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The feeling of missing home is both weird and novel for Heathcliff.
He hadn’t really thought about it for the first twelve or so years of his life here , a combination of him never having the time to think and it never exactly being on his mind. In a way, he had thought of coming to this world as an escape, from the constant pressure from his mother, the desperate push of Korean schools. Everything was competitive, sucking you dry and wondering why you had nothing left. It’s not something he particularly missed. Even with half his memories under a muddled fog, only slowly revealing themselves in a way that lends itself to many confused thoughts on whether this is a rebirth or isekai or something else, he can’t say that he preferred the old world to the new one.
This is not to say his life in Bretus was good , by any means. But he had time to breathe, and a freeing lack of expectations. When Grander picked him up, the material he had been expected to learn was actually interesting , all the colors of magic forming a vibrant picture compared to the dull monotone of the schooling he remembered. Between the piles of books and experimentation with all sorts of spells, he spends another three years with only the occasional thought back, wondering if his other-world family is doing okay.
___
On his twelfth birthday here, Grander has a sudden moment of kindness, and decides to take him to a nearby restaurant for a small celebration. Heathcliff isn’t foolish enough to think this will stop her from beating him into the ground tomorrow, but he certainly isn’t going to complain about a break.
It’s a pretty boring restaurant, honestly. It blends in completely with everything else if you ignore the sign, the name of the restaurant carved onto it. It’s barely legible, remnants of paint long since dulled of color and peeled away.
They stand outside — and for a singular moment, Heathcliff thinks he smells a scent that’s familiar in a way precious little is, in this world. A hint of sourness, spiciness, almost pungent in how strongly it hits him. It’s there for a brief second, and disappears. No matter how he turns his head, it doesn’t come back.
Grander tuts impatiently at him, and he quickly follows her into the restaurant. The menu is painfully bland and he orders without paying particular attention once he sees nothing familiar.
Just a trick of the senses. A moment of weakness, a moment where his nose made a mistake. He hasn’t ever even seen napa cabbage since he’d arrived-transmigrated-rebirthed, and he’s unsure of how it originated back in the world of his memories, so he can’t even predict if it’ll ever grow here.
Heathcliff drives it out of his mind, focuses his attention on keeping Grander happy for the remainder of the day, and ignores how the whipped cream of the cake is far too heavy.
___
He dreams for the first time in years, of a yearly period of warmth, despite the winter sometimes having bitten relentlessly into skin even as the city came to life. He remembers bowing in front of elders he never quite remembered the proper relations of, traditional clothing that he wore with this combination of both pride and hate.
And always, the board game, the rare time past-him was permitted such frivolities by his other-world mother, his sister shrieking in delight when she got to move first.
He wakes up, stares at the moon, and for the first time understands that one Chinese poet they were forced to learn about.
Lowering your head and missing home, indeed.
___
Sometimes, when he stands in crowded places, he’ll close his eyes and just pretend like he’s back to attending proper school, shoving his way through seas of people as he struggles to reach his destination. It works surprisingly well. Perhaps it’s because his memories never quite got any clearer from what they were when he was ten or so, but he likes to think it’s because crowds all feel the same, anyways.
It’s never quite right, though. Always missing something, be it the holler of a peddler, or the rush that’s just never quite present here.
It’s something he remembers hating, something he was grateful to be able to escape.
It’s strange, how he misses it now.
He knows, objectively, that he doesn’t actually miss that vein of quickquickquick under every single interaction. It’s more just missing that world in general, and as such everything associated with it.
He has much less luck than he’d like persuading the emotional part of his brain he could never quite shut off, though.
So, he wanders into crowds, closes his eyes to ignore the lack of high grey buildings, and pretends like if he pinches his nose shut, he’ll be able to ignore the distinct lack of car exhaust.
But despite it all, when the crowd fades — and it always does, noise dying down and disappearing eventually — the silence feels nothing like home.
___
Food is… odd , these days. He’s learnt how to cook, since Grander’s definition of edible cooking is the one bar she sets that he can easily step over. Thousands of years on this earth, and his master is still capable of burning water.
So, most of the time, he commandeers the kitchen. He rarely whips up anything fancy, and cycles through a set number of dishes every lunch and dinner. It’s fine, his master doesn’t always join him but they eat in companionable silence when she does. He doesn’t particularly understand why some are so picky about food, but he doesn’t necessarily hold a particular dislike for it during those two meals.
Breakfast is a bit of a different story. It doesn’t matter how long he’s slept for, or when he wakes up, his appetite never quite seems to settle before he’s been up and about for long enough it’s typically lunch.
Not eating is also a stupid decision, obviously, considering that Grander’s training is rarely anything less than physically intensive, but there’s still dread every time he lays down a platter of bread and whatever else on the table.
Eggs are the worst. Even a single bite of the yolk in the hard-boiled ones is too much most days — it inevitably leads to a solid hour of his stomach roiling, throat and teeth sticky even if he swishes water in his mouth for minutes on end. It’s considerably better if he scrambles them, which is what he’s taken to doing when it looks like he’s eating alone. He’s gotten a lot better at predicting if he’s going to have company for breakfast based on Grander’s moods, these days. But when she does eat with him, her mood is always significantly improved when he fries the eggs without fully cooking the yolk.
He can’t explain why it feels so godsdamn different, eating the yolks like that versus when past-him had eaten them in marinated eggs on Earth. For all intents and purposes, the texture of the yolks between the two dishes aren’t that different, and yet, one makes him desperately crave something he can’t even fully remember, and the other just makes him gag.
He tried marinating eggs himself, once. They had some soy sauce, and he made do with the other spices he could scrounge up.
The smell had set Grander off. He didn’t bother trying again.
Now, he just sticks to plain toast if Grander’s planning on showing up for breakfast. She doesn’t notice if he only makes eggs for one on those days anyways, and if she does she certainly doesn’t mention it. And when she doesn’t show up, he mixes the yolks and whites together with a vengeance and tosses that into the pan.
Even that on bread is still hard to swallow, though, when he vividly remembers the toast sold on street corners, with eggs and vegetables scrambled together, bread coated with butter, ham slices fried to perfection and that final ingredient of cheddar cheese laid on top, all stacked together into a sandwich perfect for the busy mornings. Past-him had relied on that street corner stall many, many times, rushing to school before the bell and barely having time to even grab breakfast at all.
He considers making it himself, more than once. And then he thinks about what would happen if it tasted terrible and nothing like his memories, or if he froze and forgot the entire recipe as soon as picked up a pan because it was all just his imagination.
It isn’t. He knows it isn’t, knows that he recollects this balance of too much and not enough that simply wouldn’t be possible if it was just a fantasy in his own head, but the thought of confirming that fills him with a terror that leaves him breathless and staring blankly down at hands that are not his — yet have accompanied him for the clearest of his memories.
For once, Grander’s impatience is kind to him. He always hesitates long enough debating with himself that he runs out of time to do anything more than swallow a few bites of dry bread, and so he never has to actually convince himself of anything.
___
He wishes he could say it was a phase. But twelve years here turns to thirteen years turns to fourteen years in the blink of an eye, yet so slowly he has time to mourn the time. He meets new people and is dragged to new places. He learns and fails and pretends like he learnt from failing.
Yet, through it all, that desperate ache stays.
He remembers taking English lessons. A mandatory subject, one he had learnt for years upon years in his memories. He had never quite thought he’d end up in a world that only used it, but life is strange sometimes.
The courses he had taken when he was older-but-younger focused on grammar and spelling and reading. It’s not until he woke up in a world that had never even heard of Korean that he really learnt how to speak English properly, a fresh tongue that didn’t stumble through syllables with an accent.
They don’t call it English, of course. They just call it the common tongue, introduced to the whole world by Bretus, back when they dominated everything.
He hadn’t thought all that much about it before, back when he was still revelling in the wonders of magic and having space to properly breathe. He hadn’t thought too much about languages when he was devouring books and figuring out how to tear his siblings open with words since he had no advantage on any other front.
But suddenly, a month or so after he’s turned fourteen, he’s sitting on his bed and staring at the ceiling, and he just wonders — when did he start thinking in English, instead of Korean?
He doesn’t know. Perhaps some time in Bretus, perhaps sometimes after he was picked up by Grander.
He tries to recollect what it was like to think in Korean. Tries to imagine those characters, and realizes he’s imagining in English anyways.
He can’t. He can’t remember, can’t even build up a fantasy, and gods, blankness has never felt worse.
___
Royal Street is probably the project he’s the proudest of. It tops the treatise he had written on the role of imaginary numbers and cubic functions in magic as James Moriarty, his final painting as Vincent van Gogh, and even his defeat of that horrible beast as Abraham von Helsing.
Perhaps it’s because this time, he was working with others, sharing the same hopes and dreams for a place that felt like home, albeit he probably had a different interpretation of what that would entail. There’s something magical about looking around a table and seeing bright eyes full of light on those who most would assume to be jaded and cold. And under all of their collaborative efforts, Royal Street thrived . A home they built with their own hands.
For the most part, he hands the decision-making for all the different shops and attractions over to the groups that had used to own the streets, when they were still just grey slums. He trusts them — well, more accurately, he trusts that they want to see Royal Street come to life as much as he does.
Still, he can’t quite help but add in some selfish ideas. Convenience stores with quick food (quite a few things native to this world, but he can’t help but put triangle kimbap and tteokbokki on the list of what they sell), for one. Karaoke rooms, for another, although he frames it as a hangout location for students from Ceoren that offers music rooms for singing. He’d been dragged to a few of those, back in his memories, although he very rarely held the microphone. Still, he remembers how many of those there were, and since Internet cafes obviously aren’t plausible, he settled for whatever he could recall.
It still doesn’t stop him from being stunned, though, when he walks in the street and feels something familiar , like a piece slipping back into where it was always meant to be.
Heathcliff — or, well, Ludger now — has come to accept, these past years, that even if he could go to the before-world, he wouldn’t. There were simply far too many things tethering him to here, now, whether it was U.N.Owen or his students. Too many people he cared for, too many things he wanted to do. He aches, longs to visit Earth, to see Korea again, but he doesn’t want to return.
He might not ever stop missing it, though. Like one of those old scars that has long since healed over, long since stopped hurting, but there’s still a phantom ache when it’s looked at.
But standing in this bustling street, closing his eyes and letting himself sink into reminiscence-
This may not be Korea, may not be the place he used to call home, but it’s the home he’s built for himself.
That’s more than enough.