[Fic] The Cell - 3/3
Title: The Cell
Pairing: Zhou Mi/fem!Kyuhyun
Rating: R
Genre: AU, sexswap
Summary: Kyuhyun dreams of a life she has never experienced, and of a man who makes her question everything she knows.
***
They had been married a month and a day, carefully watched and kept apart for the perfect night, the night they were to make their child. They had had only stolen moments, too many people surrounding them, exasperating them as Zhou Mi looked at her over various heads and wistfully waving at her when she was being led away. The date of their wedding had been important, but the date they would make their child would be also.
“Surely they won’t keep us from each other after this,” Zhou Mi said, the sound of his voice low and close as he pulled the pins and decorations from her hair. It was an intimate thing, something only her mother or a servant had ever done, but it was her husband, Zhou Mi. When her hair fell, she rose, turning to him, watching strands of her hair slide through his fingers.
“If you order them, I think they will not,” Kyuhyun said, laughing a bit. “Once they know our child has been made, surely they would not mind.”
To be close to him, not just the stolen hours and moments lost in his kisses, but times like that, when he pressed above her and kissed her and made her think only of him and how they were together. She gasped, desperate as she clutched at his shoulders and stared at the dancing stars. Her eyes were blurry with want, her breath bleating out of her as his body shook hers, his hips pressing her thighs wide, the rock of them making feel like her body was twisting out of her control.
“Zhou Mi. Zhou Mi. Oh.”
If that was what being his wife was like, if that was what doing her duty and getting him a child brought her- All those times they’d stolen time together, when he pulled her into his lap until she ached for something she didn’t quite know. She knew then. It was with him, but it was within her, burning bright, and she pressed desperately up against him as she reached for that promised pleasure, for the promise in those stars. He took her, quicker, his want driving hers, and she could not even gasp as her head pressed back and her hips lifted. He rocked her, their bodies rubbing together and she keened as the pleasure darted through her.
He gasped when he felt it, the way she went tight around around him. And his groan was low, her name rumbling out of him. And she knew he spilled in her, then. She wondered if it felt the same for him, that bright bead of pleasure cresting.
“I’ve decided I like being your wife,” she told him smugly, wrapping her arms around his neck like he was some favored toy. All he did was moan a bit pitifully at her, and she smiled against his skin, laughing as he pulled from her, pulled her with him until she rested half against his chest.
“Beautiful,” he said, stroking her hair. “You undid me. I guess that’s good, so I didn’t hurt you more.”
“What is pain?” she sniffed, and then couldn’t help but tease. “It stung a bit, since you’re quite a man. But how it felt at the end was almost too much to bear. I felt like a goddess.”
“No one will tell you that you are not,” he promised her, she poked his stomach as he pressed a kiss at the corner of her mouth. “I want to spend every night with you. I want you at my side.”
It brought tears unbidden, and Kyuhyun pressed her cheek close, hearing his heartbeat begin to slow. She wanted that, too. Her husband, close and making her smile.
Her body throbbed with lingering pleasure, the stretch of him. She nuzzled against his skin and opened her eyes to the skin lit by firelight. And it was not the room of first love, but a cell, and against her cheek was Zhou Mi’s chest.
And it took only one more breath to realize that she was naked.
And she ached. Fuck, she ached. The pleasure gave way to bone-deep pains that seemed to throb as she breathed. That faded a little too, like waking to it had been enough, and when she lifted her head, thinking Zhou Mi asleep, his eyes opened. He’d been meditating maybe, or praying.
“I’m alive,” Kyuhyun observed, and his face was fierce before he cupped her cheek.
“I feared you wouldn’t be. You were so cold. So cold. Like a woman made of ice instead of alive.”
“But you warmed me?”
He nodded. “You were so cold it hurt you to be by the fire, so I took off your wet clothes and I wrapped your feet in warm blankets and used my own warmth to try and bring you back.”
“I thought I was going to die. A man… Men who looked like you took me to the woods, and I tried- I tried.”
He held her as she cried, her fingertips aching, her shoulder, her knees. Her heart. But she wasn’t back in that hillside any more, and Zhou Mi was there. She was safe. But the fear was swamping, since she could finally feel it without the fear of dying. She could have died, and never seen him again, or made it back in one piece. It could have been an hour a day, all she knew was that her face was finally dry and the warmth finally spreading through her. He’d held her, warmed her. He’d-
“There were stars above us. Not in the sky, on the ceiling. On our wedding night.”
Kyuhyun turned her head so that she could see him, felt his fingers stroke along her cheek.
“Kuixian,” he said, like looking at her was a revelation. It had to be, to her, to him. Those moments before, she remembered that as closely as if it had been yesterday. It had not been someone else in Zhou Mi’s bed but her. She was woman he’d been waiting for.
Kyuhyun still hurt, but she remembered the want of that night, echoing inside her. His prison had kept them apart, but no longer.
“Will you make me feel like a goddess again?” she pleaded, and felt him groan, the worry of a dozen lifetimes leaving him.
“Your husband will be glad to.”
When he took her to his bed, she was the one to pull him closer, sinking into the gentleness of his touches and letting pleasure edge away pain as he kissed her and learned her skin. Zhou Mi was hers. She had never been so certain, never been so sure. Being held by Zhou Mi, there in his bed after he’d loved her, made every moment of confusion and pain leading up to that make sense, have a purpose. It had all been leading to that, obstacles that she had needed to overcome to get to him. And though she was the one who still hurt, Zhou Mi was the one who grumbled when she sat up. She sat for a time, though, letting him kiss her shoulder and hold her. If she was kicked back to Seoul, she didn’t want to arrive naked, and that meant putting on the clothes he had dried for her by the fire.
“Do you feel like you finally have your wife back?” Kyuhyun teased. She hadn’t had a lover in some time, so he ought to have been proud there. Though she didn’t mention it. She could hardly tell him right then that she’d slept with other men, even if she hadn’t known she’d been married. Another time, maybe, if he ever wanted that knowledge.
The smile he gave her thrilled her, and the way he touched her shoulder. “Little by little I see more of you returning. But I will only truly be able to enjoy it, once all three of us are safe.”
They’d found each other, but they were not safe, their family not back together. Kyuhyun crawled fully clothed into his bed and could not even consider leaving, listening to the beating of his heart and holding him.
She woke to cold, lying on the stoop in front of the glass door, and Seoul continuing around her as though she’d never left. But the cold she felt wasn’t from the air. It was because she was alone.
***
It had been the longest time they had been apart, the better part of two weeks since the last time Kyuhyun had shown up beside him. Little by little, memories filtered through, the lens through which she viewed them making the city she had known so well seem almost otherworldly at times. But she continued life as she’d understood it, taking comfort in homework, in routine as she worried about when she would go back. They had not slept together again, not after that night she’d almost frozen to death, and she’d been back twice over. The hug she’d gotten so used to had been especially sweet the first time, kissing him, holding him, inhaling every familiar nuance of scent like it was part of herself. He knew she didn’t remember everything, but what they knew, it was hope, it was understanding. The scars, the memories, they all added up to one thing, and her goal hadn’t changed. She wasn’t out to save a stranger, but her own husband, and herself as well. The world she was in, with its high, winter blue sky, continued on around her like she hadn’t changed.
She didn’t dial the number in her phone for her parents any more, or worry about doing anything but keeping her head afloat, her bills paid, her grades all right. It was treading water, until she could figure out a way to stay with Zhou Mi permanently.
And she’d discovered another reason she couldn’t stay away much longer: she woke up one morning, and knew she was pregnant. The calendar she kept of her cycles, the queasiness she’d felt through the days - she knew with an instinct, even if she couldn’t remember learning of her first pregnancy. That was the other tragedy, not remembering Yina besides in flashes, not knowing where she was, how she was. The protection of her blood led them to assume she had to be alive, but that didn’t mean she was well cared for.
Kyuhyun approached the cafe near the glass door, hoping it would allow her entrance. Outside of the door, two men stood, sullen-mouthed and postured like they were looking for a fight. But they weren’t like the men she’d seen before, not with Zhou Mi’s face.
But the same or different, they were the same type of danger.
When she turned, a hand cupped her elbow, but instead of holding her back, the hand propelled her, getting her to the corner and around it and releasing her. Facing her.
There was a bright yellow gym band on one wrist, and there on his hand, a brand that was part of her name.
“Zhou Mi,” she said, and it was disbelief, but also wariness. Before the Zhou Mi she had seen in her world had no scar. Perhaps they had learned.
“Of a sort,” Zhou Mi agreed, studying her face. “I am him and he is me. But this is not my place.”
Kyuhyun shook her head. He looked so normal, jeans, a sweater. He looked like he belonged in Seoul. “I don’t understand. Don’t you live here?”
“No. I am him. I am his…his deepest longing for you, his push to find you, to protect you. I tried to find you, but this world is filled with layers, and the times we passed were full of confusion and danger. If I left you, it was to protect you. And I failed even that, more than once.”
“You saved me from the snow?”
He nodded. “For a time, I can pass through the barrier. But the man you know, he sees this in a haze. He won’t remember.”
“Then if you are not real here, then I don’t exist here either. Me, his face. Our baby? Am I his wife? Is this my place?”
Zhou Mi’s head tilted. “Does it feel like it is?”
She stared out at the traffic, shivering in the chill wind. She thought of her narrow bed, cold, of her classes, her friends. Her hand slipped over her belly, and felt a chill of a different sort to know there would be a curve there soon. Zhou Mi was waiting. He knew her to be his wife, had feared that his wife was dead. But she remembered him, remembered pieces of their life, of the way she had loved him, of the way he had shown her he loved her still.
“He loved her. Me. I don’t want to be a replacement. If I don’t remember-“
When Zhou Mi pulled her close, she breathed into his shoulder, into his warmth.
“Is this your place?” he insisted.
She clutched the cabling of his sweater and shook her head. “No. It’s with him.”
Zhou Mi sighed against her hair as though the weight of several planets had been lifted from him.
“Then you have seen at last what you ought to have all along,” he told her.
It was different to believe it, and another thing to hear it. “I am his wife.”
Zhou Mi pulled her back, his smile sweet. “He has none other.”
“And those men?”
“I fear someone suspects there is leak between this world and the one you should be in. Be cautious of going to a place where you have met with Zhou Mi before. They maybe be watching.”
“But how do I free him? When I leave through the barrier, it sends me back to this place.”
“It is a thought he knows from a book long since read. But he will remember, if you tell him that the barriers are weak to steel,” he whispered. “Goodbye, Kuixian. See him soon.”
And she was left holding only air.
***
If Kyuhyun’s legs were shaking, gripping her purse every time that she went out after meeting with the Zhou Mi who’d appeared in her world, she couldn’t even have blamed herself. She felt like she was in some kind of movie, watching for someone watching her, following her. On his advice, she stayed away from the places she’d fallen through, with the exception of her own apartment. But lying in the dark and waiting, hoping to fall some kind of magic hole wasn’t helping her to sleep, and the baby she sheltered was sapping the energy from her more than ever. She was afraid to visit a doctor, afraid almost to search for information. All she could do was eat well, sleep well, supplement her diet, go about her life, and wait.
And wait.
But the glimmer, the glimpse of a fire-lit bed and the scent of wood, it pulled her from fearful scanning, and she ran for it, dodging a child and a business man and not even stopping to wonder if there was ice still on the sidewalk. The portal had opened against the side of a building, some kind of doughnut shop, and she almost squealed, diving, rolling onto the bed and coming to a halt, panting, her nose inches from the wall.
It was hard to miss that much commotion, so she wasn’t surprised to see Zhou Mi standing from where he’d been sitting on the trunk by the fire.
“Kuixian!”
She felt almost dizzy when she stood, leaning into him as Zhou Mi enfolded her, and a sob choking her as he pressed kisses against her hair.
“Are you okay?” he asked, but she wouldn’t let him pull her back, just holding onto him him tighter as she nodded and struggled to breathe, getting control of her dizziness first, and her crying second. It was the stress, or the adrenaline, or the hormones, or all three, but the tears were still streaming down her cheeks as she squeezed him, and let out a long, shuddering exhale as he held her, tense and worried.
“I’m okay,” she said, knowing he needed to hear it. “It’s just been a while, and I missed you. I have so much to tell you.”
Her voice broke a few times while she talked, and he made a sound, cuddling her, breathing her in.
“I missed you. I miss you every moment,” Zhou Mi said. “Every time you leave, it’s worse. You’re sure, no one tried to hurt you?”
“No, but I think someone might be watching in the other world.” She had to sit, and he sat with her, holding her hand and staying close but still giving her the space to breathe. There was too much news to share. The baby. The hint she had been given at how they could possibly escape Zhou Mi’s prison. She took the cloth he offered, and dried her face, exhaling as she squeezed his hand. “But I’ll tell you about that after. I have news. Good news.”
Zhou Mi so immediately perked up at the thought of good news, of anything good, that she almost laughed, her heart twisting with how dear he was, how happy and afraid the news made her at the same time. She took his hand that she was holding and spread it against her belly, looking at him, smiling slowly as she let him begin to understand. He gland down at his hand, and up at her. And his eyes went wide, lips parting.
“A child? But-“
“We only had that one night,” she said, almost hiccuping as she confirmed it. “But it was enough.”
It had always been enough. Kyuhyun lifted the cloth to let him feel, not that there was much to feel, and looked down, puzzled, as he traced what seemed like odd lines against her skin.
No, not lines. Stretch marks, etched into her skin from a pregnancy that when she had first met him she would have sworn had been someone else’s, marks on her skin that she had not seen a week or a year ago. Another proof, if they had needed one. Another window to who she really was.
“I may have new ones,” she warned about the stretch marks, and he shook his head, bumping his forehead against hers and smiling fit to break his face.
“I will love every one of them, my love Kuixian.” It was her he held, gently kissing her neck and rocking her. “I am so happy. This child is just another reason for us to be together, truly, and escape this place. For us, and Yina, too.”
Kyuhyun gripped the cloth along his back and pulled him, needing to see his face.
“You remember when I had seen you before in the other world? Not when it was someone trying to attack me, but before that. I saw him - you - again. He had the scar on his hand.”
She told him everything she’d been told, how it was almost a projection of himself, his worry for her, like Zhou Mi’s subconscious was reaching out in a dream.
“What does steel have to do with magic?” Kyuhyun asked, remembering her encounter.
“Steel? Nothing that I know of. It makes a fine knife, and can be used for preparation.”
“But what of a barrier? Can it counter it? Cut through it?”
Kyuhyun reached for her purse, dragging it closer. Not an hour after encountering the man who had looked like Zhou Mi, she’d bought a knife. It was for a kitchen, and it was still in its box, but it was steel, the box proudly proclaimed. It was steel, and like Zhou Mi, it had been the first thing besides a pan she had thought of. And she couldn’t have imagined carrying around a frying pan or a pot in her purse.
“Steel,” he said softly. “Steel can cut. Steel can… Steel can interrupt!”
Kyuhyun’s head swam as Zhou Mi spoke, listing books she’d never heard of, diagramming in the air almost. But she grasped the points she needed out of it, not knowing magical theory or whatever he had studied. The magical barriers, weak to steel, could be interrupted. Not stopped, but perhaps enough to where they could get beyond the one at the door to see what, and who, was beyond it.
But there was the unknown, too, as they stared at the barrier, side by side. She had the knife in her hand, rubbing her thumb over the edge of the handle, and she looked to Zhou Mi.
“Where to you think it’s best to try it?”
The middle made sense, but so did the corner. She didn’t know if it was a sheet of a barrier, or if it was cast in some sort of a circuit.
“A corner,” Zhou Mi mused. “If we can turn the blade, it might… I hope it might create a hole some way.”
A path.
But Kyuhyun held the knife away when he reached for it. “If this doesn’t work, you get burned. If it doesn’t work for me, I just end up going back to the other world. I should do it.”
“But-“ Zhou Mi paused, frowning.
“It can’t hurt me. Or the baby. We know that.” She moved closer until she could press her lips to the softness of his, and still he did not touch her.
“Zhou Mi?”
“I just thought I should. You’ll be safer if you stay here.”
“I have come this far. I can help. I won’t be locked away in this cell where they can keep me if something happens to you.”
She could see that thought hadn’t really occurred to him, and he grimaced. “You’re right. I didn’t think of that. When they captured me before, we were apart. Maybe being together is the difference.”
“Plus, you can’t hold the knife and go through, too. One of us has to stay on this side, at least at first.” Her first look at the world outside of Zhou Mi’s cell. She looked down at herself. Her sweater, her jeans. “This isn’t how women here dress, is it?”
He gave her a thoughtful eye. “No. We can at least make you blend in more.”
All it took was a robe, one she had seen Zhou Mi wear after he had climbed out of bed. It wasn’t full length, so it didn’t swamp her, but she felt like she wouldn’t make the eyeballs fall out of anyone who saw her - if anyone saw her. “Are you ready?”
Zhou Mi touched her then, the sweet warmth of his palm cupping her cheek just before he kissed her. And Kyuhyun braced herself with her free hand, clutching at his side and kissing back in that desperate kiss.
“I love you,” Zhou Mi said, and his voice was rough with emotion.
“I- Me, too. Together,” she said.
She loved him. It had bubbled up before, but it choked her then, and she turned from him and raised the knife, holding it steady in both hands as she aimed for the corner of the barrier.
She half expected a shock, like an electrical current. But there was none. She expected resistance, and there was none. At least, not at first. Her eyes widened as the barrier wavered, and in a swath wider than her head, disappeared. And the tip of her knife thudded against something solid. Wood.
A door.
It felt like she was shaking as she twisted the knife, turning it millimeter by millimeter and widening the surface of it. One way made the gap in the barrier grow smaller, but turning the other way, it grew, inch by precious inch, extending from the top all the way to the floor like the magic was coursing down from the top and interrupted in its path. It was wide enough, with care, for either of them to go through.
“Try the door handle,” Kyuhyun said, needing to know if there was another thing holding them back.
It was a simple lift and lock mechanism, and when Zhou Mi pulled, it gave, swinging the door outward so that they could see out into what looked like a dim hallway beyond.
For a moment, their eyes met, and Zhou Mi nodded, inhaling and turning sideways to the door. Step by step, he slide through the gap as Kyuhyun tried not to move, and hardly to breathe. It felt like her whole body sagged as Zhou Mi pushed through the door, looking both ways down the hallway before reaching up from his side.
“I have it,” he assured her, and slowly, she let the knife go, letting him hold it, slipping through the gap and hardly believing she’d gotten beyond it instead of just being kicked back to Seoul. She’d half thought she could, half feared she couldn’t. With a flick of his wrist, Zhou Mi pulled the knife, and the barrier fused whole, leaving them on the other side with the open door.
“Do you know this place?” she whispered, and watched him shake his head.
“I have never seen it before. It’s not our home.”
It was dark enough that it could not have been daytime, or not if there were any windows. Kyuhyun drew the robe tighter around her, cooler in the hall than it was in the room with the fire. But she stayed close by Zhou Mi’s side as they peeked into a room filled with pots and a dying cooking fire but empty.
They’d almost reached the end of the long corridor when Kyuhyun inhaled, steps sounding clearly ahead of them.
“Stay back,” she whispered. “Maybe I can pretend to have escaped.”
Zhou Mi, and even she, didn’t know where she had been kept. But Zhou Mi had the knife, and she could distract whoever it was approaching them, but not if they both were spotted. It gave Zhou Mi little time to argue, but his eyes were sharp with caution, concern. She had saved herself from a man choking her once, and she knew Zhou Mi would be there, that time.
So she put her hand to her head and her eyes were quick, catching sight of the man limping toward her.
“Oh…Oh, hello?”
“My lady!” The man almost sounded scared, not angry, hanging back from her instead of aggressively approaching her. “You’re awake?”
She could feel Zhou Mi lurking around the corner, waiting if there was any trouble. At least she did not look utterly out of place in the lounging robe, but her hair was loose and she knew she could not pass as normal, not with the shock on the man’s face in front of her. Awake, yes. She could play that.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she deliberately swayed. “No one was there? I’m still so tired. Do you know where…”
“I’ll take you back, my lady. Follow me.”
She nodded, smiling, ambling along like she didn’t really know what was going on as she curled her fingers behind her back, urging Zhou Mi to follow. The room they entered was not barred by magic, but a thick wooden door with a simple lock. In it were two beds, of a sort. They were narrow, one larger than the other. And Kyuhyun inhaled, to see what looked like herself lying beneath a shimmering barrier.
“No, how is that possible,” the man said, looking between the bed and her.
Kyuhyun didn’t have a chance to respond before Zhou Mi pulled the man’s head into the doorframe, stunning him as Kyuhyun pulled the belt from her robe so that he could be bound. A cloth from Zhou Mi’s pocket made a gag, and the man moaned in the corner they put him in. But she didn’t really care, going to the magical barrier over the still woman and wanting to scream, or vomit, she didn’t know which. It was her face, still and asleep. Her face.
“Then…she and I were not the same person,” Kyuhyun said, and even then it felt like some kind of lie as she reached to touch her own belly. She just didn’t understand how things could have gone so wrong, how they both could have been so misled.
“I don’t understand,” Zhou Mi said.
She did. She knew that Zhou Mi had found his wife, still and perfect in her clothes. Still. Too still.
Kyuhyun’s eyes studied the woman’s face, frantic. Maybe too perfect.
“Can you stop this magic?”
“I can’t. Maybe the steel?”
Maybe. Zhou Mi tried, pressing the knife in with carefully studied hand. It caused a rift to form, just like in the door, one large enough to fit her hand through. It had to be her, to touch first. Even if the woman in front of them was Zhou Mi’s wife, she had Kyuhyun’s face, and she was noticeably not pregnant. She didn’t know if it was some kind of law, like they couldn’t exist in the same space, if she touched and there were two of them. But her breath held as she touched the still arm, expecting warmth.
The woman’s skin crackled beneath her fingertips, and Kyuhyun almost shrieked, almost lifted her hand into the barrier as Zhou Mi jumped beside her. But it had not just crackled, but cracked. A fine line splitting the smooth surface, one that her nails caught in as she dragged her fingertips against it. Beneath, it was not flesh or bone or carnage, but straw covered in fine plaster and paint. Beneath the sleeve of the dress she wore, the plaster stopped, only straw bound to look like a body.
“She’s not real,” Kyuhyun said, stating the obvious that Zhou Mi could also see. “She’s not real.”
That meant- That meant…
Zhou Mi nudged her to the side once her hand was free of the barrier, reaching in himself and confirming what his eyes were telling him. He tugged the sleeve down, pressing the plaster back together and leaving it almost exactly as they had found it.
“Why did you do that?” she asked, when he had pulled back the knife.
“If they believe you are in here, sleeping, then I want them to believe that until we want them to know differently,” Zhou Mi said.
It made sense, and she almost melted against his chest, a moment stolen as she pulled herself back together. They hadn’t been wrong, and he was warm, and real, whispering against her. A word. Beloved. His wife, his only wife. And she turned her head, staring at the bed beside the straw woman’s. Smaller, the size of a child. But it was empty.
Kyuhyun met Zhou Mi’s eyes, and she moved to the man, pulling the cloth out of his mouth, and he stared at them both like he’d seen a ghost.
“Where is the child?” she demanded.
“My lord,” he babble, staring at Zhou Mi. “My lord, we didn’t have a choice. They made us- They made us.”
The man was weeping, his voice going so small, so thin, and Zhou Mi gripped his hair, forcing his head up so that he looked at him.
“Made you what? Help them take over this place? Help them lock us up?”
“Yes, yes. All of it. They told us you’d gone mad, that… That you’d tried to burn the village, and that you’d made my lady go along with it. They said-“
“The child?”
“She was innocent. But she had to be watched, in case she was like you,” he said, and whimpered when Zhou Mi shook him. “She’s not here! She’s not here, but she’s safe. You don’t look mad, my lord.”
“They nearly made me so,” Zhou Mi said. “They locked me away alone without company or comfort, and told me my wife and child were dead, the village burned. And all for what? For power? Revenge?”
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
They let him cry for a while, softly, as they looked at each other. She didn’t know what they could do, what they should do. Finding Yina was one of the first things, but if she was safe, that was what was important for right then. Kyuhyun walked to the other side of Zhou Mi and sat, holding his hand as Zhou Mi asked the man everything, soldiers, servants, where people were. How many people there were who had overthrown them.
“I am the only one here. A woman comes in the morning with food for the day, and once a week, sometimes two, the man who keeps the magic arrives. He makes sure the barriers are secure on you both.” And the man looked to the plaster image of Kyuhyun in the gleaming barrier.
“She isn’t real,” Kyuhyun said. “We aren’t magic, or a danger. Has your life been improved by this man, this magician?”
The man shook his head. “They seek to open a mine. All able men are working, forced to. I cannot work the mine, so they set me to guard, to make sure none discover this place.”
“Where are we? I know it’s above the village,” Zhou Mi asked.
“Above? No, my lord, we are in a farmer’s field, set into the earth.”
Kyuhyun knew why Zhou Mi asked some of it, if they could overtake their captors, take back the place they were held in or their house, Zhou Mi’s land, his people. She also knew he asked in case it was hopeless, at least right then, if they had to find their child and flee in hopes that they would be able to fight again another day. The option to pretend they could not get out while making a plan was no longer an option because they had been discovered by the man in front of them.
So it came down to the most important question of their lives.
“Will you help us?”
***
There were no other magic barriers to hinder escape, but that was the smallest part of their worry. If the schedule held, the man who orchestrated their prison would be there the next day. To get out, to get away, that was easy. To take back their home, a home Kyuhyun still only vaguely could remember, it was more than just walking away. But the man had been truthful. When they lifted the door, it was to an empty field, and the smoke they saw was the smoke of fires of a village nearing nighttime. If they left, it would have to be under the cover of dark, anyway, and it was a novelty for Zhou Mi to be able to walk further than the length of his room, so they walked together, her hand tucked in his as they paced the narrowness of their confines. Even then, it wasn’t much.
“People have mined the hill in small ways for decades,” Zhou Mi mused. “But to force people to work that ground… It is dangerous, sometimes slick and unstable. Those men, most of them are farmers, craftsmen. To take them away from that is to risk them being unable to feed their families. Gold does not satisfy a belly.”
“The greed of it does,” she said, and Zhou Mi chuckled, stopping and turning to her, holding her closer.
“It seems unreal to be out of that room, to talk with you. We’re getting closer.” And Zhou Mi exhaled. “And then I remember there’s another child to think of, and our little one out there, waiting for us.”
“We’ve taken the first step,” Kyuhyun murmured, . They could not rush ahead, not when there were so many unknowns. But though Zhou Mi could have walked for hours, she had begun to tire, and she left him to talk to their guard so that she could rest. But what drew her was the room with the bed and the barrier over it, like some kind of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. She looked, and she saw herself, as though in a mirror. The hair was no different, the face. Only the clothes, and the fact that the woman lying there was perfect, asleep. Tired, maybe. Maybe she looked just as tired.
“You are Kuixian,” Kyuhyun said, and had to laugh at herself then. “You are Kuixian, but so am I. I’m glad you’re not real. We’re just waiting for me to remember.”
She tried. She tried so hard, looking at their surroundings, at Zhou Mi’s hands, as though she could divine it.
“But I can’t. I don’t remember him fully, I don’t remember your life- Our life! Just pieces of it. Our lives were different, but…I know it’s in me somewhere.” In her, the proof of their relationship in so many ways, like when she pressed against the dark cloth covering her belly. There was that curve, the one she knew when she pressed her hand to be sure of herself. She could hallucinate many things, but not that. And she imagined the woman lying their scolding her that there was only one child who grew, the one that Zhou Mi helped her make. His wife.
“I know they tried to rip me me from this world, but they forgot that what binds me here is stronger. I’ll remember, and remember my family, my child. I’ll free us.” Not the woman made of plaster and straw, but herself. Zhou Mi. “I’m not some shell of a body. I am only the echo of the woman they sent away, but I don’t know how I will live with two lives in one head. But that other life, without my family there, it grows more and more like a dream.”
Like the dream it was. Once, Zhou Mi was the dream, but no longer. He was what was real, solid, true. The tall buildings and fast-paced life felt empty. It was just a different kind of a prison, one she would not have thought to escape, and to find herself there, looking at a construct meant to resemble herself, in a prison maybe they had made to keep her. She shed those things, her driving lessons, her subway card, elevators. She shed them like they were weights falling off of her, as tears began to stream down her cheeks. The embroidery on that sleeve, she knew it as from her mother’s hand, as well as she remembered walking in the forest and hearing the sound of her mother’s laughter.
“Zhou Mi! Zhou Mi!”
Kyuhyun swallowed hard, her voice so choked, and he all but leapt for her when he appeared in the doorway.
“Kuixian! What’s wrong?”
Her husband. Kyuhyun reached for him and rubbed at a white spot on Zhou Mi’s collar. It bloomed like a small flower and the smile bloomed with it.
“This reminds me of the first time you brought me a flower. I think you meant to charm me,” she said, laughing a little. “But it was this tiny little white thing, already starting to wilt because you’d carried it in your saddlebag. But you gave it like it had been blessed somewhere. It did charm me. You were right.”
Zhou Mi was so still against her, that at first she did not notice. But Kyuhyun’s eyes widened.
“You gave me a garden on our wedding day,” she said, meeting his eyes. “When you’d leave early, you put flowers beside my pillow to greet me. You let your dog sit on you like a child, and- Zhou Mi.“
She gulped in air, but he had already gathered her in, weeping against the skin of her neck as they clung to each other. He crooned at her softly, words she did not know, had never known. They had come together like two storms, merging, uniting, stronger for it. She remembered. She remembered.
“My Kuixian.”
“They cast me out,” she told him. “They locked me away and locked away my memories of you, of myself, of this place. I woke…I woke to a false life, to a false body that began to fall away the longer I was here. We vowed… We vowed that no magic would part us. The protection that you put on me was too strong. They could not kill me, only change me. I have lived a life twice over. The life…it was good.”
There had been no pain, no deep worries. No concern for a child, or obligations of a marriage. She’d been free, free to study, to live.
“I’m glad the life they gave you wasn’t like this one. You were always so confused when you came here, this place so strange. I thought I had lost you to a place I couldn’t understand.”
He had to wonder, if not then, then at some point, if she wished she could have stayed ignorant of what she’d left behind.
“I was content there, until I remembered- I would not trade that life for you. I understand finally, how we came to meet again. The entire scope of my world was your prison cell.”
Zhou Mi frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“The barrier would not burn me because I did not leave through it. It only passed me back to my prison, living my life apart from you, but never truly far from you. We lived apart, but together. When I saw a doorway to your world, I saw your cell. Because I was already there.”
“Then all this time-“
“They kept us together, but not close enough to touch. How clever they must have felt, knowing they imprisoned you with your wife, but still kept you from her.
“But their prison was not perfect.”
“Maybe they grew too complacent, or keeping us together undid it. I don’t know. But maybe we can use that to fight him. The scars, the wounds I took in that world, they carried with me. Perhaps we can lure him somehow?”
Zhou Mi shook his head. “If we wait for him to come here, how do we fight him without any weapons, and without magic like he has?”
“Maybe we don’t fight him here. This world has magic. The one I was held in doesn’t.”
“But I could not go with you,” Zhou Mi said.
“We can use the weapon he created against him,” Kyuhyun said, squeezing his arms. “I’m almost sure of it. He may have made that world, but I know it better. Do you doubt me?”
“I trust no one more. But the thought of losing you again-“
“We could leave. We could run, find Yina and never see this place again. But the people, they must dream, too. Their prison is just as real as ours, but it’s not one they can escape without help.”
It was an impossible decision for Zhou Mi, perhaps, but his pride in her, and love for her shone too brightly then to see how torn he was to have to choose between his people and the safety of his wife, but Kyuhyun had never been more sure. If this man came to kill her in the guise of Zhou Mi and thought that would sway her, he did not know her. No, he did not know them. And he didn’t know what would be waiting for him.
***
Waiting was the hardest part. They sheltered together outside of Zhou Mi’s cell, talking, dozing, and Kyuhyun half afraid she would be yanked back before she was ready. They had a plan in place, in case that happened, but Zhou Mi held her hand as though that would keep her from leaving him. And maybe, also hoping he would come up with a new plan, one that didn’t involve putting Kyuhyun in danger. If they had weapons beyond knives, if they had swords, magic beyond Zhou Mi’s healing, maybe they could have found a way. Once he knew his prison had failed, he would send something to attack her, or go himself. Either way, a magician deep in use of power would be vulnerable, either to her or to Zhou Mi. So they attacked from within, and without, though she knew if Zhou Mi could have willed himself to go with her, he would have. And when morning dawned, they helped each other back into the cell, meeting the eyes of the servant who would keep their secret until it was time.
Zhou Mi pressed kisses against her hair, and Kyuhyun thought back to those times, researching about Zhou Mi, thinking of him, talking of him. When it seemed like someone had known, like someone could read her thoughts and was monitoring what she was doing. It had felt like paranoia, then, but she felt it more with a certainty - when she had been trying to remember, their captor had tried to knock her into line.
At a knock on the outer door, indicating their captor had arrived, Kyuhyun squeezed Zhou Mi’s hand.
“I love you,” she said, and walked into the barrier. There were the tingles, as she emerged through the glass door, but she did not stumble that time. No one paid her any mind, and Kyuhyun began to walk.
“My name is Cho Kyuhyun, and my husband is Zhou Mi. Have you seen him? We live in a village in another world,” Kyuhyun told a lady she grabbed. That lady shook her off and kept walking, and Kyuhyun turned to a man, another man, a child, until people were staring at her as she paced, and her words grew louder, and louder.
A man stepped out from the crowd with Zhou Mi’s face, and she glanced at his hands and laughed.
“Now that I know who I am and where I belong, do you think you can fool me?” Kyuhyun asked. “Would you like to bed me like that to tell my husband you’ve had me? This prison has failed you. Or is it you, the one who kept me here. Or some underling come to do his bidding.”
Perhaps his own pride would draw him out.
The features melted into someone unfamiliar, a face she knew, barely. A trader? Perhaps. Someone who had come to do business, to gain wealth at all costs. Someone who had no love for her, or for Zhou Mi.
“There is nothing of him here in this world. You should never have remembered.”
Kyuhyun shook her head, fondling the knife handle in her purse. “I can’t say it was love that made me remember. But perhaps it was your weakness, your oversight. Trying to frighten me into giving up, it did not work. But I barely know you. Why would you do this to us, to the people?”
“What do you do with someone who can’t be killed, or exiled, or reasoned with?”
“And did the gold buy you reason? You should have killed me,” she said, and she shook off the stares of the passersby as she shouted.
“If only I could have. Zhou Mi was locked away to wither while his wife lived a life without him, fucking whomever she wanted. You could have grown old and died here.”
“That I didn’t means you did not do well enough to distract me. And you were too obvious. I asked about Zhou Mi, and you sent one to me. Attacked me. When you saw your hold on me was fading, you tried to choke me, and freeze me.”
He actually laughed. “This may be just a dream, but the consequences are real.”
“Yes. All my wounds were real in both places.” He glanced at her belly. That too.
“And he still found a way to put another runt in you. No, this time the prison will hold you both.”
It was not wind that chilled her when he started toward her.
“Please,” she begged, the brick rough against the back of her coat. “Please! Think of the child. You can remove my memories again! Zhou Mi-“
“He won’t be there to save you, not this time. His prison will not give him up so easily. But he can relive the death of your memories of him. He can dream of avenging you, even though he has no chance of it. Maybe it was what I should have done to start. To break him.”
Kyuhyun drew herself up, made herself solid. And when the man reached for her, she gripped the rubber and plastic and thrust it out and up into his belly.
The blade passing through the cloth had more resistance at first than it did sinking into his body. When she thought she had it far enough, she jammed her hands up harder. Blood seeped through the hole in the bag and she pulled the blade back, pushing herself away as he brought both hands to his belly.
“The wounds here are real,” she said, and her voice shook. “You will not harm me, or Zhou Mi, or our children any more. Or the village. How could you.”
“You-“
And yet still, she could not just leave him there to die, not like that.
“If you release this magic and take us back, maybe there is a way to save you.”
“You fool,” he said, and his grin was as dark as his words. “You said it yourself. What happens here is real. When I die, this world will not cease, but seal itself. There is no magic that would undo it. You will be trapped here, and for you there will be no escape. He may have his freedom now, but not you.”
He laughed, sputtering with it as red colored his lips.
No. It was supposed to free her, not trap her. With Zhou Mi alive and still in his cell, with Kyuhyun being able to escape, she could have found another way. At least they could have been together. But if she were there for the rest of her life? Kyuhyun looked around her, saw the people on the sidewalk staring at her. Not staring as though they were horrified that she’d just stabbed her attacker, but curious, and a little boy turned, looked toward the road.
She had to go. She could almost feel the fire, drafting at her from either side, the sky moving, warping, people lining up on either side like some kind of a procession to watch her go. All she knew was where the door was, passing the bakery, the entrance for the upper level movie theater, the subway. She could just see the coffee shop’s sign through the crowd watching her, and she willed the bastard to keep breathing as she grasped the door handle of the gleaming glass door and pulled.
It held firm.
“No!” she shouted at it, rattling it back and forth, the millimeter it would move as though it was locked tight and almost frozen. “No, I can’t stay here. Please!”
Zhou Mi was waiting for her. Their life together was waiting.
“Please,” she begged, and looked, desperate for a portal to open, something, anything that would take her back. Above her, clouds boiled, and she knew the time was short.
A hand pressed over hers on the handle. The little boy she’d seen. A second hand, an old woman to her side. A fourth hand, fifteen, a hundred, and her voice was drowned by theirs as they surged around her until the glass of the door showed her frantic face in perfect reflection and began to bow inward. It was not a world of her creation, but it was her world. And the handle, it began to melt like heated chocolate, dripping down her fingers and leaving it impossible to grip. The door was leaving. It was going, and it was her only way out.
The shouts around her became screams, and the hands pressing hers were shoves against her back, her shoulders, and the glass shimmered, wavered, shuddered.
Shattered.
Kyuhyun screamed into the dark, the single light wavering in the distance as glass shards scraped against her skin and the hands shoving her became shadows pulling at her, ripping at her clothes until she cried out, blood slicking down her palms, stinging in her eyes. The pain exploded in her knees, and her hand scraped against wood just before the rest of her body bounced down after, her hip, her ribs, her skin bare and cold. Kyuhyun shook, her eyes tightly closed as she tried to curl in on herself.
The screaming had stopped but she couldn’t hear anything over her shallow breaths and the thundering of her heart. And she was afraid, so afraid of what she’d see when she opened her eyes. She didn’t want to know, couldn’t bear to know.
“Kuixian.”
Zhou Mi. But there’d been one of those, too, in that other place. If she opened her eyes, she didn’t know if she was going to see a wall, brick and lit by a sun in some mockery of another world, or a smooth bare wall of a cell.
“Kuixian, I’ve got you.”
A blanket covered her, glass falling from around her to puddle like water on the floor as he lifted her and carried her, settling her warm against him in front of the crackle of a fire.
The fire.
Kyuhyun jerked, her eyes opening as she stared at the fire, at Zhou Mi.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, cupping her face.
“Zhou Mi.”
He nodded, staring at her like she was just going to burst into flames in front of him. She looked beyond him, and where the barrier had been, there was only a door. And behind them, the barrier that had taunted Zhou Mi with his ruined village, it was only a wall.
“He’s dead!” she blurted. “I killed him. And he said, if he died there, the world would seal and I could never get back. I stabbed him, and I ran. And the door wouldn’t let me in. There were screams, and-“
Pain. So much pain.
“You’re here now. You’re here,” he said. He murmured soft things, until her trembles began to slow and she could sit up on her own so that he could wipe the blood from her skin. She could see what he was thinking, that he’d let her go alone, and she’d been hurt. And thinking of him instead of the fear that still threatened to choke her was easier.
“They are just a few cuts,” she said, touching near one near her eyebrow that had bled so much, and the scrapes and tiny cuts on her hands. She’d have bruises from her fall, and she slid a wrapped hand against her belly. There was no pain there, at least. She knew what she needed was rest, and to look on Zhou Mi’s face just a little longer to reassure herself that she was truly there. Her hand covered his, covering the brand he’d burned there to protect her and leaned her head into his shoulder.
“I need to see Yina. I need to see my baby,” Kyuhyun wavered, and Zhou Mi nodded, crooned, held her until the tears stopped, until the numbness did.
But her hands were still shaking when she stripped the clothes from the straw and plaster effigy of herself, dressing in her own clothes and picking out tiny bits of straw. It made her smile, to see the modicum of relaxation that crossed Zhou Mi’s face to see her like that. They had found each other and killed their captor. That was only a first step.
***
Neither of them were dressed for the cold when the cover of dark came, and they scrambled up ladder that led to field above. They would not wait below even if it was chilled, and the only extra cloak was wrapped around Kyuhyun’s shoulders. At least above they could run, and Zhou Mi stared toward the lights of village fires, exhaling his relief as he held Kyuhyun against him. The man who had helped them had gone for a cart, for a weapon if he could find one, and they waited together.
“Even once I knew the village stood, I’m glad to see it,” Zhou Mi said.
“This winter must be a hard one for them. Do you think they used all the food that was stored?”
“I hope not, or the wait for spring will be longer than I imagine. I can’t even tell by the food I was brought, because it was not anything of note. Soups and gruels. We’ll find a way to feed everyone until spring.”
Spring, true spring with new growth, could have been as much as a month away.
“We’ll go to your parents first,” Zhou Mi said. “I want to be sure they’re okay, but they also may have news, as well as…”
Zhou Mi leaned his head against hers and she could almost imagine what was going through his head. That her parents would be some source of comfort and connection for her, something beyond him. But also protection, in the instance that he would need to leave her. Though he had to know he would have a fight on his hands if he tried to go off without her.
“Even if our helper didn’t know where Yina was, I can’t help but wonder since he had heard she had been placed with family. My family is dead, so your parents are all I can think of.”
At least they knew she was alive. The protection of Zhou Mi’s blood assured them of that, but to know that Yina was with someone who would protect and love her, it was almost more than Kyuhyun could have hoped. Had Yina been born a boy, perhaps things would have been different. But when she grew, she could have been useful. To protect her, it made sense, in way, because placing a baby with a village woman and giving her the burden of an extra mouth to feed and the possibility of Yina growing up without a way to be useful.
The sound of the cart approaching soothed them both, and Zhou Mi took the sword from the back for a moment, holding it in his hand like it had been parted from his body for far too long. But he gave, boosting her into the back and covering her with the rough cloth to hide them both as they traveled toward the home of her parents. It was the anticipation of seeing her family, the worry of not knowing if Yina would be there, the cold, that kept her from fully relaxing. They had killed only one man, but there could be a number more.
“I think you feel more complete with a sword at your side than you do with me,” Kyuhyun teased, and Zhou Mi’s arm wrapped tighter around her, huffing a laugh as he kissed her neck.
“In different ways. They’ll make songs about your bravery.”
Kyuhyun didn’t need songs. And her whole body froze at the sound of a creaking board, a bridge, one that led to the home of her parents.
“Shh, shh, wait until it’s safe,” Zhou Mi whispered, when she tried to sit up. They could have no idea who would be watching. She strained, barely breathing, listening for the sound of voices after the cart had stopped. All she heard was a knock, and a quiet murmuring.
“My lord, it’s safe!”
Zhou Mi’s feet just barely met the ground before hers did, and their steps were in sync as they rounded the cart. There, lit by fire from within, was a figure she knew so well, and she broke into a run.
“Mama,” Kyuhyun said, and the tears threatened again as her mother folded her close, soothing her.
There were too many words spilling, of her parents being told she was dead, of them not being able to believe it.
“Yina?” Kyuhyun whispered, hardly daring, but needing to know.
Her mother seized her hand and pulled her inside, and to the side of a small mattress, much like the one she had slept in as a child. There, a girl of about a year’s age slept on her back, deeply asleep with her dark hair tousled on the pillow.
“Zhou Mi,” Kyuhyun said, her voice already choked with tears as she gently lifted their sleeping daughter, and Yina stirred only a little, curling into her and settling into sleep as Zhou Mi’s arms folded around both of them. She looked up at her mother, smiling in such a heartbreaking way at them. “Mama. Thank you.”
“I never thought I would see you with her again,” her mother said, stroking Kyuhyun’s hair and giving them that moment, with Zhou Mi’s own tears falling onto her shoulder.
“She’s okay,” he said, and repeated it, stroking Yina’s back and touching her cheek as to assure himself that she was real.
Zhou Mi had said he would not believe until they were all together, and finally, finally they were. She looked up to see her parents embracing, saw tears in her father’s eyes and it was too much. It was all too much, as she looked back down. Kyuhyun was so enthralled by tracing the little mark on Yina’s cheek that she knew so well, the curve of her ear that was so like Zhou Mi’s, that she barely heard the knock on the door, only realizing when Zhou Mi turned to help to check with his sword in hand.
“Kuixian,” Zhou Mi called, and Kyuhyun turned, leaning for a long moment against her father’s side, before going to Zhou Mi.
And Kyuhyun saw why Zhou Mi had called to her, because outside the door, people had begun to gather, with more approaching. She saw a man she knew, a farmer, a blacksmith, wives, and teenagers, some with babes in arm just as she stood there staring back at them, and more just beyond them. Kyuhyun shivered with a chill when Zhou Mi extended his hand and shook the hand of the blacksmith, touching shoulders, greeting people he knew. His people. A little whisper had spread, it seemed, when the cart had been retrieved, and the village had discovered that their leader was back. They built fires, made food, planned, and talked, and schemed, until the sun rose and long beyond Kyuhyun’s body could endure. She slept beside her mother, with the promise of their baby still sleeping inside of her and Yina within arm’s reach. She woke to Yina in Zhou Mi’s arms, with Zhou Mi, exhausted and pleased, smiling down at her. They would take back their home, and help their people.
“I love you,” she said, to both of them, and his smile made the little girl in his arms beam at him. Enthralled, of course. Maybe she had forgotten them, after so many months apart, but they would all remember, together. She had found her family, and her home. Zhou Mi needed her then, perhaps more than ever, to hear his worries, and guide his thoughts, and fight for their people again at his side. She guarded his sleep almost as jealously as she did her own, kissing him and easing him into a rest that drew some of the worry for food from him. She’d seen his face almost devoid of hope, but not then, not when they were working together to take back their future.
Still, there was a worry in Kyuhyun’s mind as she loved her daughter and settled again into the world she had been born to, that she would miss the carefree days, the studying, the bustle of a city’s life. But each night, the memories of the world she had been trapped away in faded a little more, as all dreams should.
***
Pairing: Zhou Mi/fem!Kyuhyun
Rating: R
Genre: AU, sexswap
Summary: Kyuhyun dreams of a life she has never experienced, and of a man who makes her question everything she knows.
***
They had been married a month and a day, carefully watched and kept apart for the perfect night, the night they were to make their child. They had had only stolen moments, too many people surrounding them, exasperating them as Zhou Mi looked at her over various heads and wistfully waving at her when she was being led away. The date of their wedding had been important, but the date they would make their child would be also.
“Surely they won’t keep us from each other after this,” Zhou Mi said, the sound of his voice low and close as he pulled the pins and decorations from her hair. It was an intimate thing, something only her mother or a servant had ever done, but it was her husband, Zhou Mi. When her hair fell, she rose, turning to him, watching strands of her hair slide through his fingers.
“If you order them, I think they will not,” Kyuhyun said, laughing a bit. “Once they know our child has been made, surely they would not mind.”
To be close to him, not just the stolen hours and moments lost in his kisses, but times like that, when he pressed above her and kissed her and made her think only of him and how they were together. She gasped, desperate as she clutched at his shoulders and stared at the dancing stars. Her eyes were blurry with want, her breath bleating out of her as his body shook hers, his hips pressing her thighs wide, the rock of them making feel like her body was twisting out of her control.
“Zhou Mi. Zhou Mi. Oh.”
If that was what being his wife was like, if that was what doing her duty and getting him a child brought her- All those times they’d stolen time together, when he pulled her into his lap until she ached for something she didn’t quite know. She knew then. It was with him, but it was within her, burning bright, and she pressed desperately up against him as she reached for that promised pleasure, for the promise in those stars. He took her, quicker, his want driving hers, and she could not even gasp as her head pressed back and her hips lifted. He rocked her, their bodies rubbing together and she keened as the pleasure darted through her.
He gasped when he felt it, the way she went tight around around him. And his groan was low, her name rumbling out of him. And she knew he spilled in her, then. She wondered if it felt the same for him, that bright bead of pleasure cresting.
“I’ve decided I like being your wife,” she told him smugly, wrapping her arms around his neck like he was some favored toy. All he did was moan a bit pitifully at her, and she smiled against his skin, laughing as he pulled from her, pulled her with him until she rested half against his chest.
“Beautiful,” he said, stroking her hair. “You undid me. I guess that’s good, so I didn’t hurt you more.”
“What is pain?” she sniffed, and then couldn’t help but tease. “It stung a bit, since you’re quite a man. But how it felt at the end was almost too much to bear. I felt like a goddess.”
“No one will tell you that you are not,” he promised her, she poked his stomach as he pressed a kiss at the corner of her mouth. “I want to spend every night with you. I want you at my side.”
It brought tears unbidden, and Kyuhyun pressed her cheek close, hearing his heartbeat begin to slow. She wanted that, too. Her husband, close and making her smile.
Her body throbbed with lingering pleasure, the stretch of him. She nuzzled against his skin and opened her eyes to the skin lit by firelight. And it was not the room of first love, but a cell, and against her cheek was Zhou Mi’s chest.
And it took only one more breath to realize that she was naked.
And she ached. Fuck, she ached. The pleasure gave way to bone-deep pains that seemed to throb as she breathed. That faded a little too, like waking to it had been enough, and when she lifted her head, thinking Zhou Mi asleep, his eyes opened. He’d been meditating maybe, or praying.
“I’m alive,” Kyuhyun observed, and his face was fierce before he cupped her cheek.
“I feared you wouldn’t be. You were so cold. So cold. Like a woman made of ice instead of alive.”
“But you warmed me?”
He nodded. “You were so cold it hurt you to be by the fire, so I took off your wet clothes and I wrapped your feet in warm blankets and used my own warmth to try and bring you back.”
“I thought I was going to die. A man… Men who looked like you took me to the woods, and I tried- I tried.”
He held her as she cried, her fingertips aching, her shoulder, her knees. Her heart. But she wasn’t back in that hillside any more, and Zhou Mi was there. She was safe. But the fear was swamping, since she could finally feel it without the fear of dying. She could have died, and never seen him again, or made it back in one piece. It could have been an hour a day, all she knew was that her face was finally dry and the warmth finally spreading through her. He’d held her, warmed her. He’d-
“There were stars above us. Not in the sky, on the ceiling. On our wedding night.”
Kyuhyun turned her head so that she could see him, felt his fingers stroke along her cheek.
“Kuixian,” he said, like looking at her was a revelation. It had to be, to her, to him. Those moments before, she remembered that as closely as if it had been yesterday. It had not been someone else in Zhou Mi’s bed but her. She was woman he’d been waiting for.
Kyuhyun still hurt, but she remembered the want of that night, echoing inside her. His prison had kept them apart, but no longer.
“Will you make me feel like a goddess again?” she pleaded, and felt him groan, the worry of a dozen lifetimes leaving him.
“Your husband will be glad to.”
When he took her to his bed, she was the one to pull him closer, sinking into the gentleness of his touches and letting pleasure edge away pain as he kissed her and learned her skin. Zhou Mi was hers. She had never been so certain, never been so sure. Being held by Zhou Mi, there in his bed after he’d loved her, made every moment of confusion and pain leading up to that make sense, have a purpose. It had all been leading to that, obstacles that she had needed to overcome to get to him. And though she was the one who still hurt, Zhou Mi was the one who grumbled when she sat up. She sat for a time, though, letting him kiss her shoulder and hold her. If she was kicked back to Seoul, she didn’t want to arrive naked, and that meant putting on the clothes he had dried for her by the fire.
“Do you feel like you finally have your wife back?” Kyuhyun teased. She hadn’t had a lover in some time, so he ought to have been proud there. Though she didn’t mention it. She could hardly tell him right then that she’d slept with other men, even if she hadn’t known she’d been married. Another time, maybe, if he ever wanted that knowledge.
The smile he gave her thrilled her, and the way he touched her shoulder. “Little by little I see more of you returning. But I will only truly be able to enjoy it, once all three of us are safe.”
They’d found each other, but they were not safe, their family not back together. Kyuhyun crawled fully clothed into his bed and could not even consider leaving, listening to the beating of his heart and holding him.
She woke to cold, lying on the stoop in front of the glass door, and Seoul continuing around her as though she’d never left. But the cold she felt wasn’t from the air. It was because she was alone.
***
It had been the longest time they had been apart, the better part of two weeks since the last time Kyuhyun had shown up beside him. Little by little, memories filtered through, the lens through which she viewed them making the city she had known so well seem almost otherworldly at times. But she continued life as she’d understood it, taking comfort in homework, in routine as she worried about when she would go back. They had not slept together again, not after that night she’d almost frozen to death, and she’d been back twice over. The hug she’d gotten so used to had been especially sweet the first time, kissing him, holding him, inhaling every familiar nuance of scent like it was part of herself. He knew she didn’t remember everything, but what they knew, it was hope, it was understanding. The scars, the memories, they all added up to one thing, and her goal hadn’t changed. She wasn’t out to save a stranger, but her own husband, and herself as well. The world she was in, with its high, winter blue sky, continued on around her like she hadn’t changed.
She didn’t dial the number in her phone for her parents any more, or worry about doing anything but keeping her head afloat, her bills paid, her grades all right. It was treading water, until she could figure out a way to stay with Zhou Mi permanently.
And she’d discovered another reason she couldn’t stay away much longer: she woke up one morning, and knew she was pregnant. The calendar she kept of her cycles, the queasiness she’d felt through the days - she knew with an instinct, even if she couldn’t remember learning of her first pregnancy. That was the other tragedy, not remembering Yina besides in flashes, not knowing where she was, how she was. The protection of her blood led them to assume she had to be alive, but that didn’t mean she was well cared for.
Kyuhyun approached the cafe near the glass door, hoping it would allow her entrance. Outside of the door, two men stood, sullen-mouthed and postured like they were looking for a fight. But they weren’t like the men she’d seen before, not with Zhou Mi’s face.
But the same or different, they were the same type of danger.
When she turned, a hand cupped her elbow, but instead of holding her back, the hand propelled her, getting her to the corner and around it and releasing her. Facing her.
There was a bright yellow gym band on one wrist, and there on his hand, a brand that was part of her name.
“Zhou Mi,” she said, and it was disbelief, but also wariness. Before the Zhou Mi she had seen in her world had no scar. Perhaps they had learned.
“Of a sort,” Zhou Mi agreed, studying her face. “I am him and he is me. But this is not my place.”
Kyuhyun shook her head. He looked so normal, jeans, a sweater. He looked like he belonged in Seoul. “I don’t understand. Don’t you live here?”
“No. I am him. I am his…his deepest longing for you, his push to find you, to protect you. I tried to find you, but this world is filled with layers, and the times we passed were full of confusion and danger. If I left you, it was to protect you. And I failed even that, more than once.”
“You saved me from the snow?”
He nodded. “For a time, I can pass through the barrier. But the man you know, he sees this in a haze. He won’t remember.”
“Then if you are not real here, then I don’t exist here either. Me, his face. Our baby? Am I his wife? Is this my place?”
Zhou Mi’s head tilted. “Does it feel like it is?”
She stared out at the traffic, shivering in the chill wind. She thought of her narrow bed, cold, of her classes, her friends. Her hand slipped over her belly, and felt a chill of a different sort to know there would be a curve there soon. Zhou Mi was waiting. He knew her to be his wife, had feared that his wife was dead. But she remembered him, remembered pieces of their life, of the way she had loved him, of the way he had shown her he loved her still.
“He loved her. Me. I don’t want to be a replacement. If I don’t remember-“
When Zhou Mi pulled her close, she breathed into his shoulder, into his warmth.
“Is this your place?” he insisted.
She clutched the cabling of his sweater and shook her head. “No. It’s with him.”
Zhou Mi sighed against her hair as though the weight of several planets had been lifted from him.
“Then you have seen at last what you ought to have all along,” he told her.
It was different to believe it, and another thing to hear it. “I am his wife.”
Zhou Mi pulled her back, his smile sweet. “He has none other.”
“And those men?”
“I fear someone suspects there is leak between this world and the one you should be in. Be cautious of going to a place where you have met with Zhou Mi before. They maybe be watching.”
“But how do I free him? When I leave through the barrier, it sends me back to this place.”
“It is a thought he knows from a book long since read. But he will remember, if you tell him that the barriers are weak to steel,” he whispered. “Goodbye, Kuixian. See him soon.”
And she was left holding only air.
***
If Kyuhyun’s legs were shaking, gripping her purse every time that she went out after meeting with the Zhou Mi who’d appeared in her world, she couldn’t even have blamed herself. She felt like she was in some kind of movie, watching for someone watching her, following her. On his advice, she stayed away from the places she’d fallen through, with the exception of her own apartment. But lying in the dark and waiting, hoping to fall some kind of magic hole wasn’t helping her to sleep, and the baby she sheltered was sapping the energy from her more than ever. She was afraid to visit a doctor, afraid almost to search for information. All she could do was eat well, sleep well, supplement her diet, go about her life, and wait.
And wait.
But the glimmer, the glimpse of a fire-lit bed and the scent of wood, it pulled her from fearful scanning, and she ran for it, dodging a child and a business man and not even stopping to wonder if there was ice still on the sidewalk. The portal had opened against the side of a building, some kind of doughnut shop, and she almost squealed, diving, rolling onto the bed and coming to a halt, panting, her nose inches from the wall.
It was hard to miss that much commotion, so she wasn’t surprised to see Zhou Mi standing from where he’d been sitting on the trunk by the fire.
“Kuixian!”
She felt almost dizzy when she stood, leaning into him as Zhou Mi enfolded her, and a sob choking her as he pressed kisses against her hair.
“Are you okay?” he asked, but she wouldn’t let him pull her back, just holding onto him him tighter as she nodded and struggled to breathe, getting control of her dizziness first, and her crying second. It was the stress, or the adrenaline, or the hormones, or all three, but the tears were still streaming down her cheeks as she squeezed him, and let out a long, shuddering exhale as he held her, tense and worried.
“I’m okay,” she said, knowing he needed to hear it. “It’s just been a while, and I missed you. I have so much to tell you.”
Her voice broke a few times while she talked, and he made a sound, cuddling her, breathing her in.
“I missed you. I miss you every moment,” Zhou Mi said. “Every time you leave, it’s worse. You’re sure, no one tried to hurt you?”
“No, but I think someone might be watching in the other world.” She had to sit, and he sat with her, holding her hand and staying close but still giving her the space to breathe. There was too much news to share. The baby. The hint she had been given at how they could possibly escape Zhou Mi’s prison. She took the cloth he offered, and dried her face, exhaling as she squeezed his hand. “But I’ll tell you about that after. I have news. Good news.”
Zhou Mi so immediately perked up at the thought of good news, of anything good, that she almost laughed, her heart twisting with how dear he was, how happy and afraid the news made her at the same time. She took his hand that she was holding and spread it against her belly, looking at him, smiling slowly as she let him begin to understand. He gland down at his hand, and up at her. And his eyes went wide, lips parting.
“A child? But-“
“We only had that one night,” she said, almost hiccuping as she confirmed it. “But it was enough.”
It had always been enough. Kyuhyun lifted the cloth to let him feel, not that there was much to feel, and looked down, puzzled, as he traced what seemed like odd lines against her skin.
No, not lines. Stretch marks, etched into her skin from a pregnancy that when she had first met him she would have sworn had been someone else’s, marks on her skin that she had not seen a week or a year ago. Another proof, if they had needed one. Another window to who she really was.
“I may have new ones,” she warned about the stretch marks, and he shook his head, bumping his forehead against hers and smiling fit to break his face.
“I will love every one of them, my love Kuixian.” It was her he held, gently kissing her neck and rocking her. “I am so happy. This child is just another reason for us to be together, truly, and escape this place. For us, and Yina, too.”
Kyuhyun gripped the cloth along his back and pulled him, needing to see his face.
“You remember when I had seen you before in the other world? Not when it was someone trying to attack me, but before that. I saw him - you - again. He had the scar on his hand.”
She told him everything she’d been told, how it was almost a projection of himself, his worry for her, like Zhou Mi’s subconscious was reaching out in a dream.
“What does steel have to do with magic?” Kyuhyun asked, remembering her encounter.
“Steel? Nothing that I know of. It makes a fine knife, and can be used for preparation.”
“But what of a barrier? Can it counter it? Cut through it?”
Kyuhyun reached for her purse, dragging it closer. Not an hour after encountering the man who had looked like Zhou Mi, she’d bought a knife. It was for a kitchen, and it was still in its box, but it was steel, the box proudly proclaimed. It was steel, and like Zhou Mi, it had been the first thing besides a pan she had thought of. And she couldn’t have imagined carrying around a frying pan or a pot in her purse.
“Steel,” he said softly. “Steel can cut. Steel can… Steel can interrupt!”
Kyuhyun’s head swam as Zhou Mi spoke, listing books she’d never heard of, diagramming in the air almost. But she grasped the points she needed out of it, not knowing magical theory or whatever he had studied. The magical barriers, weak to steel, could be interrupted. Not stopped, but perhaps enough to where they could get beyond the one at the door to see what, and who, was beyond it.
But there was the unknown, too, as they stared at the barrier, side by side. She had the knife in her hand, rubbing her thumb over the edge of the handle, and she looked to Zhou Mi.
“Where to you think it’s best to try it?”
The middle made sense, but so did the corner. She didn’t know if it was a sheet of a barrier, or if it was cast in some sort of a circuit.
“A corner,” Zhou Mi mused. “If we can turn the blade, it might… I hope it might create a hole some way.”
A path.
But Kyuhyun held the knife away when he reached for it. “If this doesn’t work, you get burned. If it doesn’t work for me, I just end up going back to the other world. I should do it.”
“But-“ Zhou Mi paused, frowning.
“It can’t hurt me. Or the baby. We know that.” She moved closer until she could press her lips to the softness of his, and still he did not touch her.
“Zhou Mi?”
“I just thought I should. You’ll be safer if you stay here.”
“I have come this far. I can help. I won’t be locked away in this cell where they can keep me if something happens to you.”
She could see that thought hadn’t really occurred to him, and he grimaced. “You’re right. I didn’t think of that. When they captured me before, we were apart. Maybe being together is the difference.”
“Plus, you can’t hold the knife and go through, too. One of us has to stay on this side, at least at first.” Her first look at the world outside of Zhou Mi’s cell. She looked down at herself. Her sweater, her jeans. “This isn’t how women here dress, is it?”
He gave her a thoughtful eye. “No. We can at least make you blend in more.”
All it took was a robe, one she had seen Zhou Mi wear after he had climbed out of bed. It wasn’t full length, so it didn’t swamp her, but she felt like she wouldn’t make the eyeballs fall out of anyone who saw her - if anyone saw her. “Are you ready?”
Zhou Mi touched her then, the sweet warmth of his palm cupping her cheek just before he kissed her. And Kyuhyun braced herself with her free hand, clutching at his side and kissing back in that desperate kiss.
“I love you,” Zhou Mi said, and his voice was rough with emotion.
“I- Me, too. Together,” she said.
She loved him. It had bubbled up before, but it choked her then, and she turned from him and raised the knife, holding it steady in both hands as she aimed for the corner of the barrier.
She half expected a shock, like an electrical current. But there was none. She expected resistance, and there was none. At least, not at first. Her eyes widened as the barrier wavered, and in a swath wider than her head, disappeared. And the tip of her knife thudded against something solid. Wood.
A door.
It felt like she was shaking as she twisted the knife, turning it millimeter by millimeter and widening the surface of it. One way made the gap in the barrier grow smaller, but turning the other way, it grew, inch by precious inch, extending from the top all the way to the floor like the magic was coursing down from the top and interrupted in its path. It was wide enough, with care, for either of them to go through.
“Try the door handle,” Kyuhyun said, needing to know if there was another thing holding them back.
It was a simple lift and lock mechanism, and when Zhou Mi pulled, it gave, swinging the door outward so that they could see out into what looked like a dim hallway beyond.
For a moment, their eyes met, and Zhou Mi nodded, inhaling and turning sideways to the door. Step by step, he slide through the gap as Kyuhyun tried not to move, and hardly to breathe. It felt like her whole body sagged as Zhou Mi pushed through the door, looking both ways down the hallway before reaching up from his side.
“I have it,” he assured her, and slowly, she let the knife go, letting him hold it, slipping through the gap and hardly believing she’d gotten beyond it instead of just being kicked back to Seoul. She’d half thought she could, half feared she couldn’t. With a flick of his wrist, Zhou Mi pulled the knife, and the barrier fused whole, leaving them on the other side with the open door.
“Do you know this place?” she whispered, and watched him shake his head.
“I have never seen it before. It’s not our home.”
It was dark enough that it could not have been daytime, or not if there were any windows. Kyuhyun drew the robe tighter around her, cooler in the hall than it was in the room with the fire. But she stayed close by Zhou Mi’s side as they peeked into a room filled with pots and a dying cooking fire but empty.
They’d almost reached the end of the long corridor when Kyuhyun inhaled, steps sounding clearly ahead of them.
“Stay back,” she whispered. “Maybe I can pretend to have escaped.”
Zhou Mi, and even she, didn’t know where she had been kept. But Zhou Mi had the knife, and she could distract whoever it was approaching them, but not if they both were spotted. It gave Zhou Mi little time to argue, but his eyes were sharp with caution, concern. She had saved herself from a man choking her once, and she knew Zhou Mi would be there, that time.
So she put her hand to her head and her eyes were quick, catching sight of the man limping toward her.
“Oh…Oh, hello?”
“My lady!” The man almost sounded scared, not angry, hanging back from her instead of aggressively approaching her. “You’re awake?”
She could feel Zhou Mi lurking around the corner, waiting if there was any trouble. At least she did not look utterly out of place in the lounging robe, but her hair was loose and she knew she could not pass as normal, not with the shock on the man’s face in front of her. Awake, yes. She could play that.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she deliberately swayed. “No one was there? I’m still so tired. Do you know where…”
“I’ll take you back, my lady. Follow me.”
She nodded, smiling, ambling along like she didn’t really know what was going on as she curled her fingers behind her back, urging Zhou Mi to follow. The room they entered was not barred by magic, but a thick wooden door with a simple lock. In it were two beds, of a sort. They were narrow, one larger than the other. And Kyuhyun inhaled, to see what looked like herself lying beneath a shimmering barrier.
“No, how is that possible,” the man said, looking between the bed and her.
Kyuhyun didn’t have a chance to respond before Zhou Mi pulled the man’s head into the doorframe, stunning him as Kyuhyun pulled the belt from her robe so that he could be bound. A cloth from Zhou Mi’s pocket made a gag, and the man moaned in the corner they put him in. But she didn’t really care, going to the magical barrier over the still woman and wanting to scream, or vomit, she didn’t know which. It was her face, still and asleep. Her face.
“Then…she and I were not the same person,” Kyuhyun said, and even then it felt like some kind of lie as she reached to touch her own belly. She just didn’t understand how things could have gone so wrong, how they both could have been so misled.
“I don’t understand,” Zhou Mi said.
She did. She knew that Zhou Mi had found his wife, still and perfect in her clothes. Still. Too still.
Kyuhyun’s eyes studied the woman’s face, frantic. Maybe too perfect.
“Can you stop this magic?”
“I can’t. Maybe the steel?”
Maybe. Zhou Mi tried, pressing the knife in with carefully studied hand. It caused a rift to form, just like in the door, one large enough to fit her hand through. It had to be her, to touch first. Even if the woman in front of them was Zhou Mi’s wife, she had Kyuhyun’s face, and she was noticeably not pregnant. She didn’t know if it was some kind of law, like they couldn’t exist in the same space, if she touched and there were two of them. But her breath held as she touched the still arm, expecting warmth.
The woman’s skin crackled beneath her fingertips, and Kyuhyun almost shrieked, almost lifted her hand into the barrier as Zhou Mi jumped beside her. But it had not just crackled, but cracked. A fine line splitting the smooth surface, one that her nails caught in as she dragged her fingertips against it. Beneath, it was not flesh or bone or carnage, but straw covered in fine plaster and paint. Beneath the sleeve of the dress she wore, the plaster stopped, only straw bound to look like a body.
“She’s not real,” Kyuhyun said, stating the obvious that Zhou Mi could also see. “She’s not real.”
That meant- That meant…
Zhou Mi nudged her to the side once her hand was free of the barrier, reaching in himself and confirming what his eyes were telling him. He tugged the sleeve down, pressing the plaster back together and leaving it almost exactly as they had found it.
“Why did you do that?” she asked, when he had pulled back the knife.
“If they believe you are in here, sleeping, then I want them to believe that until we want them to know differently,” Zhou Mi said.
It made sense, and she almost melted against his chest, a moment stolen as she pulled herself back together. They hadn’t been wrong, and he was warm, and real, whispering against her. A word. Beloved. His wife, his only wife. And she turned her head, staring at the bed beside the straw woman’s. Smaller, the size of a child. But it was empty.
Kyuhyun met Zhou Mi’s eyes, and she moved to the man, pulling the cloth out of his mouth, and he stared at them both like he’d seen a ghost.
“Where is the child?” she demanded.
“My lord,” he babble, staring at Zhou Mi. “My lord, we didn’t have a choice. They made us- They made us.”
The man was weeping, his voice going so small, so thin, and Zhou Mi gripped his hair, forcing his head up so that he looked at him.
“Made you what? Help them take over this place? Help them lock us up?”
“Yes, yes. All of it. They told us you’d gone mad, that… That you’d tried to burn the village, and that you’d made my lady go along with it. They said-“
“The child?”
“She was innocent. But she had to be watched, in case she was like you,” he said, and whimpered when Zhou Mi shook him. “She’s not here! She’s not here, but she’s safe. You don’t look mad, my lord.”
“They nearly made me so,” Zhou Mi said. “They locked me away alone without company or comfort, and told me my wife and child were dead, the village burned. And all for what? For power? Revenge?”
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
They let him cry for a while, softly, as they looked at each other. She didn’t know what they could do, what they should do. Finding Yina was one of the first things, but if she was safe, that was what was important for right then. Kyuhyun walked to the other side of Zhou Mi and sat, holding his hand as Zhou Mi asked the man everything, soldiers, servants, where people were. How many people there were who had overthrown them.
“I am the only one here. A woman comes in the morning with food for the day, and once a week, sometimes two, the man who keeps the magic arrives. He makes sure the barriers are secure on you both.” And the man looked to the plaster image of Kyuhyun in the gleaming barrier.
“She isn’t real,” Kyuhyun said. “We aren’t magic, or a danger. Has your life been improved by this man, this magician?”
The man shook his head. “They seek to open a mine. All able men are working, forced to. I cannot work the mine, so they set me to guard, to make sure none discover this place.”
“Where are we? I know it’s above the village,” Zhou Mi asked.
“Above? No, my lord, we are in a farmer’s field, set into the earth.”
Kyuhyun knew why Zhou Mi asked some of it, if they could overtake their captors, take back the place they were held in or their house, Zhou Mi’s land, his people. She also knew he asked in case it was hopeless, at least right then, if they had to find their child and flee in hopes that they would be able to fight again another day. The option to pretend they could not get out while making a plan was no longer an option because they had been discovered by the man in front of them.
So it came down to the most important question of their lives.
“Will you help us?”
***
There were no other magic barriers to hinder escape, but that was the smallest part of their worry. If the schedule held, the man who orchestrated their prison would be there the next day. To get out, to get away, that was easy. To take back their home, a home Kyuhyun still only vaguely could remember, it was more than just walking away. But the man had been truthful. When they lifted the door, it was to an empty field, and the smoke they saw was the smoke of fires of a village nearing nighttime. If they left, it would have to be under the cover of dark, anyway, and it was a novelty for Zhou Mi to be able to walk further than the length of his room, so they walked together, her hand tucked in his as they paced the narrowness of their confines. Even then, it wasn’t much.
“People have mined the hill in small ways for decades,” Zhou Mi mused. “But to force people to work that ground… It is dangerous, sometimes slick and unstable. Those men, most of them are farmers, craftsmen. To take them away from that is to risk them being unable to feed their families. Gold does not satisfy a belly.”
“The greed of it does,” she said, and Zhou Mi chuckled, stopping and turning to her, holding her closer.
“It seems unreal to be out of that room, to talk with you. We’re getting closer.” And Zhou Mi exhaled. “And then I remember there’s another child to think of, and our little one out there, waiting for us.”
“We’ve taken the first step,” Kyuhyun murmured, . They could not rush ahead, not when there were so many unknowns. But though Zhou Mi could have walked for hours, she had begun to tire, and she left him to talk to their guard so that she could rest. But what drew her was the room with the bed and the barrier over it, like some kind of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. She looked, and she saw herself, as though in a mirror. The hair was no different, the face. Only the clothes, and the fact that the woman lying there was perfect, asleep. Tired, maybe. Maybe she looked just as tired.
“You are Kuixian,” Kyuhyun said, and had to laugh at herself then. “You are Kuixian, but so am I. I’m glad you’re not real. We’re just waiting for me to remember.”
She tried. She tried so hard, looking at their surroundings, at Zhou Mi’s hands, as though she could divine it.
“But I can’t. I don’t remember him fully, I don’t remember your life- Our life! Just pieces of it. Our lives were different, but…I know it’s in me somewhere.” In her, the proof of their relationship in so many ways, like when she pressed against the dark cloth covering her belly. There was that curve, the one she knew when she pressed her hand to be sure of herself. She could hallucinate many things, but not that. And she imagined the woman lying their scolding her that there was only one child who grew, the one that Zhou Mi helped her make. His wife.
“I know they tried to rip me me from this world, but they forgot that what binds me here is stronger. I’ll remember, and remember my family, my child. I’ll free us.” Not the woman made of plaster and straw, but herself. Zhou Mi. “I’m not some shell of a body. I am only the echo of the woman they sent away, but I don’t know how I will live with two lives in one head. But that other life, without my family there, it grows more and more like a dream.”
Like the dream it was. Once, Zhou Mi was the dream, but no longer. He was what was real, solid, true. The tall buildings and fast-paced life felt empty. It was just a different kind of a prison, one she would not have thought to escape, and to find herself there, looking at a construct meant to resemble herself, in a prison maybe they had made to keep her. She shed those things, her driving lessons, her subway card, elevators. She shed them like they were weights falling off of her, as tears began to stream down her cheeks. The embroidery on that sleeve, she knew it as from her mother’s hand, as well as she remembered walking in the forest and hearing the sound of her mother’s laughter.
“Zhou Mi! Zhou Mi!”
Kyuhyun swallowed hard, her voice so choked, and he all but leapt for her when he appeared in the doorway.
“Kuixian! What’s wrong?”
Her husband. Kyuhyun reached for him and rubbed at a white spot on Zhou Mi’s collar. It bloomed like a small flower and the smile bloomed with it.
“This reminds me of the first time you brought me a flower. I think you meant to charm me,” she said, laughing a little. “But it was this tiny little white thing, already starting to wilt because you’d carried it in your saddlebag. But you gave it like it had been blessed somewhere. It did charm me. You were right.”
Zhou Mi was so still against her, that at first she did not notice. But Kyuhyun’s eyes widened.
“You gave me a garden on our wedding day,” she said, meeting his eyes. “When you’d leave early, you put flowers beside my pillow to greet me. You let your dog sit on you like a child, and- Zhou Mi.“
She gulped in air, but he had already gathered her in, weeping against the skin of her neck as they clung to each other. He crooned at her softly, words she did not know, had never known. They had come together like two storms, merging, uniting, stronger for it. She remembered. She remembered.
“My Kuixian.”
“They cast me out,” she told him. “They locked me away and locked away my memories of you, of myself, of this place. I woke…I woke to a false life, to a false body that began to fall away the longer I was here. We vowed… We vowed that no magic would part us. The protection that you put on me was too strong. They could not kill me, only change me. I have lived a life twice over. The life…it was good.”
There had been no pain, no deep worries. No concern for a child, or obligations of a marriage. She’d been free, free to study, to live.
“I’m glad the life they gave you wasn’t like this one. You were always so confused when you came here, this place so strange. I thought I had lost you to a place I couldn’t understand.”
He had to wonder, if not then, then at some point, if she wished she could have stayed ignorant of what she’d left behind.
“I was content there, until I remembered- I would not trade that life for you. I understand finally, how we came to meet again. The entire scope of my world was your prison cell.”
Zhou Mi frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“The barrier would not burn me because I did not leave through it. It only passed me back to my prison, living my life apart from you, but never truly far from you. We lived apart, but together. When I saw a doorway to your world, I saw your cell. Because I was already there.”
“Then all this time-“
“They kept us together, but not close enough to touch. How clever they must have felt, knowing they imprisoned you with your wife, but still kept you from her.
“But their prison was not perfect.”
“Maybe they grew too complacent, or keeping us together undid it. I don’t know. But maybe we can use that to fight him. The scars, the wounds I took in that world, they carried with me. Perhaps we can lure him somehow?”
Zhou Mi shook his head. “If we wait for him to come here, how do we fight him without any weapons, and without magic like he has?”
“Maybe we don’t fight him here. This world has magic. The one I was held in doesn’t.”
“But I could not go with you,” Zhou Mi said.
“We can use the weapon he created against him,” Kyuhyun said, squeezing his arms. “I’m almost sure of it. He may have made that world, but I know it better. Do you doubt me?”
“I trust no one more. But the thought of losing you again-“
“We could leave. We could run, find Yina and never see this place again. But the people, they must dream, too. Their prison is just as real as ours, but it’s not one they can escape without help.”
It was an impossible decision for Zhou Mi, perhaps, but his pride in her, and love for her shone too brightly then to see how torn he was to have to choose between his people and the safety of his wife, but Kyuhyun had never been more sure. If this man came to kill her in the guise of Zhou Mi and thought that would sway her, he did not know her. No, he did not know them. And he didn’t know what would be waiting for him.
***
Waiting was the hardest part. They sheltered together outside of Zhou Mi’s cell, talking, dozing, and Kyuhyun half afraid she would be yanked back before she was ready. They had a plan in place, in case that happened, but Zhou Mi held her hand as though that would keep her from leaving him. And maybe, also hoping he would come up with a new plan, one that didn’t involve putting Kyuhyun in danger. If they had weapons beyond knives, if they had swords, magic beyond Zhou Mi’s healing, maybe they could have found a way. Once he knew his prison had failed, he would send something to attack her, or go himself. Either way, a magician deep in use of power would be vulnerable, either to her or to Zhou Mi. So they attacked from within, and without, though she knew if Zhou Mi could have willed himself to go with her, he would have. And when morning dawned, they helped each other back into the cell, meeting the eyes of the servant who would keep their secret until it was time.
Zhou Mi pressed kisses against her hair, and Kyuhyun thought back to those times, researching about Zhou Mi, thinking of him, talking of him. When it seemed like someone had known, like someone could read her thoughts and was monitoring what she was doing. It had felt like paranoia, then, but she felt it more with a certainty - when she had been trying to remember, their captor had tried to knock her into line.
At a knock on the outer door, indicating their captor had arrived, Kyuhyun squeezed Zhou Mi’s hand.
“I love you,” she said, and walked into the barrier. There were the tingles, as she emerged through the glass door, but she did not stumble that time. No one paid her any mind, and Kyuhyun began to walk.
“My name is Cho Kyuhyun, and my husband is Zhou Mi. Have you seen him? We live in a village in another world,” Kyuhyun told a lady she grabbed. That lady shook her off and kept walking, and Kyuhyun turned to a man, another man, a child, until people were staring at her as she paced, and her words grew louder, and louder.
A man stepped out from the crowd with Zhou Mi’s face, and she glanced at his hands and laughed.
“Now that I know who I am and where I belong, do you think you can fool me?” Kyuhyun asked. “Would you like to bed me like that to tell my husband you’ve had me? This prison has failed you. Or is it you, the one who kept me here. Or some underling come to do his bidding.”
Perhaps his own pride would draw him out.
The features melted into someone unfamiliar, a face she knew, barely. A trader? Perhaps. Someone who had come to do business, to gain wealth at all costs. Someone who had no love for her, or for Zhou Mi.
“There is nothing of him here in this world. You should never have remembered.”
Kyuhyun shook her head, fondling the knife handle in her purse. “I can’t say it was love that made me remember. But perhaps it was your weakness, your oversight. Trying to frighten me into giving up, it did not work. But I barely know you. Why would you do this to us, to the people?”
“What do you do with someone who can’t be killed, or exiled, or reasoned with?”
“And did the gold buy you reason? You should have killed me,” she said, and she shook off the stares of the passersby as she shouted.
“If only I could have. Zhou Mi was locked away to wither while his wife lived a life without him, fucking whomever she wanted. You could have grown old and died here.”
“That I didn’t means you did not do well enough to distract me. And you were too obvious. I asked about Zhou Mi, and you sent one to me. Attacked me. When you saw your hold on me was fading, you tried to choke me, and freeze me.”
He actually laughed. “This may be just a dream, but the consequences are real.”
“Yes. All my wounds were real in both places.” He glanced at her belly. That too.
“And he still found a way to put another runt in you. No, this time the prison will hold you both.”
It was not wind that chilled her when he started toward her.
“Please,” she begged, the brick rough against the back of her coat. “Please! Think of the child. You can remove my memories again! Zhou Mi-“
“He won’t be there to save you, not this time. His prison will not give him up so easily. But he can relive the death of your memories of him. He can dream of avenging you, even though he has no chance of it. Maybe it was what I should have done to start. To break him.”
Kyuhyun drew herself up, made herself solid. And when the man reached for her, she gripped the rubber and plastic and thrust it out and up into his belly.
The blade passing through the cloth had more resistance at first than it did sinking into his body. When she thought she had it far enough, she jammed her hands up harder. Blood seeped through the hole in the bag and she pulled the blade back, pushing herself away as he brought both hands to his belly.
“The wounds here are real,” she said, and her voice shook. “You will not harm me, or Zhou Mi, or our children any more. Or the village. How could you.”
“You-“
And yet still, she could not just leave him there to die, not like that.
“If you release this magic and take us back, maybe there is a way to save you.”
“You fool,” he said, and his grin was as dark as his words. “You said it yourself. What happens here is real. When I die, this world will not cease, but seal itself. There is no magic that would undo it. You will be trapped here, and for you there will be no escape. He may have his freedom now, but not you.”
He laughed, sputtering with it as red colored his lips.
No. It was supposed to free her, not trap her. With Zhou Mi alive and still in his cell, with Kyuhyun being able to escape, she could have found another way. At least they could have been together. But if she were there for the rest of her life? Kyuhyun looked around her, saw the people on the sidewalk staring at her. Not staring as though they were horrified that she’d just stabbed her attacker, but curious, and a little boy turned, looked toward the road.
She had to go. She could almost feel the fire, drafting at her from either side, the sky moving, warping, people lining up on either side like some kind of a procession to watch her go. All she knew was where the door was, passing the bakery, the entrance for the upper level movie theater, the subway. She could just see the coffee shop’s sign through the crowd watching her, and she willed the bastard to keep breathing as she grasped the door handle of the gleaming glass door and pulled.
It held firm.
“No!” she shouted at it, rattling it back and forth, the millimeter it would move as though it was locked tight and almost frozen. “No, I can’t stay here. Please!”
Zhou Mi was waiting for her. Their life together was waiting.
“Please,” she begged, and looked, desperate for a portal to open, something, anything that would take her back. Above her, clouds boiled, and she knew the time was short.
A hand pressed over hers on the handle. The little boy she’d seen. A second hand, an old woman to her side. A fourth hand, fifteen, a hundred, and her voice was drowned by theirs as they surged around her until the glass of the door showed her frantic face in perfect reflection and began to bow inward. It was not a world of her creation, but it was her world. And the handle, it began to melt like heated chocolate, dripping down her fingers and leaving it impossible to grip. The door was leaving. It was going, and it was her only way out.
The shouts around her became screams, and the hands pressing hers were shoves against her back, her shoulders, and the glass shimmered, wavered, shuddered.
Shattered.
Kyuhyun screamed into the dark, the single light wavering in the distance as glass shards scraped against her skin and the hands shoving her became shadows pulling at her, ripping at her clothes until she cried out, blood slicking down her palms, stinging in her eyes. The pain exploded in her knees, and her hand scraped against wood just before the rest of her body bounced down after, her hip, her ribs, her skin bare and cold. Kyuhyun shook, her eyes tightly closed as she tried to curl in on herself.
The screaming had stopped but she couldn’t hear anything over her shallow breaths and the thundering of her heart. And she was afraid, so afraid of what she’d see when she opened her eyes. She didn’t want to know, couldn’t bear to know.
“Kuixian.”
Zhou Mi. But there’d been one of those, too, in that other place. If she opened her eyes, she didn’t know if she was going to see a wall, brick and lit by a sun in some mockery of another world, or a smooth bare wall of a cell.
“Kuixian, I’ve got you.”
A blanket covered her, glass falling from around her to puddle like water on the floor as he lifted her and carried her, settling her warm against him in front of the crackle of a fire.
The fire.
Kyuhyun jerked, her eyes opening as she stared at the fire, at Zhou Mi.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, cupping her face.
“Zhou Mi.”
He nodded, staring at her like she was just going to burst into flames in front of him. She looked beyond him, and where the barrier had been, there was only a door. And behind them, the barrier that had taunted Zhou Mi with his ruined village, it was only a wall.
“He’s dead!” she blurted. “I killed him. And he said, if he died there, the world would seal and I could never get back. I stabbed him, and I ran. And the door wouldn’t let me in. There were screams, and-“
Pain. So much pain.
“You’re here now. You’re here,” he said. He murmured soft things, until her trembles began to slow and she could sit up on her own so that he could wipe the blood from her skin. She could see what he was thinking, that he’d let her go alone, and she’d been hurt. And thinking of him instead of the fear that still threatened to choke her was easier.
“They are just a few cuts,” she said, touching near one near her eyebrow that had bled so much, and the scrapes and tiny cuts on her hands. She’d have bruises from her fall, and she slid a wrapped hand against her belly. There was no pain there, at least. She knew what she needed was rest, and to look on Zhou Mi’s face just a little longer to reassure herself that she was truly there. Her hand covered his, covering the brand he’d burned there to protect her and leaned her head into his shoulder.
“I need to see Yina. I need to see my baby,” Kyuhyun wavered, and Zhou Mi nodded, crooned, held her until the tears stopped, until the numbness did.
But her hands were still shaking when she stripped the clothes from the straw and plaster effigy of herself, dressing in her own clothes and picking out tiny bits of straw. It made her smile, to see the modicum of relaxation that crossed Zhou Mi’s face to see her like that. They had found each other and killed their captor. That was only a first step.
***
Neither of them were dressed for the cold when the cover of dark came, and they scrambled up ladder that led to field above. They would not wait below even if it was chilled, and the only extra cloak was wrapped around Kyuhyun’s shoulders. At least above they could run, and Zhou Mi stared toward the lights of village fires, exhaling his relief as he held Kyuhyun against him. The man who had helped them had gone for a cart, for a weapon if he could find one, and they waited together.
“Even once I knew the village stood, I’m glad to see it,” Zhou Mi said.
“This winter must be a hard one for them. Do you think they used all the food that was stored?”
“I hope not, or the wait for spring will be longer than I imagine. I can’t even tell by the food I was brought, because it was not anything of note. Soups and gruels. We’ll find a way to feed everyone until spring.”
Spring, true spring with new growth, could have been as much as a month away.
“We’ll go to your parents first,” Zhou Mi said. “I want to be sure they’re okay, but they also may have news, as well as…”
Zhou Mi leaned his head against hers and she could almost imagine what was going through his head. That her parents would be some source of comfort and connection for her, something beyond him. But also protection, in the instance that he would need to leave her. Though he had to know he would have a fight on his hands if he tried to go off without her.
“Even if our helper didn’t know where Yina was, I can’t help but wonder since he had heard she had been placed with family. My family is dead, so your parents are all I can think of.”
At least they knew she was alive. The protection of Zhou Mi’s blood assured them of that, but to know that Yina was with someone who would protect and love her, it was almost more than Kyuhyun could have hoped. Had Yina been born a boy, perhaps things would have been different. But when she grew, she could have been useful. To protect her, it made sense, in way, because placing a baby with a village woman and giving her the burden of an extra mouth to feed and the possibility of Yina growing up without a way to be useful.
The sound of the cart approaching soothed them both, and Zhou Mi took the sword from the back for a moment, holding it in his hand like it had been parted from his body for far too long. But he gave, boosting her into the back and covering her with the rough cloth to hide them both as they traveled toward the home of her parents. It was the anticipation of seeing her family, the worry of not knowing if Yina would be there, the cold, that kept her from fully relaxing. They had killed only one man, but there could be a number more.
“I think you feel more complete with a sword at your side than you do with me,” Kyuhyun teased, and Zhou Mi’s arm wrapped tighter around her, huffing a laugh as he kissed her neck.
“In different ways. They’ll make songs about your bravery.”
Kyuhyun didn’t need songs. And her whole body froze at the sound of a creaking board, a bridge, one that led to the home of her parents.
“Shh, shh, wait until it’s safe,” Zhou Mi whispered, when she tried to sit up. They could have no idea who would be watching. She strained, barely breathing, listening for the sound of voices after the cart had stopped. All she heard was a knock, and a quiet murmuring.
“My lord, it’s safe!”
Zhou Mi’s feet just barely met the ground before hers did, and their steps were in sync as they rounded the cart. There, lit by fire from within, was a figure she knew so well, and she broke into a run.
“Mama,” Kyuhyun said, and the tears threatened again as her mother folded her close, soothing her.
There were too many words spilling, of her parents being told she was dead, of them not being able to believe it.
“Yina?” Kyuhyun whispered, hardly daring, but needing to know.
Her mother seized her hand and pulled her inside, and to the side of a small mattress, much like the one she had slept in as a child. There, a girl of about a year’s age slept on her back, deeply asleep with her dark hair tousled on the pillow.
“Zhou Mi,” Kyuhyun said, her voice already choked with tears as she gently lifted their sleeping daughter, and Yina stirred only a little, curling into her and settling into sleep as Zhou Mi’s arms folded around both of them. She looked up at her mother, smiling in such a heartbreaking way at them. “Mama. Thank you.”
“I never thought I would see you with her again,” her mother said, stroking Kyuhyun’s hair and giving them that moment, with Zhou Mi’s own tears falling onto her shoulder.
“She’s okay,” he said, and repeated it, stroking Yina’s back and touching her cheek as to assure himself that she was real.
Zhou Mi had said he would not believe until they were all together, and finally, finally they were. She looked up to see her parents embracing, saw tears in her father’s eyes and it was too much. It was all too much, as she looked back down. Kyuhyun was so enthralled by tracing the little mark on Yina’s cheek that she knew so well, the curve of her ear that was so like Zhou Mi’s, that she barely heard the knock on the door, only realizing when Zhou Mi turned to help to check with his sword in hand.
“Kuixian,” Zhou Mi called, and Kyuhyun turned, leaning for a long moment against her father’s side, before going to Zhou Mi.
And Kyuhyun saw why Zhou Mi had called to her, because outside the door, people had begun to gather, with more approaching. She saw a man she knew, a farmer, a blacksmith, wives, and teenagers, some with babes in arm just as she stood there staring back at them, and more just beyond them. Kyuhyun shivered with a chill when Zhou Mi extended his hand and shook the hand of the blacksmith, touching shoulders, greeting people he knew. His people. A little whisper had spread, it seemed, when the cart had been retrieved, and the village had discovered that their leader was back. They built fires, made food, planned, and talked, and schemed, until the sun rose and long beyond Kyuhyun’s body could endure. She slept beside her mother, with the promise of their baby still sleeping inside of her and Yina within arm’s reach. She woke to Yina in Zhou Mi’s arms, with Zhou Mi, exhausted and pleased, smiling down at her. They would take back their home, and help their people.
“I love you,” she said, to both of them, and his smile made the little girl in his arms beam at him. Enthralled, of course. Maybe she had forgotten them, after so many months apart, but they would all remember, together. She had found her family, and her home. Zhou Mi needed her then, perhaps more than ever, to hear his worries, and guide his thoughts, and fight for their people again at his side. She guarded his sleep almost as jealously as she did her own, kissing him and easing him into a rest that drew some of the worry for food from him. She’d seen his face almost devoid of hope, but not then, not when they were working together to take back their future.
Still, there was a worry in Kyuhyun’s mind as she loved her daughter and settled again into the world she had been born to, that she would miss the carefree days, the studying, the bustle of a city’s life. But each night, the memories of the world she had been trapped away in faded a little more, as all dreams should.
***