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1. hunting/hurting

DAY ONE
"you occupy my mind constantly"
pairing: jennie/rowoon

They killed the kumiho in the graveyard. 

It was winter, and Jennie watched as Rowoon dismembered the body, the blood staining the fresh snow and the places where his rolled-up sleeves had fallen a deep ochre. She looked on, silent, when he pulled out the entrails in one smooth and practiced motion.

"In a different life," she started without thinking much about it. The snow, falling lightly since they set out at dawn, caught in the tops of Rowoon's hair. She wanted to brush them away for him, but she, at the same time, did not quite know how to bring this longing forth into fruition. She dug her shovel into the obstinate earth instead, trying to bury the feeling beneath the frost. "Don't you think that could've been me?"

He wiped the side of his face with his wrist. A streak of blood smeared against his cheek. Again, Jennie wanted to reach out for him, feel the warmth of his skin against her palm for no good reason other than the selfish need to want.

"No," he smiled at her kindly. Rowoon had always spoken this way, gentle enough to soften every harsh blow. Only days later, lying on opposite sides of their tent, would Jennie consider the weight of his words, and how cleanly they'd sliced through her. "No, I think you'd kill yourself before you became a monster."

This is where it'll always start, their story.

Jennie bested her first gwishin when she was sixteen. It'd been a big triumph for the family, and her father had hung the severed hand out in the courtyard, comically beside her grandmother's wind chimes. It stayed there until it became leathery and hard from the harsh summer sun, and only then did her mother sell it to their neighborhood's hanyak doctor. Jennie used the money to buy herself a new pair of shoes that she got dirty less than a week later.

She'd known Rowoon before they were posted to Jilin. In fact, she'd known him before he went by Rowoon, which was before they'd been partnered together after both of their parents had taken their names to the shaman – who'd declared the match auspicious enough aside from Rowoon's birth name, Seokwoo. That much was easy to give up when you came from a long lineage of monster hunters, who had sacrificed much more over the centuries in order to keep the equilibrium of the realms.

The day that Jennie let Rowoon drive his knife into the heart of the bulgae they'd been marking for weeks was the night of the harvest moon. In the aftermath, they stared as its blood pooled in between the roots of the large tree where they'd cornered it, like fingers stained silver by the moonlight lacing hands with the earth. This moment of quiet sanctity after taking a life was shared between them, as all things would be from then on.

She heard his voice in her head first. We should lay the beast to rest, he said and Jennie felt a swell of all the things she'd sworn she wouldn't rise within her then. A bird cried in the distance in place of her own voice, choked by a desperate longing.

She tamped the tides down. "We should," she agreed aloud, but neither of them made any motion to do so. Instead they gazed at the moon's ivory face, cracked by the naked branches of the tree, and said nothing more.