In her head, it had made sense. Open a repair café. She couldn’t fix people anymore, so she’d fix things instead, and show that she could do it all without magic. She could do it and be successful and have a life devoid of her magic and her mother. Show that she could be happy. Couldn’t she?
Eunny blinked. Tears fell from her eyes. She caught them, her movements automatic, wooden, surprise dulling her brain. When had she started crying? Why was she?—
A pointless question. One to which she’d always known the answer—known but carried in silence for so long. Since Song’s Scrap had first opened its doors.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, gaze dragging across her surroundings. The café she’d convinced everyone that she loved. Except it was everyone else who loved it. Everyone else who saw Song’s Scrap as a Sylvan institution, a beloved fixture in a community notorious for its reticence to welcome outsiders.
There’d been a time when Eunny had been proud of the work her repair café did. She’d been proud of its place here. But she’d never loved it. Perhaps even worse, she didn’t hate it either, didn’t feel anything so strongly toward it except for stuck. Guilty that she’d built this thing so many were invested in, yet she couldn’t find that same enthusiasm within herself.
Or was that a lie, too, one she told herself? The guilt was real enough, but the not feeling anything, that wasn’t true. Not when it came to Ollas. Apathy wouldn’t have made her freeze up in the face of his honesty. If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t have been so terrified by the prospect of his love. The depth of it. So no, not apathy, but fear and guilt all the same.
She had run rather than consider his forgiveness, rather than see if she was finally ready to apply a little to herself. She had broken him; Ollas should’ve hated her, not been in love. No one had ever put her first like that. She knew her friends and aunt loved her. She had people who cared, people who would drop everything and be there if she needed them. Some would do it if she simply wanted it enough to ask. They were her family. But they also had lives of their own. Wants and dreams that they pursued on their own, and she didn’t begrudge them that. Eunny had those things, too, in theory.
Ollas was willing to go further than that. She’d never had someone make her the center of their world. Not even her parents—especially not them—the people who should have come closest to having that kind of a relationship with her. But her father was irrelevant, unknown to all but Bioon, and she’d never seen fit to fill that particular gap in Eunny’s knowledge. And of her mother, well… To her mother, Eunny mattered a great deal, but only within the context of what she could do for Bioon’s own interests.
Ollas chose her. Loved her. Wanted, hoped, she could do the same.
A simple ask, yet with such a cost. I need you to remember. The one thing she’d sworn to never do. Relive that day. Remember, as if experiencing it again could change the outcome. It wouldn’t. She had quested out with her magic before that day, paired with another’s dozens of times without issue. Ollas was still only a victim of her disaster, not the cause.
She’d already done the unthinkable: used her magic. He’d enabled that, had been an encouraging force long before he’d learned the truth of her “lost” power. Because the root of her hatred and sense of betrayal was fear. Ollas softened that fear, made her feel safe, but that safety was a lie. She wasn’t safe. Just that minor slip had hurt him. She couldn’t be with him, not when she’d be a danger.
Eunny sniffed, tilting her head back to stare at the ceiling. “Sorry, Nev. I can’t.”
She had started over once. She could do it again. Even if the thought of it hurt a lot more this time.
“There you are.” Zhenya stood in the doorway, her entrance inconveniently silent thanks to the now creak-free back door. She looked over her shoulder, calling to someone out of sight, “She’s in here.”
“Who are you?—”
Dae and her younger sister, Calya, filed in after Zhenya.
“What are you doing here?” Eunny asked.
“We could ask you the same question.” Dae looked around, finding a wall lamp and turning it up. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“I-I’m— I came here because I was…” Eunny stammered, fumbling for the right words. “Sad.”
“Why?” Dae and Zhenya chorused, as Calya said, “Very dramatic.”
Eunny hesitated. “Because.”
Her friends seated themselves around her, concern on their faces. Concern, because… they cared. About her.
Eunny didn’t deserve her friends. But she was grateful for them, and they deserved better of her.
“I’ve been lying to you,” she whispered. “About my magic, I—” She raised her hand, palm facing up. Her fingers closed to form a loose fist, then slowly the fist opened, revealing a small handful of light.
No one spoke. Dae and Zhenya exchanged quick looks, as if affirming privately conferred beliefs.
Calya was the one to break the silence, breath coming out as a huff. “So, I’m back to being the only non-magical one?”
Zhenya covered a smile behind her hand as Dae admonished her sister. “Caly!”
Eunny’s head swiveled back and forth as she scrutinized each of her friends in turn. “You’re—you’re not mad? You…knew?”
“Suspected,” Dae said. “Zhen was the one to figure it out.”
Zhenya’s cheeks went pink, and her shoulders hunched up around her ears. “I, um, looked at the experiments you and Ollas were running in Trunk. I only looked! I didn’t interfere with it at all. But I noticed some traces of light magic in the soil, and it didn’t match anything we’d been doing for the elective.”
