The sadness of nine weighed heavy within her. It did not overwhelm her—a consequence of her affinity to it—but it was a constant presence. Dahyun felt the sadness of the girls as echoes. Sometimes those echoes were louder, other times softer. They were never silent. Dahyun longed for the day when she would feel none of that sadness—when the girls would stop missing her and perhaps even leave the memory behind in their lives. While she could handle her own sadness, she could not stand feeling that of the girls. She did not want them to feel such sorrow at her departure. 

Even when the echoes faded, her own feelings of loss never eased. She felt cold. She was surrounded by blue. Her chest felt heavy. Proper thought was difficult. The pain wouldn't leave her. It didn’t matter if she was in the physical or the emotional world. 

She had walked through woods and concrete streets, stopping to rest every two days or so. Time had lost its value again. She didn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, only that she’d had to fight a fresh flow of tears as she did. It was food that Jihyo had made and stored in those plastic containers. She almost wished she hadn’t stopped to eat, but the vampire had devoted time to prepare this for her. If it were to go uneaten, the sight of rotting food would have made her feel worse. 

Dahyun had once believed her kin when they told her it was a curse to have sadness as a core emotion. Now she felt it was a blessing. There was so much within her and it seemed to grow as she walked further away, but she was not overwhelmed by it. She could tolerate her own sadness. It was just as much a part of her as sadness was. While the pain was itself unfamiliar, she knew the heaviness well. The same applied to the cold. 

The emptiness had returned as well. It had never faded, but she’d begun to escape it. It was an emptiness that had been caught in the embrace of eight others, its edges softened in the process. Now it was exposed. Dahyun found that it had not lessened. If anything, it had gotten deeper. 

____

The music was too loud. The smell of alcohol and sweat was too strong. Momo hated it.

The music should have meant letting go. Dancing should have meant an escape. The party should have been a distraction. 

Momo didn’t know how long she’d been dancing for, let alone who she’d danced with, only that she didn’t want to stop. If she stopped, she’d have to take in her surroundings. What glimpses she'd caught get were of drunk teenagers. She'd drowned her senses out each time. They reminded her that there wasn’t a single reason why she should stay. 

And yet there also was.

If she stopped, she’d leave the party.

If she left the party, she’d have to go home.

If she went home, she’d have to go through the forest.

If she went into the forest, she’d think of her.

If she thought of her, she’d listen for light footsteps, a slow heartbeat, and a gentle voice.

If she listened, she’d hear nothing. 

She couldn’t stop dancing. Not yet. 

____

Sana had gone to the party.

Mina and Tzuyu had stayed home. Chaeyoung and Jihyo were on patrol, occasionally checking in and letting themselves be seen at the party. Jeongyeon, Nayeon, and Momo had all gone to the party with the hopes of letting themselves get lost. 

So had Sana. She’d left after twenty minutes. 

Everywhere she went, she couldn’t get far enough away. 

It wasn’t enough. 

And it was too much. 

Her reputation had also caught up to her the moment she’d stepped foot into the house. Boys and girls, some whose names she didn’t even know, had come up to her. They’d offered a drink or asked her to dance. She had turned them all down. She’d tried to do it with as best a smile she could manage. Were she less aware of the secrets she needed to keep from the world, she might have lost it when the seventh person held up a plastic cup with some sort of mixed drink. 

She’d thought she could do it. She’d gone to school in the hope that she could get away from the cascade of thoughts and memories that hit her while at home. 

It had worked until she’d seen the empty chair. 

She’d turned around and gone home. 

And now here she was, probably in the worst place she could be: the forest.

The scent was the most comforting. It wasn’t of sadness, but of calm. It almost convinced her that a part of her was still there. The only problem was that, just like everywhere else, the scent was faint. 

The fairy had made good on her promise. She’d taken away all traces of herself. The school was absent of both the scent of forests and mountains. It felt as if fresh air had left the forest. It was almost stuffy without it. 

Perhaps the worst part of all was that the house—her room—only held the light scent of vanilla and dirt.

It hadn’t been hard to figure out how closely scent and emotions were tied together. In the time that she’d been there, Sana had learned a few of the relationships. 

Calm was tied to forests. Sadness to mountain air. Fear to death. 

The only ones she hadn't figured out were love and happiness. Fruits and flowers were what they were tied to. She just didn’t know which was connected to which. The exact scent of either changed. She knew that. Once she had smelt mangos and roses, another time apples and lilacs, and then orange and lavender. 

Maybe she could've figured it out. If she’d had enough time. 

Time. It was something that she had a lot of, but only through it being endless had she learned just how fleeting it could be. Countless moments got lost within it. Eras passed quickly, while people were left behind. Time had been one of the biggest obstacles for her to overcome. Her life in Japan was far behind her, but she remembered every detail of it. She still remembered how food from the table had tasted, how the arms of her mother had felt, and how her father had smiled at her every morning. Just remembering it did give her a pang of longing, but not the ache of grief that she used to have. 

Getting past that had involved focusing on the good that life still held. Her current family, her coven, and Momo, a connection she had to both her past and present life. She had gotten to the point where she still loved her old family as much as she had when she was human, but did not long to leave the present to return to the past. There were moments where she wished she could feel that warmth again, but most of her time was spent feeling at ease in the now.  

It had taken years for her to reach that state of mind. Now she was lost in another. As cliché as it sounded, this was a new layer to that sense of loss. It was an avenue of the feeling that she’d never wanted to explore. Now here she was, missing another part of her life, missing a person who had left her behind, and missing the moments that hadn't had the chance to pass. 

Sana looked up then. She looked past the canopy of trees and towards what was beyond them. 

Her next thoughts were cruel. They gave her words that were stuck in the past, but just close enough that she could hear them in her mind. As though she was talking to her in that very moment. 

The night sky is never dark for us.

And yet it was for Sana. She stared up at a sky of the darkest blue. The moon was waning. She only saw the stars. She wondered if the fairy looked up at the stars or at the emotions among them tonight. Was she even in their timezone? 

Sometimes, when you direct your emotion at something…some of your emotion is transferred over. 

Sana wondered if her emotions were being transferred over now. They’d add to the endless amounts already present there. There was mostly calm in the sky. Huge amounts of it. She felt echoes of it as she stood there. 

Many people look up at it, directing emotions of despair, confusion, but also wonder at it.

The voice in her head was gentle. Her words had always come slowly. The fairy had rarely been impulsive when she spoke, always thinking over what she was saying and going to say. Sana had figured out two reasons for it. The first was language. She'd known so many, including those of elves, but she’d been more than allowed to take her time searching for the words.

The other reason had probably been the most frequent one: she’d deliberated over what she could and couldn’t tell them. There were secrets the fairy had initially kept until telling the truth was inevitable. There'd been secrets that had stayed untold, because she’d felt they’d be in danger if they knew the truth.

There'd also been many things the fairy had been willing to share. Stories of her research and the customs of her people where she’d been more than forthcoming. Her eyes would light up when she could share knowledge and her brow would furrow as she tried to figure out the best way to explain emotions to them. 

Sana sank down to the ground. The fairy used to dig her hands into the ground. Sana did that now. The earth lodged into the space underneath her nails. It was cold. 

The eyes, I thought shouldn’t be hidden. My skin, those aren’t reminders that are necessary.

There was so much that still hadn’t been said. So many parts of their lives that hadn’t been bared. It hadn’t just been secrets, but the other had left many memories unspoken, as she’d either not wanted to face her past, or didn’t want them knowing it. Sana wished she had tried harder to show her that they were strong enough to know about those memories—that they could handle that pain. 

But they'd never gotten to that point. The fairy hadn’t gotten to deal with her grief, nor with her guilt. Sana wasn’t sure if the girl knew that it was something she could try to work through, to process it. One thing was perfectly clear: she felt that she deserved her exile. She'd felt that she deserved more. 

Sana’s eyes burned. She took a breath, feeling the pressure rise in her nose. She closed her eyes. Then she let the tears fall.

Right in this moment, she was alone somewhere in the world. She wasn’t allowed to come back to one home and she had left another. While she was free to come back, Sana wasn’t sure if she ever would. 

Her chest was hurting, like whatever weight within it was expanding. She pulled in her knees. Every breath she took made the pain worse. How many times had she been in this forest? She'd definitely been there enough that her scent should have been everywhere, but all Sana really smelled were rotting leaves and wet dirt. 

She heard those same leaves rustle. 

“Sana?” It was Nayeon. 

She was more than tempted to tell her to leave her alone, but she didn't. She was several centuries old. She should have been be able to handle this. But she wasn’t. 

“Hey,” she croaked out.

“Why aren’t you at the party?” Nayeon was by her side. 

“I’m tired.” Sana didn’t want to know how pathetic she looked, curled up on the forest floor, tears streaming down her face. 

“Then why aren’t you in bed?” A hand took hold of her own. 

“Didn’t feel like sleeping.” Sana felt a stab of longing then. One for arms to be around her, a slow heartbeat beside her, and the scent of mountains and forests to surround her. 

A different set of arms went around her. She wanted to push them off, but something stopped her from doing that. She let herself be held. 

“Why aren’t you at the party?” Sana asked.

A soft chuckle. There wasn't any humour in it. “I know how these go. Jeongyeon’s going home too. We asked Momo if she’d come with,” Nayeon said. “But she told us to go on ahead.”

Sana felt incredibly selfish then. The other girls were missing her too. Mina and Tzuyu had been quieter than usual, Chaeyoung was prone to rant about how a race as devoted to knowledge as the fae could be so backward, while Jeongyeon, Nayeon and Jihyo seemed unaffected. But here Nayeon was, not wanting to be at a party, the same for Jeongyeon, while Jihyo had decided to go on patrol and probably wasn’t coming back until morning. And then there was Momo. She had closed herself off. 

Sana might have been in pain, but she worried for the pain the others were going through. Especially Momo. They had all seen this before. She wasn’t sure if it was worse or better this time. If she’d been able to read emotions, maybe she could have.

Read emotions. There the pain was again. Her chest ached because of it. It was like she’d actually cracked a rib. Emotional pain didn’t feel like that. Or at least it wasn’t supposed to. 

“Sana?” Nayeon’s voice was filled with worry. 

“It’s nothing,” she lied. Even though it wasn’t a necessity, breathing was hard. She was cold. 

“Hungry? We’ll go get you something to eat.”

Sana knew she didn’t believe her for a second, but the eldest didn’t ask anything else.

Was she eating? The fairy had barely managed to eat a slice of pizza at the start. When she’d left, she was eating a full plate, as well as a part of dessert. She’d never said it, but Sana knew her low appetite had something to with her captivity. Was she even sleeping? 

The pain got even worse. The flow of tears had stopped. Sana could only put a hand on her chest, as if that could stop her chest from feeling like it was freezing from the inside out. 

“Hey,” Nayeon’s face filled her vision, “let’s just get home, first.” 

Sana shook her head. The pain was easing up. She wasn’t sure why. Had it just been from the memories? 

You’ll also think of me, as it is my emotion, one that makes me up as a being. 

She’d said that whenever you were sad, you’d think of her. What about when you thought of her first? Did that bring sadness? No. It wouldn’t have. She would never leave them with a cycle of thought and pain, not when she had tried to avoid causing them as much pain as possible. Or at least, she’d tried to do everything except stay. 

Sana felt herself being pulled to her feet. 

“If you don’t want to go home, we can go wherever you want,” Nayeon said. “We can go to a fancy hotel, order pizza, have a phenomenal breakfast tomorrow, and fly to America or something. All of us, or just you and me.” 

“Just two options?” Sana asked. 

“You’re not going alone,” she enveloped her in a tight hug, “and I’m the most fun, so of course I’m your only other option.” 

Sana didn’t laugh, but she smiled. The pain was definitely easing up. Her chest wasn’t sore either, and yet it had felt as if the muscles had twisted and some of her ribs had broken. She could breathe now too. The ache was still there, so was the cold, but both felt more tolerable than before. Had it been the crying?

“Home first,” Sana said. She felt another pang at the word, but managed to dismiss it. 

Another squeeze. “We’ll plan the trip later, then.”

____

Dahyun had been crossing a street when the pain came. She felt it as the loudest echo yet. 

As the light went red and her feet crossed the sidewalk, the pain had increased. At first, she’d thought that someone was giving the girls sadness, but the more she felt, the more she knew who it belonged to. It was just Sana's pain. That fact strengthened her guilt. 

It also strengthened her resolve to take it. 

She found the park of the town she was in. There was less calm here and more carefree joy. It was an interesting change. Children would play here more often than the older humans would walk through it. She hardly remembered being a child. The emotions of that time had been either studied or lost. The memories themselves were faded by the centuries that had passed. 

The park was empty now. She knew it was illegal to sleep in a public place such as this, so she remained standing. At most, this would last a few minutes.

Dahyun closed her eyes, reaching out to Sana. She wished desperately that she could be with her instead. She hoped that Sana would not be alone in this moment. It was not always the case, but the presence of another very often soothed such pain. It was a slow process, but it worked. 

With the sadness came small traces of other emotions. It was a combination she now knew to be heartbreak. There was confusion, longing, regret, and disappointment. The collection of emotion pricked at her eyes. Dahyun was careful not to take too much, even though she wanted to take it all. Had she been able to, she would have done so with all eight of them.

The sadness wouldn't overwhelm her in the way that grief or fear could, but she could not do it when each echo arose. The girls would certainly know that something was happening. They had each lived nearly as long as her, knew sadness in its raw form far better than her. The accompanying cycles would be well known. If she disrupted them, they would know that she had lied to them. 

She took as much as she could without overstepping another line. The first had already been crossed when she began taking the emotions. It could be argued that there were three lines, the very first one having been crossed when Dahyun gave the girls her sadness. Yet those decisions had already been made. She would do now what she still could. 

____

“I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense,” Tzuyu leaned back, “what we know about her—this shouldn’t be happening.” Her brow furrowed as she looked down at her work. 

Nayeon looked down at the papers. Tzuyu had constructe