Chapter Text
Now
You’re somebody different, now, and you’ve been trying for five years not to hate it.
The fact that it’s impossible doesn’t stop you from trying.
And the worst part is, she’s still the same. Or at least, there’s no earthshaking crack in her foundations, nothing that changed her almost unrecognizably.
(You’ve realized, more belatedly than you should, that you’ve had three of those in your life. But one, of course, was the biggest. It was meant to remake you, and it succeeded, and you hate that so much more than you’re willing to admit.)
You avoid her the first summer, for the most part. Few enclavers can or will pull off that trick multiple times – Liesel discourages them from volunteering more than once in case someone figures out what the mawmouth “survey” is really all about. But Yuyan is persistent, and the second time she’s there is when you’re feeling well enough and stable enough (an unstable foundation! If you weren’t afraid of what they’d read into your voice and expression when you said it, you’d be tempted to make the joke) to really dig into what it is that El does, in hopes that this spell, too, can be split into parts.
And Yuyan is there, and that… doesn’t shake you, as much as it should.
It’s easy, how you fall back into it – it was always a tentative thing, this feeling between you. Somehow, it’s still there, despite all the reasons it shouldn’t be. And the friendship, the way you two just fit together – that was less tentative.
Once, you thought you’d always be alone, in a sense. That nobody would ever get you, that nobody would ever try. Why should they? Who would want to sympathize with a maleficer?
Oddly enough, there’s now a lot of folks who understand the essentials of what it’s like to be a maleficer for the best reasons, and then be offered the chance to change. And they'd all like some empathy rather than condemnation. That’s kind of what the program Liesel and Aad have set up is all about, even if occasionally they get applicants from other years who have to be given actual academic work. (Liesel is good at arranging that.)
Yuyan is not a maleficer. She never has been. But even after her last survey rota, she went home, and Shanghai is still built on malia. (Every so often, you check. El snapped and promised she’d just tell you, of course she would.) She’ll go home after this one, too. You just know, so you don’t ask. You can’t ask someone to give up their comfortable and loving home for you, with nothing to offer but a broken heart and deliberate poverty of the sort Aadhya scoffs at in El but doesn’t criticize from you.
Then
Yuyan didn’t know. She didn’t know what you’d done, and that was a distance between you, because she recognized the change – “You’re a lot… er, different than I thought you would be.” – but she didn’t know what it was.
It was a heavy weight in your chest, somehow heavier now that it was over. You couldn’t have told anyone before. But now you could, really – you weren’t a maleficier anymore, you’d been fully cleansed, and you’d been strict mana now for almost an entire school year besides. Yuyan wasn’t strict mana – she’d confided to you that it was hard, when you’d grown up with a power-sharer on your wrist, not to accidentally pull more than you had available if for some reason you forgot it, or were, like now, deliberately trying to save mana. You didn’t judge her. How could you?
Sometimes you worried the spirit cleansing had left something behind. You picked at your fingernails incessantly, looking for the black. There was something irrevocably stained about you. How could there not be? You wanted to find it before anyone else did, and asked.
But no one could tell. There were no signs left, after all. Except your short hair, and that was only a sign to you. There was the difference between what you’d been and what you were now, and only two people who knew what exactly it was and chose to love you anyway. That was a bigger gift than you could ask for a third time.
You held on to that impossibility because it made it easier to want to do the thing your parents wanted. To do the right and smart thing. If you could never love him the way you were terrified you could love Yuyan, then it wouldn’t matter so much if he never knew the real you.
It hurt more that she didn’t.
Especially when she kissed you.
Now
Yuyan knew that Liu didn’t want her like that anymore, but she couldn’t stay away. For one, it was a way to manage the crushing guilt she’d felt, when she’d decided to stay in Shanghai, and Liu had said she would visit, and never did. Then word leaked out what had happened to Liu on the tails of the whispered truth from her classmates – only ever her classmates – about what enclaves and mawmouths really were.
But Yuyan couldn’t feel it. She could only ever feel her home. It felt like safety, and love. Her parents were there. Her whole family was there. And Liu – well, she was a schoolgirl crush who didn’t even seem to want her much anymore. It wouldn’t be the smart thing to do.
They’d stopped seeing each other, and then they’d even stopped texting. So Yuyan had volunteered to do a “mawmouth survey” with Liesel, guessing at what it was really about, and she saw El and even Aadhya for the secret post-orientation orientation, and then she’d seen El up close and personally terrifying when she got closer to a mawmouth she was surveying than she’d meant to, and the foundations of Shanghai wavered but didn’t break. (Maybe the mawmouth had known.)
But she didn’t see Liu. “She’s off with my cousins doing some spell translation on the sutras,” El had said, sounding offhand. Yuyan didn’t ask again, embarrassed. Liu didn’t owe her anything, after all. Possibly it was the reverse, or why was she here?
Maybe that was the problem, she reflected after her carefully-scripted, casual text to Liu went unanswered and left on read. She didn’t send another one.
Yuyan owed Liu. Didn’t she?
Liesel discouraged her from staying on with the survey. “We must keep rotating interns, and honestly, your affinity does not fit. Whatever personal issues you are dealing with, please find a way to do it that does not compromise our operation to save the world?”
Yuyan didn’t. She just went home. It was easier.
But maybe it was the change in the foundations. Or having been so close to a mawmouth as El dissolved it. She’d tried not to look, but she’d seen what was inside. Just a glimpse, but maybe that was worse, because the images of Liu as that curled-up little dead thing would never, ever leave her nightmares. Whatever it was, home felt different now. It wasn’t just the new people. Most of them had been long-term employees anyway. Something felt different, although she wasn’t sure if she was just convincing herself, knowing the secret truth of what had happened.
So she started getting persistent. It took a few years, but eventually – under the cover of another of Liesel’s projects, since work exchange with other enclaves was becoming more common in case of sudden foundation collapse – she returned, to face the mawmouths and El’s spells that unraveled them. To understand, and hopefully craft a spell that would allow normal people to do what El did.
She hadn’t expected she’d be working with Liu. Hadn’t expected to see her at all, to be honest.
Her heart still jumped, and she was surprised nobody else seemed to notice. Liu greeted her cordially, politely, as if they were just old classmates who hadn’t seen each other in years.
Yuyan bowed, re-calibrating expectations – hopes, really – she hadn’t known she had. “I’m excited to be of assistance,” she said, and winced at how stiff that sounded. At the way she was deferring to Liu even though, as far as she knew, she had more experience with this particular work. Nobody had been introduced as in charge one way or another. Liesel had produced an entire project handbook and roadmap, and El had just rolled her eyes, handed them copies “because I don’t feel like telling her I didn’t,” and said that all they had to do was be ready to follow her to wherever when it was time to kill a mawmouth and watch carefully while she did it.
“I suppose you could read up in the meantime, if you haven’t been, but honestly it seems like everyone these days knows everything about mawmouths except how they’re made.” El smiled grimly. “Or what happens when they’re killed.”
The glance that she and Liu exchanged had years of familiarity in it, and Yuyan felt like an intruder. Yuyan didn’t know what she’d expected – for Liu to flinch? She might have paled slightly, but that might have been Yuyan’s imagination. She might have flinched, to be honest.
She hadn’t expected Liu at all, she reminded herself. Just a schoolgirl crush from years ago. Just a classmate, now a coworker. You have a job to do, so do it.