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“Is there a reason,” Luka asks her, “that you’re showing this to me?”
His eyes are shadowed. Mizi doesn’t recall if, before all this, she’d ever seen them that way before - they had probably been covered by makeup, any darkness concealed beneath a careful image of innocence used to break his opponents until winning wasn’t even a thought. He had certainly seemed that way to her on stage, mimicking Sua in his waves of his gait and the flick of his fingers until she’d left him bleeding out and bruised on the floor.
She’d wanted to do worse.
“It’s Hyuna’s,” Mizi provides. Offers, maybe. She doesn’t want to offer anything to him, really. He’s taken enough from her as is. Luka’s flashlight eyes flick up to meet hers, and they’re eerily still.
She clears her throat. “It’s- all the places she’d wanted to go.” All the places that she died before she got to, go unsaid.
All the places that you killed her before she got to, even more. She thinks that Luka hears the latter more than the former, though, from the way a dry smile makes its way over his lips. Even almost a year after they both got out of Alien Stage (a year after no one else did), almost a year after breaking into Anakt Garden and freeing everyone who was willing to go, his smiles are still soft and cherubic and entirely fake.
It would be unsettling, if Mizi was a year and a month or two months ago. Now, it’s just normal. His masks don’t scare her. There’s not much she’s got to lose.
“And what,” asks Luka, “does this have to do with me?”
Mizi doesn’t flinch from the way his eyes narrow, just slightly. All these minute changes in expression, which indicate everything going on just skin-deep; it’s all the same ways Sua used to communicate. No wonder it was so easy for him to mimic her. She wonders if it was harder to match Ivan’s mannerisms, or if Luka had taken to that new skin and easily shed the old, like Mizi’s been told snakes do.
There are supposed to be snakes in one of the forests that had been on the map, when Hyuna first showed it to her. She had crossed that location off with a grin, bright red marker dripping like blood against the paper. Hyuna had once told her that it was easy to be angry, that it was easy to hate, and to keep hating. That it was harder to hold onto joy, and find a reason to live that came after the rage.
Mizi thinks that she’s wrong. Even looking at Luka right now, it sometimes feels like the red-hot grief in her veins is dripping out, slowly enough that it blinks in and out of existence. Perhaps their angers were just of a different substance.
“We’re finishing it,” says Mizi. “The map. You’re coming with me.”
Luka snorts. Just slightly. It makes Mizi’s lips thin and her blood race. How dare he be alive to laugh at her when Sua and Till died in her arms and Hyuna died in his. How dare he laugh when Hyuna threw herself into friendly fire for him . How dare she still be breathing, how dare she be the one who got to see the sun rise with the other free humans of Anakt Garden, and not even be able to enjoy it?
“Sure,” says Luka, finally. His eyes sweep around the room - it’s small, a bed on either side of the room and a wooden table in between, small splinters from being scrubbed too hard prickling under the pads of Mizi’s fingers. The lights have been turned off, and no one has told Luka to turn them on, because he doesn’t have a roommate. As far as Mizi knows, no one goes into this room but him. No one goes out, either, usually.
“Sure. When are we leaving?”
“Day after next,” Mizi says, stepping back. She doesn’t know why it feels like she’s failed, even though he’s agreed to go with her. Shouldn’t it feel like she’s won something, for once?
“I’ll come get you.” Again, unspoken: you’re not going anywhere without me.
She wonders if Luka knows just how little he’s trusted. She wonders if it grates on him, going from being the favored pet of the segyein to the least trusted among the free. She wonders if he cares.
They leave the rebel base camp to the cracked-egg colors of dawn splattered across the sky, with a few ribbons of pink peeking through the yolkey orange and yellow. For a second, Mizi stops to stare at it - to stare at the fading blinks of stars, dissipating from their position against the night sky. Hyuna had taken her out, once, on her second day in the rebel camp. She had been near catatonic, images of Sua’s smile as she died and her own blood-splattered fists weaving between flickering visions of Luka’s face shifting into Sua’s, slipping between the gaps in her mind like sand. It had all been playing behind her eyes, and she hadn’t been able to protest as the older woman had forced her to her feet and out the door.
They had walked, and walked. Mizi had wanted to collapse. The motion had been too jarring, too present, and the present felt like it was going to crush her alive. But Hyuna had made her get back up and keep walking, and so they had kept walking.
They had kept walking until they reached the top of this hill. The grass around the rebel base wasn’t the pure, simmering verdant of the grass of Anakt Garden - it grew in clumps and patches, fading between sickly browns and yellows and the occasional growth of healthy green. Hyuna had pulled her up until they were both kneeling, knees meeting the dirt, and told her,
“Look up.”
That sunrise had been the first thing to make her expression change from the overwhelming emptiness of missing her other half since Luka had awoken a well of fury within her she had not realized existed.
Watching this same sunset with Luka at her side and not Hyuna feels off. Like a painting with all the colors off a shade. She wonders if Hyuna would have dragged Luka here the same way, had she been alive to. If she would have turned to him, the same way that she had to Mizi, after.
Hyuna had said, “Shit sucks. It’s probably always going to suck, and it won’t get much better. But we’ve got sunsets, and we’ve got beer, and I’m trying to find a way to be happy with it.”
“What is that?” Luka asks, wrinkling his nose, as Mizi flicks open the top of the can of beer the same way Hyuna had shown her - nail under the tab and press up. She’s not as smooth as Hyuna was, and it takes her a few tries before it’s open. She passes the can to Luka, and their fingers brush as he takes it. They’re colder than the dripping condensation on the beer can.
“Beer. Human alcohol,” says Mizi, with a careless shrug. She sort of wants to say, Hyuna liked it. I never understood why. She gave some to me, and that sunset was the first time I felt alive since I nearly killed you , but she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to give up that Hyuna to someone who she died for.
Luka scoffs, and when he takes a sip, his whole face twists in disgust. It’s such a new expression on him that Mizi laughs out loud. When his face shifts back into the same control she recognizes, she still can’t stop her lips from twitching upward.
“Amusing?” says Luka. His voice is soft. “Hyuna liked this, didn’t she?”
The laughter crashes out of Mizi’s body. It makes itself at home on the floor, seeping into patches of grass, and she takes a second to wonder if Sua was like this too, when Mizi wasn’t there.
“Maybe she did,” says Mizi. She licks her lips and tastes blood - she’s been biting them, she thinks. Shine had scolded her about the habit, and trained her out of it, but Sua’s death had shattered all of that. She watches the way Luka’s eyes trail the motions of her mouth like a cat at a mouse. “And so what?”
Luka leans back, just slightly. If he were anyone else, he would probably be studying her, but as it is, he simply takes another sip of the beer. Mizi takes a long, long drink, the way she’d watched Hyuna do after long days and nights - watched the way her throat would bob as she swallowed, the way she would lick her lips. Remember the way those lips had felt on hers, stolen in dark corners, on days when nothing else could keep her moving.
“Nothing,” says Luka. There’s something sharp in the twist of his lips. Something that’s always there, no matter how trained he is to hide it. “Nothing at all.”
Earth is cold, is Mizi’s first thought. Cold and dry. The air feels grainy, and the sky is grey. She’s not quite sure what she’d expected to feel when she set foot on her ancestral planet, but it’s… more. More than this.
Hyuna’s map isn’t just places on Earth, but that’s most of it. She had written little notes in squiggly handwriting, colored ink, by her landmarks, discussing research and treasures and stories and what she’d been told about them all. There are two mountains and one desert, a remnant of something called a ‘convenience store’ and two forests. There’s lakes and old building names and temples, and so few of them are marked off. Mizi traces her fingers over the ones that are, the ones where Hyuna had scribbled down reviews by side of her research points, and feels the ache that lives in her chest pulse.
“There’s not much to see,” notes Luka, a note of casual distaste in his voice. Nothing particularly emotional about it. It’s the same way segyein would discuss Till, almost; displeasure, but nothing worth getting very worked up about. Nothing that needed to be so worked up about. It’s enough that Mizi’s body moves before she can think, and her fist meets Luka’s cheek.
Luka stumbles back and spits - blood splatters on the ground like a splash of red paint. Mizi’s knuckles ache. Her eyes burn. Her head aches, too, the front of it, something pressing against her skull, the same way her lungs press against her ribcage - all too tight, all too little, not enough space to expand and let her breathe in air.
In her other hand, something crinkles. The map feels all too fragile, and there’s a sudden, crippling fear of ripping it.
“Ah, dear,” says Luka. His voice is amused. His eyes are not. “If you’re going to physically assault me every time we interact, perhaps you ought to go back.”
Mizi swallows. Her throat feels dry. She wonders if it’s Earth’s air, or if it’s just her. She wonders if Hyuna were still here, what she would tell her. Would she congratulate her for the right hook? Would she laugh? Would she look at her sadly, on the rare instances she allowed Mizi to see her as a whole person, and ask her what they were doing here?
“We’re going to have to set up a camp,” says Mizi. Her knuckles ache. Hyuna had taught her how to wrap them, just how she said someone else had taught her, though she’d never spoken about who it was. Mizi had never asked. She had wanted to, but had never understood how to get the words out from behind the lump in her throat, or in between Hyuna pinning her against a wall, her hands fisted in Mizi’s newly cut hair.
Hyuna had not kissed like Sua. Sua’s kisses had been desperate, wanting - she had kissed Mizi hungrily, hands tight to her waist and teeth sinking into her bottom lip, latching on and molding themselves together. She had kissed her like that before they had both walked onto the stage that Sua had known would be her death and Mizi had been too stupid to understand, and it had been even harsher than their days in Anakt, than the first time they had hidden between two metal walls and stolen each other’s first kisses shrouded in childhood secrecy, and she had left Mizi’s lips swollen and bleeding.
Hyuna had kissed carefully, but wholly. She had kissed like a distraction, like a lifeline. Hyuna had kissed the same way her hands had felt on Mizi’s when she taught her how to hold a gun - as if aware that at any point, her control could be gone, and someone could be dead. Mizi had wondered, sometimes, where that had come from.
Luka’s lips look soft. They look well taken care of, none of the chips or bites in Hyuna’s or her own and none of the emotion she recalls in Sua’s. Mizi wonders how Luka would kiss her - if he would try and mimic Sua or even Hyuna, the way he did on stage, or if his kisses would finally be something like honesty. She stops that train of thought as soon as her eyes wander to his lips, because she knows if she does that, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to stop her hands from wrapping around his throat.
“A camp?” says Luka, and Mizi blinks.
“Do you not know what that is?”
As it turns out, he doesn’t. It makes sense, when Mizi thinks about it, when she considers, so she’s not sure why it surprises her so much.
They set up camp for three nights and walk for four days until they reach one of the lakes Hyuna had written over on her map. For this one, some of the notes sparkle in the sunlight - Mizi wonders what pen she had used. Maybe, she thinks, she should have asked.
That night, they don’t disastrously attempt to pitch a tent as they had the first night. Luka had stared at her blankly when she’d told him to help, and then fallen over himself when he’d tried to do it after her. Instead, Mizi leans herself up against the damp bark of a tree and tucks herself into the roots, and breathes in.
Here, the air is less dry and more damp and cool. It’s more how she had pictured Earth, in the rare points she had thought of it as a child - without the strangely stale aftertaste Anakt’s air would sometimes leave behind, if she thought too hard. She had usually been too busy to bother - with Sua or singing or any of the other fancies which had fluttered by her attention. She had been an easily pleased child, cheerful and smiling, even as her classmates had been tortured around her. Perhaps she had been tortured, as well, and simply hadn’t realized that she should feel awful about it.
Luka is leaning against a fallen tree himself, head padded by green moss. His eyes are open - they stare up at the sky, fading from streaks of purple to black. Like this, he looks startling - a type of softness that somehow feels less manufactured than the act he’s putting on. The natural sort, the sort she would see in Till when he shoved lyrics at her for approval, or Sua when she would do her hair, or Ivan when she would ask him to tell her a story.
Then he turns to face her, and it fades. “Yes?”
“Nothing,” says Mizi. Earth’s forests are not silent. There’s a rustling of leaves in nighttime wind, chirping that Mizi now knows belongs to birds. Her voice is soft in the fading light, carried over, blending into the soft symphony around them.
Luka hums. Mizi doesn’t know what to make of it before he turns his eyes back to the sky and closes them. He rests, partially curled on his back - not facing towards her, but not facing away from her, either. She wonders if the position is instinctive, or if he’s just sleeping like that out of wariness.
The thought sends prickles of anger racing down her spine, and so she closes her eyes against the red sheen which envelops her vision. She tells herself that Hyuna would be disappointed, if Luka died before visiting even one of the places she had probably wanted to show him. She had never talked of him, but you don’t die for just anyone.
“How did you know her?” comes out before she can stop herself. Mizi has never quite been able to stop her mouth from working before her brain. She’s never had to - there was Sua, first, doing it for her, and then Sua was dead and any words she wanted to speak were too coated with rage or despair to come out properly.
Luka’s eyes open, like a light bulb flickering on in a dark room. Mizi shifts against rough, damp bark, as she pulls further into herself, refusing to look at him.
“Hyuna. How did you-”
“I figured,” says Luka, voice hard. It’s startling; the bluntness of it, not an ounce of the usual faux-innocence that usually twists around his words. Just as quickly, a wide smile flicks onto his face, and Mizi cannot stop herself from staring at it.
It looks wide and open. It looks like a child. It looks like Sua whenever they would look at each other, when it felt like there was no one else in the world, and it feels so wrong that Luka could ever smile like that.
“We were in the same graduating class. In Anakt.” Mizi blinks a few times, because that feels like something she should have known. Shouldn’t it?
“Hyuna…”
He trails off, something starstruck in his eyes, and hot bile crawls its way up Mizi’s throat. She can’t make herself stop staring at his face, at the open, genuine adoration on his face. She can’t stop thinking about the shadows in Hyuna’s face whenever she would look in the direction of their old home, regret and hate finding themselves at home in the same creases of the downturn of her lips. She can’t stop thinking about Hyuna’s body, cradled in Luka’s arms, how she had finally looked something like peaceful.
“How can you still think about her that way?”
Luka’s face switches back to a closed-mouth smile so quickly it’s a whiplash. He doesn’t look at her when he speaks.
“Oh? What way?”
“Shut up,” Mizi hisses. Her bruised knuckles itch, but she has another hand, and her vision is blurring. The sky above them has fully turned to night, and the moon hangs above them like a phantom, light dancing between the claw-like branches, fractured and soft.
“How can you- after- after you-”
“After I, what ,” Luka asks. His voice is so gentle, like how Shine would coo at her whenever she scraped her knee or bruised her arm and cried. With the undertone of a threat.
“After you killed her ,” Mizi spits out. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth, and her head is pounding, something like the sirens of the alarms from Alien Stage going off against the walls of her skull. Something like the red of Hyuna’s blood at her side, through her chest.
“Me?” asks Luka. He sits up, graceful and smooth, lithe as a predator disguised as prey. His eyes focus on her, and even as his lips tick up, his eyes look dead. “Well, it certainly wasn’t me who ran on stage for a dead man walking, no?”
“Don’t talk about him,” Mizi snarls. Her knees hit the dirt before she can process that her body is moving - before she realizes that the blanket she had wrapped herself in has been cast off, her body exposed and raw, her feet on the verge of touching the floor. “Don’t you fucking talk about any of them.”
“I don’t see what you’re so upset about,” sighs Luka. “Why, jealous she got shot for me and didn’t add herself to the list who got shot for you?”
“Are you happy about this?” Mizi hisses. Her teeth feel sharp in her mouth, her gums bloody, staining her all the way down her esophagus and into her stomach. “Did it give you some sick fucking joy, seeing there was someone who gave enough of a shit about someone like you-”
“Someone like me?” says Luka, delicately. She hates him for it.
“ Yes, someone like you. Someone like-”
Luka laughs. It’s not a nice sound. It’s not the sound she thinks she can remember from interviews, from the aftermath of the obliteration that was Round 4 of Alien Stage. It hurts her ears.
“ Someone like me . Is that such an awful thing to be? Really… if it was between you and the butcher’s knife, perhaps you’d understand more. But you’ve never had that, have you? You might have, if your round hadn’t… ended the way that it had. So messy, honestly.”
For a second, Mizi can’t breathe.
A few more, she manages a choking gasp, but all she can taste in the air is rust.
Her fingers itch. Her legs ache. Her mouth feels like the inside is being cut up into pieces and blood is dripping down her throat. She wants to spit it out into Luka’s face and ruin that pristine, pale expression, haloed by the moonlight the same way he had been by the spotlights on stage, all white clothes and soft face and Sua’s hands which had burned when he tilted her face up.
“I didn’t know,” comes out of her mouth. It sounds desperate. Hyuna would have told her to pick up a gun and move on. Luka just keeps smiling. “I didn’t know she would do that. I never-” I never wanted her to do that. I didn’t want to survive without her .
“And she did anyway,” Luka says, laying back down and turning away from her. It doesn’t feel careless. It feels like a loss. “What a pity.”
She wakes to soft moonlight on her face and fireflies buzzing around her ears. Mizi sits up slowly, wincing at the crick in her back and the bruises at her sides from tree roots, and breathes in. The air tastes fresh. Clean. Not like blood.
Maybe that’s why Hyuna was so interested in the Earth they had all left behind.
Luka’s asleep, when she looks over. His closed-eyed face is shadowed, hidden from the light by the shifted angle of the moon, but he looks peaceful, almost. His face is pinched, but it’s more open than she’s almost ever seen him be awake. Almost, if not for Hyuna.
And she did anyway. What a pity .
Mizi moves before she can think. Her legs feel shaky beneath her, and her feet feel distant from her hands from her head. Perhaps, she thinks, she’s falling apart, limbs and then her head, and they’ll roll around and be left here on the forest floor to be eaten by all the bugs and animals she’s been told reside here. Like old humans would have been, before space travel and the segyein and everything else.
Luka’s clothes are rough. The same material as hers. His throat, though, is smooth, the skin soft under the fingers. She doesn’t remember how it had felt, before, when Sua’s mannerisms had been on his skin and her image had been everywhere. All she remembers from then was how her knuckles had looked, bruised and stained with his blood. How Luka’s face had looked, blue and red and black and dead.
Luka’s eyes open as she wraps her hands around his throat and squeezes. They meet hers, chartreuse meeting gold, and he stares at her, unblinking, even as she squeezes tighter around his throat. His mouth opens, wordless, but even then he makes no sound - just small, tiny wheezes as she squeezes, and squeezes, and squeezes. His skin is unmarked, around his throat. She wonders if the rest of him is the same. She was, once. Sua was not, where clothes could cover. Hyuna was never, as long as she had known her. Maybe she had been when Luka had known her, when they were children.
Luka doesn’t fight her. She doesn’t know if she had expected him to. His blue fingertips brush against the hem of her shirt, but stay away from her hands. He watches her face as she strangles him, and Mizi can’t- she can’t- she-
Her grip breaks around Luka’s throat, and he gasps for breath, but otherwise remains still. Beneath her, he heaves, his chest rising and falling rapidly, but his arms rest by his sides, fallen, and his legs are still. His eyes have not moved from her face.
Mizi licks her lips, and tastes salt, and warmth. That’s what makes her realize that she’s crying.
Hyuna should be here right now. Hyuna should get to be by the lakeside, sleeping under trees and resting her head against the moss. She should have gotten to make fun of them for failing to pitch a tent and then failed herself, and she should have drank another one of her beers under the fading glow of a sunrise, as close to freedom as any of them were ever going to get.
“You cried then, too,” says Luka. His voice is wispy and hoarse. She knows when he’s referring to. There’s only one time that it could be.
Below her, he doesn’t look particularly cruel, or haloed, or even masked, all closed-off and dead eyes and calculated movements. He just looks tired.
Mizi hadn’t wanted Sua to die for her. She hadn’t wanted Hyuna to die following her, either. Everyone else has always just died for Mizi, has always just left her behind in pools of dripping blood, without ever asking if she wanted to be left at all.
Mizi leans back and sits down against the ground, her palms meeting the gritty dirt of the forest floor. It’s rough and granular, wet and will probably smear them brown. A different brown than dried blood, though. A different red than how they all looked, bleeding out in people’s arms.
Luka sits up, after her. Red marks bloom around his neck, but aside from that, he almost looks untouched. His head tilts up, and when he swallows, the finger-shaped marks shift.
“Let’s go see that lake,” says Mizi, when her voice finds its way back to her mouth again. The words sit in between her teeth, rest there and make her jaw ache with the effort of keeping it closed.
Luka doesn’t look at her as he stands up. She wonders if that makes it easier to pretend he’s here with Hyuna.
“Let’s,” he agrees, and if Mizi closes her eyes, shifts her mind, from the now to the past, just enough, she can imagine that voice rougher, more emotive. More genuine.
More like Hyuna’s.