come here .

Chapter Text

“I’ll be right back,” Vivi said, as if in a trance. 

She didn’t even turn to see if Yeojin had heard her. If she had turned, she might have seen Yeojin gazing in the opposite direction, equally entranced, back towards where they had just come from. Back towards the forest. 

Vivi walked across the street and tried the front door. It was locked. That should have been enough to dissuade her from trying to get in, but the closer she got to the building, the more the feeling intensified. Another door that might be open. She had to get in. The feeling grew stronger, leading her right to the top of a staircase. At the bottom of this staircase sat a door jutting out from what Vivi determined must be the basement of the building. 

She hesitated at the top of the steps. What was going on? What was happening to her? She couldn’t explain why she felt this way about this place, but as she had walked carefully around the building, she came to the realization that the feeling that both opened her heart and tightened her chest was not unfamiliar. It was the same feeling she had felt when she saw Yeojin in the forest. It was that something dark that had been brought into the light. The feeling that would tell her she had found the person she’d been sent to look for. She had already found Yeojin, so why had this feeling returned?

Vivi’s gaze shot across the street to where she left Yeojin outside the ice cream shop. The girl that had been lost was now nowhere to be found. 

No. No!

Vivi let the darkness of her failure fill her chest. She had let herself be distracted and now she had ruined everything. She couldn’t get distracted. She needed to find Yeojin again, but she had barely taken a step forward when a loud bang came from the basement door.

Vivi froze and stared down the jagged staircase, the patches of grass swaying slightly in the breeze from where it poked out of the concrete cracks. Her anger at what she let happen had been enough to overpower the feeling drawing her down the stairs, but now it returned as a couple more bangs thumped against the door. It sounded like someone was trying to beat it down. 

Her feet moved before her mind could figure out what to do, and before she knew it she was banging on the door too, as if banging on both sides would somehow be enough to knock it down. The banging on the other side went quiet almost immediately. Oh no. Had she scared away whoever was trying to escape?

She gave her fists a rest and kicked at the ground, frustrated at both the absurdity of the situation and the impossibility at being able to get the door open like this. When her foot scraped across the ground, there was the subtle sound of metal clinking against concrete. She bent over to inspect what she had accidentally shifted with her foot, and there on the ground, with the sun glinting off the shiny metal, was a key. 

She snatched the key off the ground and shoved it in the lock. It fit perfectly. She turned the lock, yanked open the door, and out of the darkness of the basement, a girl with white blond hair emerged.

The girl looked to be about the age Vivi herself looked, only a little taller. She squinted at Vivi, her eyes searching her face for something Vivi didn’t quite comprehend yet. Did she recognize Vivi? Did she know who sent her? Did the same feeling that hurried Vivi’s legs to this door also flow through the other arms that banged on it?

If any of these answers were yes, the girl sure didn’t do anything about it. Instead, she nodded politely and trotted up the staircase. She didn’t acknowledge any sort of connection between them, but she didn’t need to. Vivi caught it as she pushed past her. The faint, blue glow that wrapped around the outer ring of the girl’s pupil.

Vivi should have followed her, but instead she froze. She must have been the person I was actually meant to find and return to Heejin , she thought. But then who was Yeojin?

Yeojin. Vivi looked up the staircase in despair, knowing that only visual confirmation of her failure was waiting at the top. She had found double the lost girls that Heejin asked her to find, and somehow managed to lose them both.

Suddenly, she heard footsteps echoing from behind the door that had been left slightly ajar from the blonde girl’s exit. Vivi bolted up the stairs and around the corner of the building, her heart racing. She couldn’t explain it, but it’s like the feeling that had pulled her into this building suddenly flipped and now alarm bells were ringing in her head, telling her to get as far away from this place as possible. Where was this feeling coming from? Then she realized, as she pressed herself into the side of the wall, trying to mush herself right into it and disappear; the girl she just discovered behind the door wasn’t just lost, she was trapped. So who was keeping her there?

Vivi heard the footsteps exit the building accompanied by hushed voices. Her heart had never beat so fast and her mind was a pinball machine, racketting off adrenaline that lit up her nerves. Her initial fear subsided as the voices got farther and farther away, and when she was sure they were far enough to not hear her, she crept around the side of the building where they had just exited. Vivi briefly saw the figures of two girls turn right up the street and disappear from view, but there was no telling if they were even the people who had just emerged from the basement. 

Well, whoever those people were, they were long gone. With no one else around, Vivi looked back towards the door.

She was shocked to find it still slightly ajar, just as it had been after she opened it for the girl. Maybe now that the girl was free, there was nothing in there worth keeping under lock and key. Which meant the building was likely empty.

Perhaps it was the safety net of emptiness that lured her toward the door sitting loose on its hinges, or maybe it was the sour feeling that sat in the pit of Vivi’s stomach, at having been so close to finishing her mission only to have failed, that enticed her down those stairs. She pulled on the doorknob, ever so gently, slowly swinging open the door. The sunlight from outside shone into the basement and bounced off the pale, shiny wood flooring. After hesitating for a few moments, listening to see if there was anyone lingering inside, she took a step forwards. Then another. Her feet moved like a ballerina’s across the floor meant for wheels and graceful balance, extending forward to touch each floorboard with a soundless delicacy. When she had moved far enough in, she let the door slip away from her hands, thinking it would close slowly and catch on whatever propped it open in the first place. But the door swung shut. 

The darkness hit her like wind, but she steeled her eyes against its force. She blinked into this black void for a while, too scared to call out in case an unfamiliar voice answered her. Then suddenly she felt the cool hardness of wood behind her back, and she realized her hair was not drooping by the sides of her face anymore. She was not standing up. She was lying on the ground, but she had no memory of how she got there. 

“Vivi?” A voice whispered. 

Her heart seized with terror for a second before she recognized where it was coming from. 

She opened her eyes, although she didn’t remember closing them in the first place. Heejin kneeled next to her, and an obvious expression of relief flooded her face when she saw that Vivi was awake. By a quick glance around Vivi could see that they were still at the roller rink, but how had Heejin found her? She felt it had something to do with her failing her mission, so she took a deep breath and opened her mouth to tell Heejin the confusing things she had discovered. But Heejin spoke first.

“I’m so sorry, Vivi,” she said softly, her eyes wandering around Vivi rather than landing directly on her. There was guilt in this gaze, but Vivi had no idea why. She had been the one to mess up, not Heejin.

“For what?” Vivi asked, and when Heejin didn’t reply, she said, “Has something happened?”

She tried to sit up, and that’s when she felt it. The hardness against her back didn’t go away when she was off the ground. It threw her off balance and tried to drag her back down to the ground. There was something else that pulled at Vivi’s body too; an exhaustion she hadn’t ever felt before, like if she kept trying to move she would eventually freeze in one spot and stay that way. 

“Shh, shh, you’re not done,” Heejin said, holding out her hands and helping her lie back down. 

While her body might have been moving slower with the drowsiness, her mind was very much running at full speed, and a panicked feeling began sprinting from her head to her chest. 

“I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

Heejin’s lips grew tight, then she reached a hand up and tapped the left side of Vivi’s temple. Vivi felt something tingle in her eye. It felt like the whirring of gears turning, a kinetic spark, like something was moving within her. It didn’t feel like sunlight or like the warm glow the girl from the basement had.

Recalling the girl with the glowing eye, Vivi blurted out, “I think I found the person I was supposed to find, but I lost them.” Then she looked up into Heejin’s eyes, the ones that were too full of worry to see her. “Have you made me like one of them?”

Again, Heejin didn’t respond. She only offered what Vivi could interpret as a sad smile, the kind where the mouth forgets to tell the eyes what it’s doing. 

“You’re my angel, remember? That’s never going to change.” 

Heejin slid her finger away from Vivi’s temple, tucking a strand of Vivi’s pink hair behind her ear. The whirring feeling didn’t completely disappear, though, it only got a bit slower. Vivi started to notice this feeling in other parts of her body, like the cogs of a great machine turning and powering up something inside her.

“Heejin,” Vivi said, but she didn’t know what else to say. She just laid there struck with the overwhelming sensation that she had lost more than the people she was meant to find. 

Heejin had called Vivi her angel even though no wings grew from her back. Instead, a large battery stuck out like a lowered hunch. Heejin told her they could cover it with a backpack.

Chapter Text

“She never returned to the car,” said Hyunjin. “I don’t know what happened after that.”

Heejin was crouched on the floor of the kitchen. She didn’t take her eyes off the soft, lifeless dove in her hands. “Is that all?”

She heard Hyunjin shuffle her feet before offering a meek apology. “I’m sorry, Heejin, I know it was reckless. I just thought that maybe, if we weren’t enough, then others might be able to help-”

“Is that all?” Heejin repeated, an urgency suddenly appearing in her voice, like when something falls and smacks the ground a little louder than expected. “Is that all you did?”

“Yes…” Hyunjin watched Heejin rise from the ground, her back still turned towards her. Something wasn’t right. “Why?”

Heejin’s head tilted up, her gaze lifting from her hands. When she finally turned to face Hyunjin, the dove had vanished, and Heejin’s hands dropped to her sides. Her brow was furrowed and her mouth moved like it was deciding whether or not it should speak. Then it opened. “So you don’t know where Jinsoul is?”

“She wasn’t where you just came from? She’s not in the Cosmos?” 

The girl shook her head slowly. 

“Heejin, should I be worried?”

A harsh laugh burst from Heejin’s lips. She shook her head more emphatically this time, and soon the shake turned into an exaggerated shrug and a lighthearted smile broke out on her face. “No, no. I’m sure she’s around here somewhere. I have someone looking for her, actually.”

Hyunjin didn’t buy her reassurance, and although the mention of this unnamed “someone” raised new questions, she needed Heejin to know that she was still here to help. “Heejin, you can tell me if something’s wrong. Does this have to do with the chaos you mentioned before?”

Heejin threw the question back at her. “Does it?”

The girls held each other's gazes for a moment, each trying to figure out what the other one was saying underneath their words, but only one meaning more than she was letting on. She turned and headed towards Hyunjin’s back door.

“I have to go.”

“Wait, but I thought you just said you would stay here with me, and we would figure out what’s going on!”

“I have to go to the person I sent to find Jinsoul. I’m going to bring her back here.” 

But Heejin didn’t even know if that was possible. The sensation that something had gone wrong with Vivi had suddenly stabbed her in the side, and it came with the feeling that if she didn’t get to her soon, she would lose her forever. 

Despite the pressure of time pressing against her neck like a heavy rope, Heejin paused in the doorway on her way out to look back at Hyunjin. “I suggest you do the same with the girl you left in Iceland,” she instructed. “Find her and bring her back here.”

Hyunjin nodded, and as Heejin walked out into the clear air muddled with the scent of damp cat fur, she muttered something under her breath, something she was sure Hyunjin couldn’t hear. “Hopefully, together, we will be enough.”

But Hyunjin had heard her. And if Heejin was assembling a new team here on Earth to maintain the balance of the LOONAverse, then that must mean that their home was no longer a safe place. Whatever was going wrong on Earth had reached the Cosmos.

Hyunjin just hoped she hadn’t been the one to let it in.

Chapter Text

PART 2: ODD EYE CIRCLE

Water was the first thing Jinsoul had turned blue. She loved the way it flowed, rushed, trickled; how it fell from the sky and the eyes of people overcome by something that meant so much to them. Water was everywhere, and so was Jinsoul. She teleported around the Cosmos, walking along beautiful landscapes and exploring new horizons. Heejin had made the Cosmos huge, so that wherever they went, they could always become inspired and think of new ways to add colour to the world to maintain its delicate balance. 

It was a big world for only four people, and when Hyunjin left, it felt even emptier. 

“Let me go. I can find her.”

Heejin told them that Hyunjin had gone to Earth, and Jinsoul offered to use her teleportation ability to locate her. But Heejin shook her head.

 “You can teleport to different places, not people. The Earth is big, and you’ve never been there before.” Heejin smiled a polite smile and touched Jinsoul’s arm gently. “Thank you, but I need you to stay here.”

The next day Jinsoul returned to the observation deck and asked Heejin if she had located Hyunjin. She nodded, “I think I’m getting closer.”

“Is closer enough?”

Heejin tilted her head to the side. “You still want to go down there and find her yourself?”

Jinsoul nodded, but Heejin didn’t say anything more. The next day Jinsoul found Heejin leaning against the wall outside of the observation deck, almost as if she’d been waiting for Jinsoul to arrive.

“Any closer?” Jinsoul asked.

“No,” said Heejin. Then without another word, she turned and went inside. 

And for the first time, Jinsoul wasn’t certain that Heejin was telling the truth. 

But what reason did she have for lying? Was getting Hyunjin back to the Cosmos not the most important thing? She hadn’t tried to give a whole lot of thought as to why Hyunjin had left in the first place, but the longer she was gone, the more Jinsoul couldn’t avoid those questions. What if something had happened between Heejin and Hyunjin? What if Hyunjin didn’t want to return? Or worse, what if Heejin didn’t actually want Hyunjin to come back?

These thoughts were ridiculous, and Jinsoul knew this. Neither one would risk the balance of the universe over personal matters. Heejin would find Hyunjin soon, and whether or not Jinsoul would be involved in the search, Hyunjin would be back in the Cosmos in no time. All she could do in the meantime was focus on keeping chaos at bay. 

She spent the next few days in her aquarium. When they were first created, Heejin had encouraged each of them to create a space in the Cosmos where their abilities could feel enhanced by their surroundings. Jinsoul made an aquarium. When all the lights were off, save for the blue glow of the tank lights, she could feel her power rush through her veins like a river, and her left eye tingled like it was on the verge of tears, but no tears would spill down her cheeks. Each tank represented something important that was blue on Earth. She would bring blue fish from the rivers of the Cosmos and add them to the tank to maintain the colour’s presence. All the fish she added eventually turned gold and then disappeared, presumably respawning in another river for her to find later.

She was adding a new one to her tank when she heard someone enter. Her left eye tingled, and the soft light emitting from her eye caught the scales of the fish in a flash of blue as it began wiggling its way out of the plastic bag she had used to transport it. 

“Did you find her?” she called, unable to break her focus until the fish was safely in the tank. She was sure it was Heejin, and if it wasn’t Heejin, it would be red, the only other colour still left in the Cosmos. They could all feel in their odd eyes when one of them was close by. 

Heejin didn’t respond, so as soon as the little fish was finally free from the bag, she shut the lid on the tank and turned around.

That was the last thing she remembered before waking up in the basement. 

There was no way Jinsoul could make sense of it to herself. One moment she was in her aquarium and the next, she was in this dark open space, the air hanging massive in the air waiting for some kind of movement to stir it. An eye-patch had been strung over her left eye. She took a few deep, quiet breaths, trying hard not to disturb the darkness in case that’s what it really was waiting for. Is this how a fish feels when it first enters a tank?

As her body found feeling in her fingers and toes again, she reached into the pocket of her skirt and was relieved to find the small flashlight she kept on herself for when she worked in her aquarium with the lights off. After much hesitation, she put her thumb over the lightbulb to dull the brightness and clicked it on. She swept the light around the large room and noticed three things that all flowed into each other.

First, an apple had been placed right in front of her. It was a green apple, but there was something about this green that was different from the kind her and Hyunjin would make together in the Cosmos by combining their colours. It was more vibrant, so much so that when Jinsoul moved the light towards a different area of the room, she swore she could still see the apple as if it was glowing in the dark. 

This unsettling feeling gave way to another, even more unsettling feeling, the way the breaking of a dam gives way to a flood. Something was off about where she was, and it wasn’t just the physical building. Up until this point, she had always somewhat felt like she was floating through the air when she moved, even though she couldn’t fly. She felt heavier now, like gravity was somehow working harder to keep her on the ground. This was somewhere she hadn’t been before. 

Suddenly the blood drained from her face, like gravity was tugging on the inside of her body too. 

She was no longer in the Cosmos. 

So this must be Earth.

In a panic, she tore off the eye patch covering her odd eye. Heejin was right. She needed to be in the Cosmos. She needed to get back. She noticed the third thing just as she was about to try teleporting back to her home plane.

The flashlight had fallen out of her hand when she had ripped off the eye patch, and it shone in the opposite direction of where the apple was. The white pool of light revealed a microphone lying on the ground a couple feet away from Jinsoul, the speaking-end of it pointed towards her. Slowly, Jinsoul stood up, and moving as silently as she could, she followed the wire connected to the microphone with her flashlight, until she came to a cassette deck on the seat of a chair placed against the wall. The cassette tape inside was turning. 

She was being recorded. Jinsoul felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, and she clicked off her flashlight. If she was being recorded, she was probably being watched, too.

She couldn’t teleport back now, not while she remained under some kind of observation in this place. Although, it was clear that whoever took her to Earth knew something about the Cosmos. Enough to be able to get in.

Could it have been Hyunjin who brought her here? Did she find something on Earth that she needed help with, something that only Jinsoul could fix? But if it was Hyunjin, why bring her to this dark place? Why record her? No, this couldn’t be Hyunjin. It couldn’t be any of the girls from the Cosmos, which means it wouldn’t be safe to teleport back to the Cosmos until she was sure she wasn’t being watched. She didn’t know how someone from the outside could have even gotten in, but she would figure that out later. For now, she just needed to find a way out of this place without using teleportation. 

Before she could figure out where to start, a faint glow emitted from her left eye, accompanied by the familiar tingling. For a second, relief washed over Jinsoul due to the tell-tale sign that a friend was near, but this feeling instantly turned to panic when she remembered that her apparent kidnapping was preceded by this feeling too. And it was a lot more likely that her kidnapper was close by than her friends. She had to get out of here now.

She turned her flashlight back on for a moment and shined it along the wall, looking desperately for a door. She found one at the far end of the room, but as she turned and ran, she caught herself and looked back at the tape recorder. The tape might help her later in uncovering the mystery of who had broken into the Cosmos and taken her. After all, somebody had to hit record . Frantically, she smashed buttons on the cassette deck until it popped open. Grabbing the tape inside and shoving it into her pocket, she kept her light pointed to the ground in front of her and ran in the direction of the door. 

She tried the handle but it was locked from the outside, and she let out a muffled grunt of frustration. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. She yanked a couple more times on the handle to no avail, and then resorted to banging on the door, tentatively at first, the loud thud seeming amplified by the darkness, and then more hurriedly. She hoped that wherever she was, there would be at least someone walking by outside who might hear her. 

Then suddenly, strangely, the door thudded back, like somebody on the outside was pounding to get in. Jinsoul stopped banging on the door and recoiled. What if it was her kidnapper? She hadn’t considered that they could be on the other side of this door. She peered back behind her, into the darkness engulfing the rest of the room. Maybe she should try to hide instead…

She had run out of time, though, because the door swung wide open, and all Jinsoul could do was stand there in the blinding light, stunned. She blinked and squinted at the person in front of her who had set her free, a shorter girl with soft pink hair. The girl stared blankly back at her. If this was the person who had kidnapped her, she didn’t seem very aware that she did. Deeming the girl in front of her as the friendly passerby she had hoped for, she gave a polite nod and ran up the stone staircase behind her. She had to keep moving. She could still feel a faint tingle in her eye. Her kidnapper must still be close. 

She turned left around the building and darted into an ice cream shop across the street. She didn’t want to go too far without a plan, but she needed to be around other people so she couldn’t be taken again. 

Collecting her bearings at a little round table, Jinsoul patted the tape in her pocket. She kept a diligent watch from the window of the shop, distracted only for a moment when the person behind the counter asked if she wanted to order anything.

Jinsoul considered buying an ice cream cone, but then remembered that things on Earth cost money, so she politely declined. The shopkeeper looked annoyed but didn’t tell her to leave. 

He also thankfully didn’t react when she ducked away from the window seconds later. She had seen two girls with dark hair emerge from the side of the building she had exited, and from the way their heads bowed together and came apart, they seemed deep in serious conversation. They headed up the street on the other side of the road. Even though they moved farther away, the tingling in Jinsoul’s eye didn’t completely vanish. Maybe those girls had nothing to do with her kidnapping at all. 

But the lingering feeling was enough to convince her that until she felt her odd eye return to normal, she shouldn’t teleport back to the Cosmos. She dug out the eye patch she had shoved into her other pocket and put it back over her head to hide her faintly glowing eye. She needed to leave this area, and even if those girls weren’t the ones who had taken her, they just came from the basement she was being held in. Perhaps if she followed them, she could find out something about where she was and why she had ended up there.

Chapter Text

“She probably went back.”

“No,” the other girl shook her head, her hair a jet black curtain refusing to reveal the mysterious face hiding behind it. “She couldn’t have gone too far. At least not yet.”

Were they talking about Jinsoul?

The girls walked quickly through the people peppering the sidewalks, strolling lazily about. Jinsoul was grateful for the small crowd for giving her some cover as she followed them, but she was worried that her effort to match their pace would soon expose her intentions. She felt like a fish swimming against the current, darting and diving as delicately as she could around old couples and young ones, too distracted with each other to really notice her. Meanwhile, she remained mostly out of earshot of the conversation between the two girls, catching a few bits here and there when she was lucky enough to get close. 

“The apple wasn’t touched. Do you think she knew what we were doing?” 

The girl with black hair shrugged. “Maybe. But maybe she already…”

She lost the end of that sentence as they dipped around the corner of a building. Jinsoul lingered for a few seconds before peering after them, checking to make sure there were still enough people around to provide her anonymity for as long as she needed it. She caught up once more. 

“... What about the tape?”

Keep moving , she reminded herself, or else she would have been swept up by the current of people moving against her. She reached down and felt the cassette tape she had slid in the pocket of her skirt. So they were talking about her. 

“There shouldn’t be much on it. She was asleep for days.”

Now Jinsoul’s feet couldn’t be willed to move any further. Asleep for days? She had been missing from the Cosmos for that long?

Suddenly, a boy not that much younger than Jinsoul bumped into her. 

“Sorry!” he exclaimed. His friend playfully hit him on the shoulder and began to laugh at his clumsiness, an overexaggerated wheeze that drew the attention of other passersby on the street. A black curtain of hair was tossed over a shoulder. Jinsoul stood in horror as dark hooded eyes met hers. Her left eye pulsed with lightning blue heat, the same way it had in the dim glow of her aquarium. 

She never saw the face of the person who took her from the Cosmos, but she was sure that it was this girl.

Jinsoul turned and ran through the crowd. Swimming with the current this time, she didn’t dare look back until she was far away from where she had left the two girls. When she finally did, she couldn’t see them, but the tingling in her left eye didn’t completely disappear either. She must still be too close. She had to keep moving until her odd eye was back to normal, and only then could she go home.

So she ran through the city, following the flow of people all day and all night. Their waterfall rushes, their vast ocean crowds, their burbling streams down otherwise empty alleyways. Her eye stayed aglow underneath her eye patch, while her mind lit up with questions. 

Those girls were the ones who trapped her in that basement, who had placed the apple in front of her, and who were recording her. Why? The one with brown hair had asked the other if she thought Jinsoul had figured out what they were doing. What were they doing? Part of her almost wished she had stuck around to find out, but that curiosity was no longer strong enough to stop her feet now. 

By the time she eventually did sit down to rest, it was the early hours of morning. She had boarded an empty train on a metro line heading north. It was too early for the daily commuters to crowd the subway cars, and the area she had gotten on at didn’t have a ton of nightclubs in its vicinity, so there were no late-night partiers stumbling about either. Her train was completely empty. The only other living being was the metal tube itself, rumbling and shaking and shooting her down tracks and tunnels like a jet stream, far away from the danger she ran from, and hopefully, closer to home.  

She could feel her heartbeat in her feet, and thundering in her ears of all the voices she had followed to stay hidden. The quiet of the train was disarming, but she tried to remind herself that it was a good thing. It meant she was truly alone. And if she was the only one riding this train, then there was no way that raven-haired girl with the hooded eyes could remain close by for very long. 

Still, it was hard for Jinsoul to adjust to the quiet. After a few minutes wringing her hands like they were wet cloth, and shuffling her feet like they were moving through a puddle, she took out a pair of earbuds that she had taken from an electronics street vendor a few hours ago. She connected it to the burner phone she had also been able to snatch. Her fingers wrapped around the rectangular plastic of the cassette tape in her pocket. She would have to wait until getting back to the Cosmos to listen to that. 

The pitter-patter of falling rain filled her ears. She took a deep breath, and felt a wave of serenity wash over her. Her mind was always clearer when she could hear the sound of water nearby. As Jinsoul sat on the train, closing her eyes and focusing on the sound of the rain, she thought about what she would do when she returned to the Cosmos. 

Her first instinct was to find Heejin right away. Although, there was something in the pit of her stomach tugging against this idea. Had this whole situation happened before Hyunjin left the Cosmos, she would have had no doubt that Heejin would know what to do. But ever since Hyunjin left, her faith in Heejin had been slipping like ice through the warm palm of her hand. It had even seemed like Heejin reciprocated those feelings. Jinsoul had wanted to help find Hyunjin, but Heejin didn’t let her. 

Well, she had ended up on Earth anyway. Perhaps she shouldn’t be in such a rush to go back. Perhaps she should look for Hyunjin… 

A tug on one of her earbuds brought her train of thought to a halt. Jinsoul whipped her head to the left, where the tug had yanked the earbud on that side right out of her ear. She stared down the barrel of a still empty train. Slowly, she turned her head to the right, bracing herself for what she might see, but there was still no one there. She could have sworn she felt a tug. She let the other earbud fall from her right ear before daring to take her eyes off of her surroundings.

When she did, she glanced down at where the left earbud had fallen after being yanked out of her ear. It lay on the seat next to her, and beside it sat a plastic bag filled with water that wasn’t there before. It looked like the kind of bag that Jinsoul used in the Cosmos to collect fish for her aquarium. She thought she heard a faint melody emitting from the earbuds, but she was less concerned with them now. 

Carefully, she took hold of the plastic bag and lifted it up to her face. Just then, the train shot into a dark tunnel, and the only light left came in flashes along the rim of the tunnel. She stood up and moved towards the center of the train, hoping that she could get a better look at the bag during one of the split-second flashes if she wasn’t tucked away to the side. With the bag only inches from her face, she waited, holding her breath. A ring of light blazed by. 

And she caught it, in that split-second, floating towards the bottom of the bag. A little fish. A second ring of light came, and then a huge wave of gray sunlight as the train shot out of the tunnel and back into the early morning. And Jinsoul could see now that the little fish was dead.

She nudged the bag with her finger to see if the fish could be roused somehow, but it didn’t move. The fish was jet black. Even the ones in the Cosmos looked a little lighter when they lost their colour. She felt a pang in her heart at the mysterious death that had appeared next to her. Poor little fish , she thought. Dead and colourless . She couldn’t save it, but maybe she could give it some colour as a goodbye. 

Without taking her eye off the fish, as if in a trance, she slowly removed her eye patch. The faint glow of her blue-rimmed eye shimmered, but the fish did not change appearance. Instead, Jinsoul felt a shift within herself. 

She had always known her purpose was to add colour to the world, but now she could sense just how huge and hollow the dark world was. It was overwhelming. It felt like no matter how much colour she could create in the Cosmos, it wouldn’t be enough to fill this void. It was as if, up until now, she was like the fish in the rivers at home; living underneath the water, unaware that there was a whole other world, a bigger world, just above the surface. But now she knew. She just didn’t know where to go from here. 

Little drops of rain tapped against the windows of the train. Jinsoul watched the water drip across the window with the wind, shredding like streamers, blurring the world outside like her inky black pupils were dripping from her own eyes. Her odd eye no longer tingled like it had when that girl was close by. Back to the Cosmos. That’s where she had to go. 

But even as she prepared to jump back home, her uncertainty about Heejin still sloshed around in the pit of her stomach. Heejin couldn’t keep Hyunjin in the Cosmos. She couldn’t even keep Jinsoul in the Cosmos, though the circumstances under which Jinsoul had left were still fuzzy. For the first time in her existence, she didn’t know if she could trust Heejin to fix everything. 

That left one person in the Cosmos whom she could trust. 

Red.