CHAELISA One-shots

I Still Love You

***

The worst thing Chaeyoung could imagine when Lisa went off to war was the possibility that she might not come back. That one day there would be a knock on the door and two uniformed officers and—

And then the phone rang, telling her there had been an accident. (An accident? An accident?! A bomb wasn't an accident!) Lisa was alive but she was hurt, badly hurt, and she might not make it and—

And then the waiting. The daily, sometimes hourly calls to and from Lisa's doctors to see how she was doing, whether she was any better today (or any worse) and did they think she would be stable enough to transport home soon, until finally one day they said yes, yes, she was coming home, they would call Chaeyoung as soon as the plane landed. She could meet them at the hospital and—

And walking into the hospital room where Lisa was laid up in a bed, looking worse than Chaeyoung had hoped but better than she'd feared, and at least her face, her beautiful face, was unscathed (and it was petty and horrible that that was one of her first thoughts and Chaeyoung knew it but couldn't change it) and she wanted to rush to her but then Lisa looked at her and asked in a voice flat and completely unlike her own, "Do I know you?"

Chaeyoung stopped, her breath stuck in her chest, her lungs burning with the need for air as she waited, waited for Lisa to wink, to laugh, to say, "Just kidding." It would be a cruel joke, and Lisa was never cruel, but it would still be better than the alternative which was Lisa looking to the doctor, a frown creasing lines between her brows that hadn't been there when she left, and asking, "Do I know her?"

And the doctor looking at her helplessly, her mouth hanging open like she didn't know what to say to either of them and—

And Chaeyoung walked out.

Lisa watched the woman go, wondering if she had upset her, or if she should be upset or—

"Do I know her?" she asked again.

Her doctor looked at her and smiled, but her eyes were sad. "You do," she said. "She's your wife."

Oh.

Wife.

It was a nice word, a soft word, comforting like...

Lisa didn't know like what. Comfort was forgotten along with so many other things, replaced by pins and rods and replacement parts that kept everything in line while her body tried to knit itself back together around a million points of pain.

"Wife," she said out loud, and it sounded right, and tasted good on her tongue, like chocolate cake and buttercream frosting and—

"Her name is Chaeyoung," the doctor supplied.

"Chaeyoung." The woman who had been there a second ago but was gone now (had Lisa only imagined her?) She has a wife? Not a husband?

Because if she was a man, she would be Lisa's husband, not her wife.

Husband didn't taste good at all. Lisa didn't even need to say it to know that. It was bitter like gunsmoke and black coffee.

"Chaeyoung," Lisa said again, waiting for some sense to fill in the blanks around the name, but there was nothing. She sighed and closed her eyes, too tired to fight through the painkiller fog to chase after something that wasn't there... and maybe she'd only imagined it after all...

....

She'd thought death was the worst thing that could happen to a person, to a relationship, but Chaeyoung soon discovered that going day after day to see the woman she'd pledged her life and love to, watching her body mend but her mind remain shattered was infinitely, infinitely worse.