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I wish that I did not know
Where all broken lovers go
I wish that my heart was made of stone
Yeah, if I was bulletproof
I'd love you black and blue
If I was solid like a jewel
— DIAMOND HEART, Alan Walker ft. Sophia Somajo
One of the first things Mizi learns about Hyuna is that she was trained formally at Anakt Garden. What she doesn’t say is that she was trained in the same class as Luka.
This, she learns when she wakes up after a night of crying in a ripped dress and Luka’s blood crusted on her knuckles and underneath her fingernails and flinches at the sight of golden blond in her periphery—only to realize it’s just a ripped-up poster still stuck to the wall.
Mizi stares. She makes no comment on it when Hyuna stops by with a change of clothes and a cheer to her tone that has no place in the greyness covering everything.
Hyuna, formally trained and raised as a pet in Anakt Garden, who is rumored to have competed and lost in a round of ALNST—
She does not sing anything like an Anakt Garden pet would sing. Mizi’s immediately enraptured by it and it tastes like blood bubbling in her throat.
When Hyuna sings, she sings like she’s throwing away every bit of the harsh demands their teachers imposed upon them: to sing smoother, try not to sound so abrasive, you’re supposed to sound melodious, soothing, appeal to the crowd. You don’t want to die onstage so easily, do you, Mizi?
Hyuna’s voice carries a rough quality to it that she clearly doesn’t care to hide, a grin and a laugh to it that throws her off rhythm, clearly not caring that the crowd can tell she’s trying to find her footing in the beat again. She laughs and asks the crowd if they’re enjoying top-quality segyein-trained vocals, hooting and cheering with them when they respond in kind.
Mizi can’t make sense of it.
She can’t make sense of a rebel base of humans who are evidently plotting an uprising against the segyein, so who can say what she should and shouldn’t be trying to make sense of?
“Mizi,” she sing-songs, throwing the door open all the way with her hip, “you’ve got to lighten up and spend some time with the others, y’know!”
“Appreciate the offer, Hyuna-ssi,” Mizi mutters, eyeing the bottle and stacked cups in both of Hyuna’s hands, “but I prefer keeping to myself.”
It’s not something she ever would’ve imagined herself saying just a week ago. Mizi, for as long as she remembers, has thrived in connection, thrived in people (thrived with Sua) and it was her shield and her misery, her willingness to be everyone’s friend and nobody’s beloved but Sua’s. Living here among the rebels is learning about all the kinds of firsts someone can have, evidently.
“Too formal!” Hyuna pronounces, shoving a cup into Mizi’s hands. She blinks. “Hyuna-ssi this, Hyuna-ssi that, how old do you think I am?”
Instead of trying to hazard a guess at Hyuna’s age—she looks young enough to be Mizi’s age, but she’d most likely been in the same class as Luka—she shrugs and concedes, “Hyuna-unnie, then. Sorry, but I’m not really in the mood.”
“Lighten up a little,” Hyuna scoffs, and it’s not unkind, the way she says it. She shifts toward Mizi, utterly unheeding of personal space, a thing even Mizi has always tried to respect, crowding next to her and tipping the strong-smelling liquid into Mizi’s cup without asking. The other cup goes unused when she chooses to down a gulp straight from the bottle.
Then, she fixes Mizi with a questioning look. “I don’t drink,” she offers uselessly. It was more like Shine had never really allowed her to, after she’d graduated. It wasn’t…proper, not in-line with the image Mizi projected to the world. She’d thought it was real, too.
“There’s always time for a first try,” Hyuna says instead, but holds out a hand to take back the cup anyway. Mizi looks at her, her deceptively open face that has not told Mizi a single true thing about herself in the five days she has been holed up here, and knocks it all back.
She chokes on it, throat burning. “Shit,” she chokes out miserably, “Great Anakt, that’s fucking awful, how do you drink that on a daily basis?”
Hyuna smiles, irreverent, cocky. Sad. “You get used to the burn.”
The first time Mizi had tasted alcohol had been at one of those stuffy events pet-humans always get dragged to when their musical career takes off. Shine had been so pleased, even if miffed that Mizi insisted on sharing the spotlight with Sua, always.
Right before an interview, or was it a magazine photoshoot, Mizi and Sua had been offered snacks and alcohol, the expensive kind, and both of them had figured it probably wouldn’t do to turn them down. The alcohol hadn’t been awful, but neither of them had felt inclined to get used to the taste in the near future.
“I’d rather easily get drunk on—”
“Don’t say me!” Sua protested, elbowing Mizi lightly. She’d giggled. It was true that, when cradling Sua in her arms, it was a different kind of headiness, a rush that rang through her blood like settling into a skin she didn’t recognize but understood. It left her wanting, left her clawing for more. It had cast the rest of the world in shadow.
Only her Sua to look at—nothing else existed beyond that. No Shine telling her to tilt her smile just right, no boys who say, just one chance, just one chance, Mizi, you’re so pretty. Just Sua, just her, just Sua right there within reach and so easy to keep ahold of. Just as easy to shatter, but she wouldn’t do that, not to Sua.
She’d loved Sua so much. She still feels Sua’s blood hot on her face. She looks at Hyuna and knows without a doubt that this is what they say about drinking to forget.
Mizi never does develop a taste for alcohol, anyway, no matter how hard Hyuna tries.
Hyuna is hard to figure out.
If there’s one thing that she is, it’s that she is shameless, and Mizi’s learned to expect Hyuna’s arm around her waist or shoulder or a quick kiss to the cheek before Hyuna is even within arm’s reach. She never tells Hyuna to go away—she should, really, but she doesn’t. In a way, it’s like being reassured that she’s still a person walking in the world, that she is corporeal, flesh-and-blood.
(That she hadn’t truly died that day on the stage along with Sua—
that she hadn’t just gotten shot and died for attacking Luka and this is all some kind of elaborate hallucination she’s having before she passes on, or something.)
The other thing about Hyuna is that she acts like nothing in the world bothers her. It’s not uncommon for Mizi to wake up in the late mornings and find Hyuna slumped over the kitchen table with a horrible hangover and a hoarse throat from singing all night. Isaac scolds her and she grumbles back at him and looks at Mizi as if saying, can you believe this guy?
“Unnie,” Mizi always ends up saying, “he does have a point…”
And then, by the time night falls, Hyuna is back at it. Mizi can only watch in astonishment, unsure of what to say and do, only knowing that she’s helpless to following Hyuna around like a baby duckling, still clueless as to where she fits into the rebellion movement.
“What does the rebellion movement even do?” she asks Hyuna one night, when she descends the stage to grab some water instead of alcohol, for once.
Hyuna smiles at her like she’s sharing a secret. “Watch and learn. We’re going to save your friends and all those kids.”
“By…getting drunk and singing,” it comes out meaner than she intends it to.
Hyuna’s eyebrows go up. Mizi never speaks like that—she’s only known Mizi to be quiet, withdrawn, avoiding skin and eye contact like the plague. She never did say whether she’s seen Mizi on broadcasts before, but she has to have. It’s not a question so much as it’s the truth. Mizi-and-Sua had been popular, a unit even when forced apart.
“If that’s what it takes to hype people up and convince them that it’s worth it, then yeah,” Hyuna says, matching the sharpness in Mizi’s tone.
Her stomach flips, head snapping up to look at Hyuna. Her long hair’s pulled back tonight in a messy ponytail, baring her fire-hot eyes to the world without hesitation. Mizi’s gaze falls to Hyuna’s shoulder. She never tries to hide the tattoo the segyein had given her.
“You should join me,” Hyuna offers. “Most people don’t know you’re here, yeah? It’d be something to see a freshly-escaped Anakt graduate sing here.”
The idea of singing again makes Mizi sick. “No,” she shakes her head. “I—don’t ask that of me again.”
Hyuna takes it in her stride. “Sure,” she concedes easily without questioning it. Throwing an arm around Mizi, she presses a messy kiss to her forehead and then she’s off, climbing back onstage and meeting the hollering and cheering with great delight, all the skill of a performer, the swagger and confidence quite unlike anything the segyein would have encouraged.
It’s as if she’s taking it all back. Taking back what had been used a torture tool, and made it her own. Mizi wonders what it’s like to know that you love singing and it is what you love doing, and have it be connected to a place that kills and kills and takes and takes.
We’re going to save your friends, she’d said, and when she thinks about Ivan and Till having to compete against each other in the next round, she feels like she’s floating somewhere far away.
She ends up having to take Hyuna back to her room that night, a giggling, drunk mess, proclaiming this and that. Dewey is mostly distracted with other matters and she has no idea where to find Isaac—isn’t even sure Isaac really trusts her, at this point in time—so she commits herself to it nd hauls Hyuna back to her room.
“Hyuna-unnie,” she pants, stumbling again for the nth time. Hyuna is both taller and weighs more than her and she’s drunk. Wonderful. “Do you have to do this so often?”
“Miziiii,” Hyuna singsongs back in response. Mizi grits her teeth and sighs instead of looking for a dignified response to that. She hasn’t had dignified responses to anything in what feels like a long time now. She feels like being mean, callous, saying something that would cut across Hyuna the wrong way. It might taste like blood. It would feel good.
She has to swallow it back, think about Sua’s hand on her shoulder steadying and telling her to keep it to herself. Violence with no place to go. Luka’s bruised, smiling face beneath her hands.
Luka’s pristine, cold smile reflecting back at her from Hyuna’s bedroom walls. She should feel bad about the way she all but dumps Hyuna onto the bed and then turns on her heel to flee.
She comes back to give her a glass of water on Isaac’s orders, and then runs right back out.
“You said we’re taking ALNST down.”
“Mhm,” Hyuna hums, focused on taking apart some kind of contraption.
“You don’t like anything to do with ALNST.”
“Nah.”
“Then why do you have Luka’s posters on your walls?”
That gives pause to Hyuna’s movements. Mizi realizes that Hyuna had been banking on Mizi never bringing it up at all—because why would she do that?
“You were in the same class as Luka, in Anakt Garden,” she presses.
“…I was,” Hyuna confirms. “He was a classmate of mine. We more or less grew up together, I guess you could say.”
“You don’t keep a classmate’s posters in your room,” Mizi can’t hide the snarl in her tone, and Hyuna doesn’t make a comment on it, either.
“No, I guess not,” is all she says on the matter, tone closed with finality. Mizi doesn’t have the heart to fight back against it. She still sneaks out of her room in the middle of the night to press play on the tape with Sua’s promotional song for this season of ALNST on it, and she cries every time, silent and still and stone-faced.
Hyuna isn’t always loud and silly when she gets drunk.
There are nights like this, when she convinces Mizi to sit with her, and she gets distant-eyed, speaking softly about everything and nothing, and Mizi isn’t convinced she’s really drunk so much as out of it. She doesn’t sing onstage today, like every night she’s done this, and Mizi thinks to herself that it’s probably a relief for Isaac. She also thinks that Hyuna being the way she is why the rebels function at all in this way.
“Hyuna-unnie,” she says, “what am I doing here?” And when Hyuna opens her mouth, “no, I mean, what am I doing here? What use am I to all of this? I don’t understand what you’re getting out of—out of all this. I don’t understand.”
There’s so many things she doesn’t understand about being here. The freedom she’s been given is dizzying. There’s no schedule demanding she do this or do this, and no one scolds her for her lack of a smile—except Hyuna, and it’s never like that—and she is not putting on a performance. She does not have to ask anyone’s permission for anything.
She can choose what to wear. She has no skills for anything, her arms barely strong enough to hold up a gun. Hyuna had put one in her hand and she’d immediately dropped it.
To be human is to sing within a gilded cage. To be human is to understand you will die and your damndest to go out in the way that best benefits your guardian. To be human is to love someone so much you would ruin everything for it. What else do humans live for, die for?
“You’re here because I saved you from being shot and killed dead,” Hyuna says, simply. “Do you know what you’ve done, ruining Luka’s face? He’s always been sickly, you know. You might’ve just killed him.”
Mizi scoffs. “Doubt it. You were listening to him on the radio this morning.”
“Sneaky. You get what I mean, though.”
She shifts, uncomfortable. “Yeah.”
“Mizi,” Hyuna says, heaving out a sigh, “you’re here because we saved you from dying over a stupid thing like ALNST, and once you get out, you’ve got to learn how to fight it out. It doesn’t matter that you think you’re useless—you’ve got some role, in all of this. You can’t let the segyein win.”
Hopeless idealism, that’s what Mizi thinks this is. What are any of them hoping to accomplish?
“Why didn’t you save Sua?” it slips out of her before she realizes what she’s saying. Her ears pound, but she keeps going. “If you could save me, then why—why not her—”
She won’t cry again. She won’t. She’s crying anyway. She rubs her hand harshly across her face, thinking more than anything that this is—
(“You can’t just do this!” Mizi shrieks. “I know what you’ve been doing. I know you’ve been planning to die. Sua. Sua, don’t you dare—”)
“You can’t save everyone,” Hyuna says, tired. In the dim lighting, she looks even more tired than she sounds. “I wish we could. But it’s just not possible.”
Mizi wants to fight back, deny it, but she has no will in her to say so. There’s the next round looming up in front of them, the perfect opportunity to gatecrash their way in. Hyuna’s plan, ready to set into motion.
Hyuna begins to sing, softly, under her breath. “Hush, my child, gently now, go to sleep…”
Mizi flinches. All she can think of is an artificially sunny day in Anakt Garden, looking at Sua, believing so perfectly for the moment that nothing is wrong, voices rising as one, “and without a word, you’ll embrace the sea that sings…”
She thinks about kissing Hyuna, for a moment. She’d taste like cheap alcohol and Mizi just—
Mizi just wants to go home. She wants to plummet off a cliff, Sua’s hand in hers.
“What do you suppose a sea looks like?” Ivan muses.
“Probably like the lake, but, like, bigger? Way, way bigger,” Mizi decides. Ivan snickers, which turns into a yelp when Sua kicks him in the shin. He looks to Till for help, which he decidedly doesn’t get.
The sea that sings, the song says. Mizi wonders if the sound of ocean waves sounds like a song, and if she’ll ever get to hear it.
They never do find Hyuna’s body in the aftermath of the burning.
Mizi stumbles and walks away, singing softly to herself. A witch she is, and a witch she will be. The desert is not the sea, but it sounds like a whispering song. It even sounds a little bit like Sua. Hyuna would laugh if she heard that.