Please! Just read your snippet on when your grief stares back and I'm a massive dimension travel sucker! Has the trio been raised with stories of the dead Celine? Do they think "wait a sec, she kind of looks like..." And and I absolutely loved the comparisons to how Celine knows them, with the Mira hair thing and esp Zoey's calculations/analysis.
...do you have more? 👀
Dimension travel and Time travel are my absolute favorite flavour of au because they can be soooo good in the fix-it way but also in the angst way. I love them all to death.
And yes! they were trained and raised with stories of Celine! I don't think their canon counterparts actually got a super-duper lot of stories about Mi-yeong and Soo-min because I think it's a wound that never stopped bleeding for Celine. She was alone in her grief and with Rumi as a responsibility on top of that. Post-movie and post-reconciliation might be the first time Celine actually has the space and the environment necessary to actually start healing.
Soo-min and Mi-yeong, meanwhile, had each other after demon dad and Celine kicked it, so they'd have healed... better? I guess? It's very much a wound that never stopped hurting, theirs just stopped bleeding.
So yeah, they girls know a lot of stories, and they've seen the pictures, so they all recognize her (Zoey being the first to do so lol). They immediately assume demon at first, until she pulls her weapons out and they all just go "!!!???". That's when they start noticing everything wrong, like the gray hairs, the scars along her arms, the wrinkles in her face etc etc.
ANYWAYS Yeah! have some more because I love dimension travel so fucking much:
And then it just went out. That little light that shone so brightly in her gaze, shone of shock, confusion and overwhelming grief just... flickered out. Leaving no emotion, no hurt. It made her dark gaze look as endless as the cosmos and as cold as the night sky. It was as if their lover had walked away, hidden behind ice and just left her body behind. It wasn't violent or sudden. Mi-yeong could see the moment the light started to waver, could feel when the door slammed shut in this stranger's mind. She tried to force herself to say something- anything. Soo-min was frozen beside her, their girls were looking between them holding their breaths but Mi-yeong couldn't move. Her tongue was leaden in her mouth and her throat was dry. "I see." It hadn't changed. Over twenty years and her voice was the exact same as Mi-yeong remembered it. A gentle timbre that'd wash away uncertainty with the calm certainty of success. But it was still wrong. Cold, detached. Apathetic. Like she was measuring them and simply jotting down her observations. Like she had to. Like she couldn't remember the days they'd spent telling each other their deepest secrets and forgiving each other for their darkest sins. "Celine?" Soo-min found her voice before Mi-yeong could, but it was shaky at best. Celine-not-Celine nodded sharply, only once. Not unlike how she'd respond to an order from their mentor, back in the day. Mi-yeong felt lightheaded. "Yes." She responded, still in that monotone that made Mi-yeong's skin itch. "But not yours."
honestly feel free to ask questions about this one, I have no idea when i'll come back to writing on it T~T
Yeessss. And there's something about dimension/time travel that really allows you to compare and contrast characters (and how they view each other) that's so delicious.
Ok ok ok ok. A Celine who sees this almost-perfect world (perfect because she's not in it?) but starts seeing more of the cracks like Rumi's patterns and the shame she's still holding. I wonder what she'll make of Huntr/x's relationship to each other in this world - ways that they're closer, ways that they aren't.
Also a Celine who's a sole survivor (and the survivor's guilt involved in that) trying so hard to keep Miyeong and Soomin separate in her mind, leading her to be that cold, detached self.
(But... but, well, there's Huntr/x. She's raised those girls solo and it's so easy to fall into habits with them when she sees those little weaknesses and wants to help them fix it.)
(Miyeong and Soomin watching as the hardness softens when Celine forgets herself and begins guiding Mira through an unfamiliar moveset she had brought up. Watching almost enviously when Zoey takes advice Celine gives to heart and prank-ambushes her and Celine dodges but laughs.)
(They don't notice the matching longing looks Celine throws their way. Doesn't see how Celine sees how they've grown up to lean on each other so much more in her absence. Doesn't see how Celine aches when Rumi goes to them first and calls them by the title Celine has always prevented herself from having--)
I do wonder how the ball gets rolling for communication tho 🤔 This feels like a great setup for lots of pining and self reflection and not a lot of talking
You get me!!!
It's so fun to toy with in my book. Time-travel tends to be my fix-it au's while dimension hopping tends to be my comparison pieces but they're both so delicious to me
When it comes to huntrix's relations to each other, the biggest difference would be that Mira and Zoey were told about Rumi's patterns way earlier, which allowed another level of closeness that canon!huntrix didn't get to have due to the secret needing to be kept.
But that is also basically the only one (very big indeed, but still) because Celine did encourage the girls to get close to each other. They needed to be close and trust each other when they were both on the field and on stage for things to go smoothly.
And this perfect world isn't perfect because Rumi's patterns are still very much fueled by shame. They are that purple colour and while she doesn't have to hide them from Mira and Zoey, she still needs to hide from the world. They're smaller due to the lack of shame from hiding them from her fellow hunters, but they're still very much not iridescent like C!Rumi's.
And something else is that Soo-min and Mi-yeong were very focused on helping them grow as people, putting duty slightly on the back burner. They saw hurting youngins and decided they were more important, something Celine couldn't do.
Celine turned them into hunters and idols, Soo-min and Mi-yeong turned them into people(at least from Celine's PoV. Unreliable narrator anyone?).
But being a well adjusted individual therefore comes at the cost of their skills. They're good hunters and fighters, don't get me wrong! But Celine looks at them and she sees rigidity and technicalities. They are technically perfect in what they do, reminding Celine so much of how she herself used to fight when she still had her own Soo-min and Mi-yeong to fight with.
But after they died she had to do everything on her own. She had to learn to be more dangerous, more skilled. It then translated into what she taught C!Huntris, making them extremely lethal. It meant that most demons that came through the tears in their world were nothing but canon fodder to them. au!Huntrix strategized and still got close calls where C!huntrix would have made a game out of who could slay the demons in the funniest way if put in the same situation.
Maybe that's how it starts lmao
Celine sees them out hunting at some point and Rumi -her fellow sword wielder- does something that's technically correct, but could've been done so much smoother, finally gets Celine to snap. They are going to die just like Soo-min and Mi-yeong had, just like Celine had at this rate! (is the excuse she gives herself. In reality it was honest to the Honmoon 99% reflex that caused her to shout-)
"Footwork Rumi! You do not slow down in a fight, unless you want to try tanking a blow, of course."
And it unfortunately distracts au!Rumi a bit, so Celine tosses her own blade at an approaching demon to banish it. Then she has to think back to all those lessons she gave years ago at this point.
"Think of the ground being lava. If you stay still too long you'll burn your feet, always keep moving." And she can tell this other Rumi is a bit annoyed with her backseat hunting, but she can also see her take the words to heart as she starts moving again, her feet carrying her along with each of her strikes, no longer staying in one place.
Either way it starts her down the path of coaching Huntrix once more. She doesn't have the time to re-train them, she needs to get home after all, but she does give them pointers when she can.
Soo-min and Mi-yeong will see this, see the familiarity and they'll ache. This is what they could've had if Celine had survived. They could've had her gently chopping Zoey on the top of her head when she tried to ambush her. They could have had Celine instructing the younger generation on how to keep their hair out of their faces when they fought (because neither Soo-min nor Mi-yeong let their own hair out when fighting), allowing Mira to finally do a simple half-up half-down style that wouldn't bother her as much.
(Also something something, Celine being in the middle of hunts and Soo-min and Mi-yeong actively panicking about it because of what happened last time their Celine was faced with a hoard of demons something something it doesn't help at all to see how dangerous she has become, it just highlights how different this Celine is something something Celine would also panic if she were to see them fighting demons something something)
And like you said: They won't see how Celine looks on with a burning throat when Rumi doesn't call out to them by name. Celine knows she's not made for that role, she knows that.
She'd grown too sharp in her time alone, she'd just cut anything that she held too tightly.
That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
Also:
C!Huntrix is fucking BESIDES themselves by the time they figure out how to get to the different universe. Celine might've been gone for weeks at this point, they had to lie and forge Celine's signature for the company so that they'd think she was just taking an extended vacation or something.
Add to that the first thing they learn in this new universe is that Celine is dead???? Yeah no. They are not having a fun happy time.
Maybe they come in through a tear or something, so other Huntrix goes to take care of it and. Well. Soon enough the Honmmoon is basically sending out a distress signal lol.
Celine is closest at that point so she hurries over only to see au!Huntrix taking hits from an enraged looking Rumi, fangs and claws out and everything; an angry looking Mira, who keeps glaring at her counterparts hair; and a strangely annoyed looking Zoey, who keeps tossing random shit she finds on the ground to mess up the trajectory of au!Zoey's shin-kals.
C!Rumi leaps at au!Rumi and is promptly snatched out of the air and held up by the back of her jacket like she's a misbehaving cat.
"No." Is all Celine says as she stands in-between the participants of the one-sided beat down.
in .3 seconds C!Rumi has attached herself to Celine in a koala hug and C!Zoey and Mira are actively leaping at her to join the hug because thank fuck you're not dead!
au!Huntrix is like ??? These are your versions of us???
And Celine is just like Yupp. These ones are mine.
au!Huntrix is left just staring as C!Huntrix is actively glaring at them from where they're clinging to Celine who... looks very used to being a human jungle gym.
(C!Huntrix recognized so many of the moves au!Huntrix were pulling and they were in fact Not Okay with Celine apparently taking the time to teach these posers things instead of trying to find her way back to the obviously superior versions. The audacity.)
