Tehran, 1808
"Stop with your secrecy, your deception." Chaewon yelled, the tears not yet soaking from her eyes but they leaked through her voice. She had had it, being filled with cryptic nonsense and blindly following it because she thought it would keep her alive, but then monstrosities like this would befall her and her faith just sank. She needed answers.
Choerry stayed silent.
"I've spent my life as if I'm reading the stories, but someone else keeps turning the pages and doesn't let me catch up, just putting me in where it starts!"
Her eyes flickered over to the side of the room, where Sooyoung was, her arms desperately trying to pressurise away the everloving flow of liquid that rushed from her neck. It meandered through the room soaking the floors and drenching the bottom of her skirts. It ran down the walls, staining them such a deep shade of red it felt like Lucifer himself was ready to spring from it.
Beware of the wolf.
It was probably the first words Chaewon could remember hearing, inside her nursery. She would huddle against Sooyoung and Jinsol as they curled up in the bed, listening to matron tell her stories. She cared not for the thieves, the dragons, the pirates or the knights, they were simply a bedtime story for her, forgotten by morning, but the wolf never left.
It's what the strange girl with the funny clothes had said to her as she kicked off her shoes one day in frustration at her loneliness. Eight year old Chaewon didn't have much of an attention span without her friends, and with Sooyoung ailed with influenza and Jinsol away at sea for at least another week, she just wished for company. And there she was, the girl who smiled as sweetly as the fruit she was named for.
"Beware the wolf! She will hunt you and she will taunt you! But you must run, you must fly away!" Chaewon chanted as her cheeks reddened and she continued to scream. "All of this fabled nonsense! I've spent my whole life being tossed around a story I don't understand! I have to ru, do I? How do I fight?"
You don't.
She was almost ready to lunge at Choerry when she realised that hadn't been her voice, but her own, from somewhere plunged deep into her. It felt- felt like instinct.
You fly away. That familiar pang stabbed her again. Fly away. She had known it all her life, she'd felt it as she ran along the docks when she was a toddler, as she ran into her father's warm arms screaming about the wolf coming to eat her, and it didn't go away even when he soothed her hair and told her there were no wolves in Port Royal.
She'd felt it in the middle of the night, last year she'd screamed so loudly in her sleep she awoke the whole household, begging her to answer their questions of concern but she pushed out of the way, running and running and running until it didn't feel like the earth was quite beneath her legs anymore.
Fly away, You all have to fly away.
She didn't even know where she was going until she realised she was in front of Jinsol's house, and she was not alone.
A girl stood at the doorway, her back turned away. There was a strange abrupt moment of tranquility as she watched the girls chest rise and fall, a small urge to reach out and-
But then the girl began to turn,just twisting her body slightly and it came back again all at once. Fly away, fly away from the wolf. She was long gone before the girl would have had a chance to see her.
And then the morning came, she was found wondering around the docks in the early hours, clutching the newspaper that headlined the murder of Jung Jinsol, her throat slit in her bed as she slept. Choerry had appeared to her for the second time then, and she'd held her hand and promised her that she would see her friend again.
"Please." She begged, clutching Choerry's shoulders so tightly she felt she could break her bones with a tingle squeeze harder. "I just want to know why."
Choerry sighed, an expression she couldn't read sauntering across her features.
She sank down to the floor, letting the burgundy river drench her. She glanced over at Sooyoung, who was exhausted, had let it fall from the gash in her neck, and stared lamely at the ceiling.
"It's just..." Choerry began, and then stopped herself. "Sooyoung, she only hit you at your neck?"
"Yeah."
"And it doesn't hurt?"
"It's not that it's not painful...it just doesn't exactly hurt." she replied with a shrug, as if she was making any sense.
"How can it not hurt?" Chaewon screamed, at least she had intended to, but it came out as no more than a stage whisper.
"It just doesn't" Sooyoung replied, dryly, and raised her arm up to the gash, pinching it, as if to tear it open more-
"DON'T!" Choerry yelled, but a second to late. More liquid began to flush down her side, except it was evidently not the same deep red that scathed the surfaces. No this was a less viscous substance that pooled to Sooyoung's left in a violet lagoon.
Choerry's eyes glistened over it hungrily for a fraction of a second, before leaning back and sighing.
"I fear this is just what she wants." Choerry groaned. "If she had intended to actually harm you she would have aimed elsewhere, no this was deliberate. It isn't a coincidence this is happening. She wants you to know."
"I don't care! Knowledge can never be a crutch!"
"She got it off though, you must have pretty strong reflexes there Sooyoung." Choerry continued, blatantly ignoring Chaewon.
"Razor sharp." Sooyoung grinned back.
Choerry's mind seemed to be going at a thousand miles a minute as her lips curled and her fingers fidgeted, she had this constant look of uneasiness. She just stared at the saturated floor beneath her, now the flow had finally stopped, like she was waiting for something.
As angry as Chaewon was, she actually trusted Choerry, despite the evasion of information and the general mysterious ausra that stank around her, she wouldn't even tell them her real name for the lord's sake, Chaewon fund herself unwilling to think she would wish them any harm, unlike Sooyoung, who had multiple times expressed her dislike of the phantom girl who sprang at Chaewons comand, like sorcery. Then again, Sooyoung didn't trust anyone. Chaewon wasn't even convinced Sooyoung trusted her.
It didn't take long to work out what Choerry was waiting for, because a few seconds later, in a flourish, a forest of roses sprouted out from the redness. Chaewon gasped in surprise, but her shock didn't match Cheorry's, her eyes sparkled like she had just found proof of God.
Chaewon studied Choerry's eyes as they flickered over to Sooyoung's left, as they hungrily latched onto the lilac lilies that had sprouted without her notice. She marched right over, the purpose in her stride almost like she was hypnotised, until she reached out to touch it, and she instead found an apple in her hands, but with every second it withered away from her touch, until it shrivelled into nothing more than a black core. It was revolting not for it's visual appearance, but for the adamant sentiment of rejection spat at her. This isn't for you it seemed to scream.
"Oh Irony, you sadistic cunt."
The language was so foul Chaewon almost forgot about the irregular botanical growth that had sprung from her floor in a sea of what didn't quite seem to be blood.
Choerry's hands picked at the roses, filling up her arms until she had a handful of scarlet apples, glistening in the refracted sunlight that etched through the crack in their window. Soon all the flowers disappeared, and there were eleven apples remaining in their place.
She dropped them at Sooyoung's feet.
"Don't shoot the messenger." She whispered. Sooyoung just glared at her. "These are your memories, whether you like them or not."
And with that Choerry vanished.
Atlanta, Georgia, 1993
When Yerim felt herself back in the familiar setting of her bedroom, she felt like she wanted to do nothing more than sink into the walls and never move again. She was beginning to hate being summoned now.She hated Sooyoung looking at her like that, like she was something to be wear of, like she was a threat. The cold stares just felt like jabs at her stomach, as she knew Sooyoung as the girl who might as well have been her sister, who she owed so much to and felt so loved by, but this Sooyoung just...she was the same, she knew she was, but it felt so alien. She hated she didn't remember.
All she had to go off, was the voice Jinsol had managed to leave in her conscious somehow from her last time alive, that led fifteen year old Yerim two states away to an elementary school field, and told her to dig. Half an hour later, she had a dirt covered box in her hands. When she lifted the lid, she found a picture dated the 7th of September 1972. She'd almost thrown it from her grasp when she recognised herself in the middle of the shot, between the arms of two other girls. But the voice told her to stand her ground, and she flipped the photo over to see a note.
God I hope this works. If you've found this then you're already amazing. I can't make you remember... so this is my best shot. - jinsol.
Under it was an endless supply of more letters, of photo's and newspapers, annotated in a blue pen. Pictures and information about girls who had lived before her, and the same girls. Who lived again. Of her. But not her. Of Sooyoung. Of Vivi. But also not them. Every so often there would be another note directed at her.
Remember this! I almost forgot but Jungeun wacked me.
You would not believe the life you had in the late victorian era oh my god i cannot believe i wasn't there that time i was too busy starving on the streets of Prague and you joined the bloody circus.
I can't wait to see you again. I'll come and find you, I promise.
And yesterday, she had shown up in the parking lot of her work, with one of the faces on the pages. She'd seen Jiwoo a couple of times in summonings, but they'd never been very long. Chaewon had once summoned her into a war hospital, in the middle of it being shelled, probably by accident, she didn't see her, but Jiwoo seemed to recognise her and pulled her hand into a hug before she returned to the present, but she'd never seen Jinsol. All she had was the little voice in the back of her mind, and the information that she stuffed under a pile of unwashed shirts in her closet. She knew so much, but like Jinsol- one Jinsol had said, she couldn't make her remember. Only one of them had the power to do that, and she was blissfully ignorant and Yerim was hesitant about stabbing one of her best friends in the neck.
She'd barely gotten to see Jinsol, she and Jiwoo had left for the motel yesterday and through lunch she'd barely gotten a second glance from her.
That's because she had literally no idea who you are.
She plunged her hand into the wardrobe pit, dragging out the little file on Jinsol. She stared at the pages for what seemed like an age, she was so exhausted, before hearing a rattle at her door. She figured it was Vivi telling her dinner was ready, and began to stand up.
"You found it." That was not Vivi's voice- that was-
She froze when her eyes met Jinsols.
"How?-" Her voice croaked. How the hell can you remember? She meant to say, but Jinsol seemed to understand.
"I don't know. Happened Gradually." She replied, shaking her head, and heading down to sit next to her, her fingers lacing carefully through Yerim's.
"I said I'd come, didn't I?" She grinned.
Yerim literally wasn't aware of anything else, her mind seemed to be screaming and silent at the same time. "Does Jiwoo...?"
Jinsol shook her head, reaching out and wiping Yerim's cheek. Yerim had no idea she'd been crying.
"I missed you."
Hellooo it's been a while but I'm back on it dont fear! I'm actually proud of this one ish. Oh and it'll get more confusing before it gets clearer.