Chapter Text
The stitches have only just come out when Mizi first gets the idea. “We should elope,” she expresses to Sua as the ball she’d been trying to hold falls out of her loose hand and bounces across the floor. The words burst from her like a swear; Mizi’s rising annoyance with the exercises she’s been assigned have had her on the verge of angry tears for the better part of fifteen minutes, frustrated with how her hand struggles to squeeze a ball or move her fingers the way she wants.
Sua looks at her tenderly. “Yeah?” She hasn’t said anything as Mizi goes through the repetitions, humming and sometimes playing with Mizi’s other hand. The ticklish touch of Sua’s fingers and the warmth of her hand is a welcome, grounding counterpoint against Mizi’s struggle to get her other hand to listen to her.
“Really,” Mizi insists.
“Okay,” Sua says. “I’ll be waiting for you to take me away.”
The thought instantly banishes what remains of Mizi’s frustration. “That’s a promise.”
Now the idea keeps bouncing in her head like a lost rubber ball, running away from Mizi every time she tries to really grasp the problem. She’s already married to Sua, obviously, but there’s something else Mizi wants and her brain keeps sticking on elopement and stalling on the idea of spiriting Sua away whenever she tries to think of an answer. Mizi considers the contacts in her phone.
—
“Well, I think it’s obvious,” Hyuna says with her usual confidence. Hyuna is surprisingly easy to get along with for someone Sua and Mizi first met at one of the unofficial memorials which had sprung up for Luka. She’s tall, with sharp grey-blue eyes and a reassuringly confident smile. Mizi liked her immediately.
Sua hadn’t warmed up as fast, but she’d flushed when Hyuna worked her impressive biceps. The sight had been so hilarious Mizi teased her for a good part of the night.
“You have a typeeee,” Mizi sings, leaning over Sua and crowding into her space. With Sua still in recovery, Mizi hasn’t been able to pounce on her wife like she wants to, but she can still make Sua blush all pretty and get real squirmy even if she can’t mess with Sua in all the ways she’d like.
Sua goes pink. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” She sounds flustered but not nervous. Mizi’s wife is hiding something, she knows that.
“You like it when people have good arms,” Mizi continues, propping up her weight on one arm so that the muscles stand out. Sua’s eyes follow the motion. Mizi grins, feeling like she’s finally getting Sua back for all the times she helped with “stretching” and “massaging” Mizi’s sore muscles. Sua grows redder and her breathing is getting faster; they’ve both been pent up trying to keep their actions limited while their injuries recover.
Then Sua’s eyes catch on the pink line where Mizi was hit by a crossbow and the mood falters. Her hands go up to trace just under the scar.
“It doesn’t hurt at all,” Mizi mumbles, crowding close to Sua now to comfort her. She can’t tell Sua to not be sad, but Mizi can stay close to her until it passes. She hopes it helps; Sua’s presence definitely helps Mizi remember that they’re here, together.
Sua’s arms wrap around her. “I know,” she says. “I’m so thankful.”
Mizi nuzzles into Sua. They stay close together until the reassurance of being together mellows into a more uncomplicated happiness of just being with each other. But Mizi doesn’t forget Sua’s flushed face either, and resolves to start training with Hyuna. She can carry her wife, but she could always carry Sua longer.
(For her efforts, Mizi learns that Sua only developed a thing for biceps after watching Mizi run around playing all manner of sports during high school.)
Having spent the last few weeks together, Mizi knows that she really, really likes Hyuna. She’s so cool, and they have the need to be active and moving in common; Sua accompanies Mizi for morning runs, but Mizi’s precious wife is more like an indoor cat, as much as she likes to see Sua’s face flushed red and sweaty in almost any situation. Hyuna ropes Mizi and Sua in to play paintball with her friends and laughs when they scream and fire randomly, but teaches them how to aim and keeps bringing them back until the lessons stick. More importantly, Hyuna has a kind of confidence in herself that comes from experience and she doesn’t begrudge Mizi for being more sheltered either, just offers her advice and challenges Mizi to do her best.
So when Hyuna says it’s obvious, Mizi listens. “It’s only natural to want to change your relationship with something bad, right?” Hyuna continues. “To want to make it something your own again.”
The words resonate. Mizi’s brain comes unstuck from the image of hiding Sua away somewhere and lands on what she wants to do; more than the literal act of eloping, she wants her and Sua’s marriage to be really, truly their own this time, so that the shadow of that night isn’t the only thing following their anniversary around.
Once Mizi starts thinking about it like that, it’s like she can’t think of anything else.
“Ivan, do you have a day you’d consider the happiest day of your life?” Mizi asks when she arrives in his office during lunch hours. The sound of typing stops and he looks up at her.
“Naturally,” Ivan says. Mizi nods. As expected. Sua and Till had both said no when Mizi asked, which meant that talking to them would be no good —Mizi needs more ideas.
“Do you think it’s possible for one of the best days of your life to also be one of the worst?” Mizi asks.
“Yes.” A bittersweet smile crosses his face. “You sound like you have an idea,” he prompts.
Mizi allows him to nudge her where he wants her to go, but squints her eyes at him to indicate that she’s doing him a favor in being nudged. He looks appropriately grateful. See, this is what being honest gets you, Mizi thinks but doesn’t say.
“I was thinking about redoing our wedding,” Mizi says. “Not the vows, but I wanted to have another one on a different day so we wouldn’t have to celebrate our anniversary on the same day as when we all almost died.” Ivan hums to indicate that he’s listening; it’s one of those little behaviors he shares with Sua. “But then I talked to Hyuna and changed my mind.” Mizi laughs. “It would also be kind of hard to explain, right? Sorry, our anniversary is actually three months later. You must have confused the date.”
“You might be able to get away with declaring a new date,” Ivan muses. “If your wedding wasn’t covered in the news.”
Mizi sticks her tongue out. “Can’t you do a little black magic again? What did we inherit all that money for then?” They’d actually inherited relatively little, as if reminding them that leaving Anakt meant giving up the benefits previously accrued by the family.
“To buy up all the newspapers?” Ivan says, sounding perfectly sincere. His snaggletooth however, rising with the curve of his smile, gives him away.
“Exactly,” Mizi says. “But actually I was thinking back and it wasn’t all bad. I meant all those vows I said that day, and the dresses were really pretty…” It still might be too early to see Sua in a white dress though, Mizi doesn’t say, and swallows.
“I’d want to spend the day with actual family this time though,” Mizi says. “No fine print. Consider this an invitation,” she announces, and leaves so Ivan can’t have the final word.
She’s got all sorts of ideas in mind to write down.
—
“I think Mizi has started another scrapbook,” Sua says, after ten minutes have ticked by in silence.
It is a cruel twist of fate that neither sibling has a large enough social circle to find another confidant. They meet on neutral ground every few weeks, slowly sampling their way through all of the cafes roughly equidistant from their respective workplaces. Ivan debates the merits of spilling the contents of his earlier conversation with Mizi over staying silent. Sua stares at him like she’s trying to extract the conversation directly from his brain. Ivan refuses to break eye contact first.
Eventually, their eyes drift away again. “Are you planning to surprise her back?” Ivan asks.
“I don’t think it’s meant to be a surprise,” Sua says. She sounds supremely satisfied to be so naturally kept in her wife’s confidences.
“Tolstoy was wrong,” Ivan says decisively after another fifteen minutes have passed. “The two of you are definitely singular and unreplicable in your happiness.” This conclusion makes things easier to swallow.
Sua beams. Ivan can almost appreciate it.
—
In deference to Mizi’s continued nightmares, Sua chooses a suit for their anniversary celebration. The suit is such a good idea that Mizi and Sua almost don’t make it to the venue on time; Mizi’s lipstick is smudged and her hair a little rumpled, but with the guests they’ve invited all this warrants is a loud hoot from Hyuna and a little teasing. Mizi blushes, taking the heat from their friends as they hold hands under the table. Sua smiles at her wife, knowing that they’ve successfully gotten away with keeping a little secret: they ran late because Mizi insisted on fixing Sua up so at least one of them looked presentable. Her knight in shining armor.
Mizi’s dress is white but simple and knee-lengthand there are no flower arrangements except for the wilting flower crowns on their heads made from the little red flowers they used to pick as kids. The flower crown on Mizi’s head, made by Till, looks much neater than Sua’s, a testament to the fact that Ivan’s skills in making flower crowns have only improved enough to stop actively and intentionally destroying them. Nonetheless, Sua feels much lighter now than she did one year ago, with expensive wedding planners making sure every minute ran perfectly smoothly.
This is the kind of gathering Sua never could have imagined a year ago. It’s not exactly a wedding, because Mizi hated the even the suggestion of taking back or delegitimizing their previous wedding and their subsequent status as wives, but there are promises, and the gathering of their closest friends involved.
Once again, Mizi takes Sua’s hand and reiterates her wedding vows. Sua makes hers this time without the weight of Anakt bearing down on her, free to wholly devote her attention to Mizi without fear gnawing at the back of her mind; the tears that roll down her face are purely happy, but Mizi takes her into her arms and hides her away from the world all the same. Hyuna comes up first, cooing about how cute they are and crushing both of them against her chest. Dewey and Isaac follow her cue, dragging everyone else into a huddle around them. Mizi laughs, loud and unrestrained. It’s contagious; soon Sua is laughing too, sweaty and crushed and content despite it all.
They don’t have cake. Mizi is the first one to light the grills, and the scent of cooking food fills the air. In keeping with the intention of having a different night to talk about, Hyuna and her friends have created a professional-looking setup for a temporary drive-in theater. Isaac starts cooking popcorn over the campfire as Mizi and Dewey excitedly pile together cushions and blankets to make some kind of fort that will probably get too hot for multiple bodies to crowd in all night. The intention is to keep movies playing all night until dawn, although the food and the reassuring warmth of Mizi by Sua’s side makes the prospect of an all-nighter seem less and less likely.
Perhaps today’s efforts won’t be enough to guarantee a sleep without nightmares tonight, or in the future, but as Sua holds Mizi and is embraced back she is confident that this time they truly have each other.