Chi froze a little, his forehead creased in confusion. Finally, I heard him take a deep, weary breath. "Ha-Na, is everything alright? I mean—is every as well as it can be?"
"Don't worry." I took his hand and squeezed his fingers in reassurance, although my assurances to him did nothing for my own, trembling hands. "Everything is fine. I mean—as well as it can be."
He smiled softly, a little sadly. "Then I'm reassured." He returned the embrace. "But what is it that you need to tell me?"
This is it. I opened my mouth to tell him, but then closed it, hesitating. I'd thought about how I would tell him, rehearsed it to myself, promised myself that when and if the time came, I would confidently tell him everything. But how do you tell someone what I had to tell Chi? That I was from the future, or some sort of parallel future, and I wasn't who I thought he was, yet I looked freakishly like her, and that he'd just confessed his undying love to a woman who wasn't who he thought she was.
Yep. Not a fun conversation.
It was like standing at the edge of the high board, deciding whether I was ready to dive in or not. I knew I needed to just get it over with, yet my fear held me back.
I felt a light pressure around my fingers again. Looking up, I met Chi's warm, reassuring smile. "It's alright, Ha-Na. You can tell me."
I'd spent so many years watching what I said, worrying that my professors would read into me admitting that I was tired the wrong way, and that they'd think that I wasn't working hard enough, or wasn't cut out for the profession. The shame had been so deep, so never-ending, that I often hesitated to talk about my feelings, even with my parents. Could I confide in someone I'd only known for weeks, and about something so ridiculously impossible?
Clearly, I'd been debating a little too long. "Ha-Na?" Chi moved his hands to my shoulders, bending down to look me in the eye. As his gaze leveled with mine, I saw the same look in his eyes that I saw when he spoke of his first meeting with Ha-Na.
This is wrong. The words formed in my head before I could even really comprehend them. While Chi clearly thought I was the Ha-Na from his childhood—and that was deception enough—I also knew that he was the most genuine person I'd ever known. For whatever reason, he truly loved me, not just his memory of Ha-Na, and that reason alone was enough to gave me the courage to do what I needed.
"Actually, I'm not Ha-Na."
Chi's eyebrows raised and an expression somewhere between confusion and surprise clouded his eyes. Way to go, Ha-Na. Nice to ease into this. Still, he kept his voice level when he finally spoke. "Alright, Ha—" He paused, swallowed, then started again. "Alright. Who… who are you then?"
"Well," I swallowed against my suddenly-dry mouth. "I am Ha-Na. My name is Hanna. And I am me. I mean, my personality is the same as you know me in adult form." Making it worse. "But I'm not the Ha-Na you knew."
The light bags that had formed under Chi's eyes since his absence became more pronounced. When he spoke, his voice was pleading. "I'm sorry, Ha-Na. I really don't understand."
"I'm from the future!" I blurted out.
So much for tact.
I watched the fallout unfold slowly. Chi blinked at me, as if the information was being slowly filtered to him and he was trying to process the disjointed pieces. After a few, long moments, they clicked in, but disbelief began to spread across his face. His pupils flicked back and forth as studied me. I could almost hear his internal dialogue; Is she crazy? Or is she telling the truth and life is crazier than I thought?
It was very much the same process I'd gone through when I first came to Goryeo.
Finally, he spoke. "The future?"
He's smart. Better to ask more questions and let me do the talking. "Yes."
"Which future?"
"Hm?"
"I mean—as in tomorrow, or—"
"I'm from hundreds and hundreds of years in the future." I kept my tone level, as if giving a report, but even I could hear how ridiculous the binary of the situation sounded coming from my deadpanned tone. How on earth could Chi believe that I was from the future, let alone comprehend it? "What that means is, by the time I was born, you were gone from this world. Long gone."
I'd thought about that aspect of our situation before, many times, in fact. But saying it aloud was like a punch to the gut, not only because I never, ever wanted to think of a time with Chi not in it, but also because it reminded me of the reality of our situation. Not only could Chi not be mine in this life, but if I ever went back to my old life, he wouldn't be there either.
"If you're not Ha-Na—I mean, not my Ha-Na…" I flinched at his intonation of my. "Then who are you?"
I sighed. This would be the downfall. Deep down, I knew that this would be the last time Chi could ever tell me he loved me. The first and last. Because even if he did love me—not the Ha-Na he once knew, but the me trapped inside Ha-Na's body—how could he really love anything about the situation. With my confession, I was cutting the cord between us even more quickly, and I knew it.
"I'm the person you've known for these last two months. But physically, this is not my body. Or my life. That first day you met me—when you found me in the fields—it was the first time I ever saw you. In my other life, the one in the future, the last memory I have is of cleaning up my grandmother's garden. I fell, and I think I must have hit my head, and the next thing I knew, I was here, in Ha-Na's body. All the memories I've made since have been here."
"So, that's why you couldn't remember anything from before." Chi's voice was soft and hushed, and he spoke more to himself than to me.
"Yes. Exactly."
"I wasn't as surprised about your childhood, but your scar…" Again, he spoke to himself, piecing the muddled puzzle together. He turned to me. "Do you really mean it, Ha—" He stopped himself. "Do you really mean that you're not in your own time?"
I nodded, my throat too dry and constricted to speak much. "I do."
Chi fell silent again and I felt my tears begin to fall. Tears of sorrow, and of a strange relief. Chi and I were never meant to be; because of some cruel twist of fate, we were perfect for each other, but could never work out. At least now, I wasn't lying to him. My vision had blurred with salty, hot liquid when I felt a warm, familiar pressure around my hand, then looping itself around my fingers.
I turned in surprise. Although I couldn't see him properly at first, I knew it was Chi when he took his free hand and gently swiped under my eye with his thumb. I instinctively turned towards him, and he began to stroke the tear stream from my other eye. Although my vision still burned with a mixture of salt and painful sadness, I could see more clearly now. When Chi's face came into focus, I knew that however unbelievable my story was, he believed me.
Gradually, his hand moved towards the back of my head, and the other, placed lightly on my back, pulling me into a hug. I leaned into him, into his forgiveness, letting my forehead rest on his shoulder. How many times had I struggled alone, subconsciously longing to rest my head? Now, even for the moment, I'd found a place to rest my head.
"I can't pretend that I'm not struggling to understand how this all came to be, Ha—" Chi paused.
"You can still call me, Ha-Na," I mumbled. "It's my real name, coincidentally."
Chi stroked my hair. "Ha-Na," he said, his voice quiet, contemplative. Yet the slight choke behind it told me how much it meant to him. "I can't pretend that this isn't a strange occurrence."
You've got that right.
"But I believe you."
I knew he did but hearing him say it meant everything. "You do?"
"I do." He gently pulled back, still keeping his arms around me. "When your—your predecessor…" He wrinkled his nose, unsure of what to say. "When she moved away, I made a promise to myself that if she ever came back to me, I would do everything I could so that she would never have to leave in hurt or shame again."
"But—" I didn't want to say it, but knew I had to. "But you know I'm not her, now."
Chi shook his head and stroked away one of the limp, tear-stained strands of hair off my forehead, tucking it behind my ear. "No, you're not," he acknowledged. "But you are the one I like, just as I liked Ha-Na when I was only a boy. For whatever reason, though I sent for her, you came to me." For the first time in hours, I saw a real smile spread across Chi's face. It wasn't one of his vibrant, sunny ones, but it was one of love, and hope, and comfort. "I could never forsake you or send you away, any more than I could detach my heart from myself. You are all of my heart."
If I didn't know it before, I knew it now. And if I couldn't say it before, I could say it this time. I looked into his warm, kind face, one that had been unfamiliar to me only weeks ago but was as familiar as my own now. With more clarity than I knew my tears would allow, I found my words. "And you're mine. You'll always be."
Chi's smile grew larger, and I felt mine respond. Without knowing it, I'd been looking for my always, for the one thing that I knew would always be true. Chi had been looking for his always too. So, while we couldn't be together forever, the knowledge that out hearts were forever joined gave us enough hope to know that we'd both found what we'd been looking for.
After awhile, we walked back, hand-in-hand. Like earlier, we were quiet on the way. The exhaustion of the day's earlier events was finally catching up to me and I was content to simply walk forward. Chi, I could tell, was also tired. Every now and then, I'd turn to look at him, and I could see the strain on his face. But then, he'd see me through the corner of his eye and turn his head towards me and smile. In those moments, I knew that if we were quiet, it was because we happy to just walk beside each other.
We let go of each other's hands before we got to the palace doors but as soon as we walked inside, we knew we needn't have worried; everything was quiet.
"They're probably busy with Heonae and the baby," I whispered.
Chi nodded. "They'll tell me when the baby is born, but I should probably go and see that all is well.
I nodded. After quickly looking behind us to make sure that the guards weren't looking, I slipped my hand back into Chi's. "When you see Heonae, give her my best wishes."
Chi squeezed my hand. "I'll walk you to your room."
We walked to my room quietly, but when we got to the door, Chi gave me one last hug. "Sleep tight," he murmured.
"You too. That is, if you can get some rest tonight."
Chi laughed, softly. "I will."
I'd turned to leave, when I heard him again. "Ha-Na?"
I turned back to face him. "Chi?"
Chi's face was warm in the dimly-lit hall. "When I asked you if you weren't my Ha-Na, it was just because I was surprised. I knew it in that moment, if I'd never really said it before. You were always mine."