Chapter 1: i'll be good
Summary:
She chases the stars.
Notes:
Fueled by Jaymes Young, "I'll Be Good"
Chapter Text
She remembers being small, too small to really reach the sink to wash her hands in a public restroom. She remembers another girl just as small not even trying to do it by herself, because her mom, what must have been that girl’s Celine, lifted her up, clearing the rim of the basin easily and helping those tiny hands get clean. The little girl beamed in arms that didn’t hesitate to wrap around, touched by hands that weren’t rushed in a haphazard way to break off contact.
When Rumi had looked away, up and into the mirror, she had seen Celine’s face staring at the back of her head with that look.
The hope she didn’t realize had blossomed caught fire and burned to ash. She didn’t ask what had wrapped her mind in a cold vice. It felt heavy. She remembers tearing her eyes away and not knowing what to call that expression, that distant, removed glimmer in Celine’s eyes. How could she?
But as she slumped down from her tippy toes, weighed by something that felt an awful lot like a hundred pounds of tears and the unrecognized ache for a hug, she could sense what it meant.
Don’t touch me.
She pretended that Celine was proud of her for being able to do it by herself. She was different. That little girl being lowered gently back to the ground had no idea the role Rumi was meant to play, so unlike her Rumi had to learn to do things by herself. She had to be strong. Celine had to step back. Had to let her be a big girl.
How else was Rumi supposed to get rid of her patterns? Love wasn’t going to stop the demons.
(That thought was just another crack, another fault line stenciled across her skin. She could claim whatever she wanted, but it didn’t change the rot in her blood spreading from the inside out.)
She sees that look now though, through the hurt and devastation on Mira and Zoey’s faces, that distant comet of revulsion catching the dim backstage lights. She feels it in her spine, the way they edge back. The threads of the Honmoon tying them together fray, quick, so quick she can’t even think to grasp them. She’s been cut off—removed like a limb they just realized was rotten.
She isn’t wanted. She isn’t one of them.
She’s a demon.
It is instinct, or maybe habit, to make herself small, so she can’t touch, even with the yawning space between them. She learned well.
But she begs, still, greedy and selfish and terrible, so maybe not well enough.
“Please, please—please,” a mantra more desperate than any Celine had pressed into her escapes from her mouth like the hopes flickering out like candles between her fingers, weak and sputtering. Her marks are burning and glowing and doing everything but what Rumi trained her whole life to ensure—staying hidden, unobtrusive, unseen. “Don’t leave. Don’t—”
She remembers being little, too small to not fall behind Celine’s brisk stride. It was hard, keeping up. She remembers the tree, the Honmoon, and its talismans, caught by the wind that seemed to usher her closer. She remembers the first time the Honmoon reached back, out, and settled in the form of her blade, too big but lighter than air. Her hands struggled to wrap around the hilt and her eyes could not contain the glow of starlight that bloomed, gentle and singing, in her tiny hands and in her heart.
Hello, it hummed. You are special. You are mine. I will keep you safe.
It had felt like a hug.
The way the starlight comes into existence now, crying, crying, crying, digs into her like a stab.
A phantom butcher’s knife not unlike the blade of Mira’s gok-do catches the breath in Rumi’s lungs and cleaves it apart; her voice can’t come out in anything but a whimper. She takes a staggering step forward. “No, please, we can still—I can still fix it. Please.”
“Rumi, just… stop,” Mira exhales, not firm, not steady, but more like she can’t bear to even waste the words on her anymore.
Zoey’s eyes flicker, distraught, between the starlight and the patterns, not to Rumi. “How can we trust you? You admitted to working with him, and your patterns—Rumi, were you ever going to tell us? That you’re—that you—this whole time, we’ve been training to—"
“The Honmoon can fix it! Me! Zoey, please!”
Zoey’s hands rise in unison with Rumi’s heart falling. The two shin-kal that shimmer quietly, with a painful finality, in betwixt the rapper’s fingers, drive it home.
She’s…
Never going to be good.
Never going to be wanted.
(You thought they could still love you?)
Rumi’s gaze flutters, going distant, lax as she tries to shield herself from the (scorndisgusthate) betrayal on their faces. Her chest aches, burns hot, deep, unyielding with the agony of her grief.
She’s lost them. She’s lost everything.
Because—
“You’re a demon,” Mira reasserts, almost as if to herself. Still, her grip is… wrong. The way the gok-do is held out, less like a swing ready to be set in motion and more like—
Don’t touch me.
(You are a stain.)
Zoey shudders with a breath and the pain on her face only makes Rumi hate herself more.
(A corruption that your precious mentor should have excised from the beginning.)
She thought they would hate her.
She was right.
But she has never once thought that she’d hurt them.
Did they love her, then? Once?
For a moment?
(You are a wretched, unlovable thing. You broke their hearts along with their trust.)
Rumi stumbles.
Their stances tighten minutely across from her.
“You’re a demon, Rumi. And…”
Zoey breaks a little saying it. “We’re hunters.”
Don’t touch me!
(You are alone.)
Rumi stands still, for just a moment. Shuts her eyes to their words. If she opens them, will she see their blades descend?
That low voice she had always loved to hear crack with sleep in the morning echoes in her ears. “And it’s our job to kill… demons.”
(Unwanted. Unloved. Do you see? Do you hear? They hate you.)
Rumi sucks in a short, aborted breath, adrift, panicking but not, her mind racing and her body struggling to catch up. Then it’s her body that’s too quick, in motion before her mind can catch the reins. She’s moving through water, through space—she’s falling into nothing. She is heavy like a stone and as weightless, inconsequential as a dead leaf plucked by the breeze. Nothing makes sense. She’s—
(But I will love you.)
“He can hear me. That’s why I can never be free. His voice can reach me, even here, through your precious Honmoon.”
She knows the story. Knows the appeal of having what you so desperately want crooned in your ears alongside all your insecurities…
Hasn’t Jinu been doing that all along?
She’s not in control.
Not completely.
But she can stall. She can stop it.
She can fix it, the one thing.
She can fix the mistake Celine made.
She won’t—she won’t be what he wants her to be. Even if she is what they know her to be, now. She is weak, but she can be strong, just this once.
Just this one, last time.
Celine will be proud, Rumi thinks, distant, hopeful. Please let her be proud.
“Rumi, take a step back. Now.”
Mira.
She said such awful things to Mira. Rumi truly is the worst of the worst; does she have any right to plead with her, to tell Mira she never meant it? That she hopes Mira will still dance in the morning like they did together, turning in spirals in the living room, twirling whoever is lucky to be caught in her orbit into dizzying spins, laughing when it’s one spin too many and inevitably they stumble? That the only thing that matches the way she smiles unrestrained and confident is the way Zoey laughs freely, loud and with her whole body? The way Zoey curls her fingers into theirs and hooks them along to whatever fascinating or mundane thing that steals her eye? The way she rambles and how—how happy she is, just to exist at the same time as them.
How many times did she crowd close to them on the couch, stealing their warmth as her patterns burned beneath layers that were never thick enough to warm her without their touch? How many times did she linger in doorways to listen to their voices? How many times did she sit at the same table as them, pretending nothing was wrong, that she deserved the same simple pleasures they did, and gorge herself on their presence?
All these beautiful moments Rumi had thieved right from under their noses, and she can’t bring herself to apologize for doing it, only to be sorry that she ever had the chance.
She deserves to be alone.
(But you don’t have to be.)
Rumi shakes her head, of the memories, of a voice she never wanted to hear. Pushes against the marks trying to shackle her in place, hot chains of harsh violet that sear in their effort to dissuade her forward march.
“I know we’re hunters, but I don’t—I don’t think I can—god, Rumi—don’t—don’t make us do this.”
“We can’t ever go back to the way we were.”
“I know that, Mira! But this is Rumi! You feel it too, don’t you? Look at you, you’re not even holding your gok-do right!”
Rumi can’t speak. She looks through them. The starlight is so bright.
(Why race to the end? Why flee the arms that would embrace you?)
And the darkness so close.
Why?
Because this is how it was always going to play out. She was silly to think otherwise.
(Come to me. Come. To. Me.)
Rumi shuts her eyes. Thinks, No, and inches forward.
Even if she is rotten at her core, she won't turn to him. She won't turn her back on them.
Not like that.
Mira moves, edging away, tilting her head the barest bit, her eyes leaving Rumi to meet Zoey’s. “Fuck, Zoey, I know, I—"
Rumi is there, then, in front of her.
It's so bright.
Rumi chooses to burn in the starlight.
The screams tear through the veil that falls over her, but they are just a breeze that barely stirs her consciousness, her chest speared on the end of Mira’s gok-do. She is the choking flame at the end of a burnt-out candle wick. She is a natural disaster finally coming to a close, and in her absence everything she touched can finally heal.
Yes, this is it.
This is how she fixes it.
She burns it out of her.
“What the fuck, what the fuck, what—no, nonono, you weren’t supposed to—"
“RUMI!”
And she did it so they didn’t have to. Used all her force. It’s straight through. Through the chest. She’s choking around it, lungs struggling.
She’s standing, then she’s sitting, then she’s laying. The world is full of color, bright but blurred, watercolor shapes surrounding her.
This warm feeling around her… is it the Honmoon?
Is it crying?
Is it—they’re holding her.
“Please, no, Rumi,” hands brush her face, stroke the untidy mess of her hair that strays from her braid, sweep across her jaw. “Don’t, don’t,” the words splinter, cracked and fragile and desperate.
Their arms are around her. The gok-do is gone. It had burned and now it does not. She’s floating with it, this sensation.
Surely, she cannot burden them when she is no longer heavy.
“This is insane, it’s not real,” something pushes against the emptiness of her chest. It doesn’t hurt. It only feels like pressure, like an anchor. “You’re crazy, you’re so—why would you do this? Why did—I wouldn’t have, I couldn’t, never, never—if you had just—”
They are touching her. They aren’t flinching. They aren’t letting go or shoving her away.
Are the marks gone?
“Rumi, I don’t give a shit about your patterns,” Zoey barks, wetly. “I just want you to stay! Can you stay? Please, just stay. We can fix this, we can do better, all of us. Just give us the chance!”
Why?
A sob.
A choked gasp.
Neither of them hers.
“Rumi—"
Did I… do it wrong?
I tried, I really did, I promise.
Why aren’t you happy?
I fixed it.
I fixed me.
A shuddered breath. This one is hers. She doesn’t feel it, only knows in the way someone looks out the window and sees the trees blow that it is there.
The next gets stuck.
“Mira, she’s not—"
“No, no—please, move—!”
Another one doesn’t come.
Everything is still.
Everything is quiet.
(Oh. Child. Did you think this would save you?)
(You bear my mark.)
She opens her eyes, and she is standing, and the flames are hot and violet, and—
She screams.
Chapter 2: i never meant to start a fire
Summary:
She remembers until she does not.
Notes:
I didn't have a plan going into this except angst. Tags will apparently be added to reflect the direction this trainwreck takes me. Jaymes Young is still here.
Chapter Text
Her voice shatters. She goes silent. She goes down, onto her knees, bracing herself with her arms. Her gaze wavers on the unmoved ashen stone beneath her, on her hands burning with marks and covered in the soot that powders the ground. All around her, golden eyes leer, but unlike the horror beholden to humans, these are demons, and even they are disgusted by her. She feels the scorn within their eyes brand her skin.
“Look at you,” the fire crackles, solemn and mocking all at once. “How did you ever think you could oppose me when you belong here, at my heels?”
Rumi’s looking. She hasn’t stopped looking. Her hands aren’t hands but claws, her skin isn’t flesh but pale ash given shape, burning with Gwi-ma’s hateful patterns. Her fangs sit large and blatant behind her lips. There is a heaviness on the crown of her head. Something juts there, and she won’t touch them, she doesn’t want to know. She must finally look the part.
Her body has truly turned on her, completely and irreversibly—or is it her soul that’s twisted into this ugly caricature of sin?
That can’t be. She doesn’t have one, not anymore. Instead there’s a gaping pit where a gok-do sat, though the mockery of demonic flesh stitched itself back over the wound, leaving only a harsh, twisting ripple of a scar. It would have been the only mark she’s proud of, if she wasn’t here.
But she is. She shouldn’t be. Demons die on their starlight blades: permanently, irrevocably, no exceptions. Except, much as she began to think otherwise, she wasn’t wholly demon.
Did the human half of her betray her? Did her blood churn and deceive the hunters (Mira, Zoey, their names hurt to think, hurt to grasp) into believing she had been exorcised? It wouldn’t surprise her. She’s always been deceitful. She lies the same way people breathe, instinctually, a survival reflex.
“Get up. I would take a closer look at the little girl that thought herself worthy of standing against me.”
She doesn’t get an option — she understands now, what Jinu meant about the lack of control, of how wholly Gwi-ma’s voice seeps in. He is choking smoke, he is suffocation; you cannot argue against him when he pulls the air you would use to do it with from your lungs. Her feet lift from the ground, and she’s yanked by some unseen force, made to drop to her knees in unwilling subservience before the hungry pyre. Unwilling, but unresisting. She thought her struggle over, foolishly, stupidly, and she hasn’t yet figured out if she can muster the will to renew it. If she even has it in her.
Gwi-ma recognizes the defeat hanging over her like a shroud; he savors it, growing brighter as she dims.
There is a long draw of silence before he sighs.
“It’s hard to believe,” he says, then breaks into a laugh, hard enough that a chorus of nervous titters from the demons at the bottom of his altar echo up. “That an ugly little thing like you thought she could be loved by those wretched canaries when you bear my marks. Mine. The gall! What were you thinking?”
She doesn’t answer.
It was rhetorical, anyway. “I know what you were thinking: that your Honmoon could save you, that its light could purify you, that your friends could look past my patterns and see you, once you scoured me from your flesh.”
Rumi’s unseeing eyes remain fixed on the dull stone of Gwi-ma’s altar. The flames roar higher. It’s not warm here in front of him. One might think it but the violet haze illuminating her only seems to draw whatever remnants of heat, the lingering memory of arms around her, into itself, leaving her chilled and lifeless. It would hurt. It does hurt. It’s a distant thing that doesn’t matter.
She is a wound. It’s in her blood to ache.
“You should have listened to Jinu. Isn’t that right?”
A flinch of a reaction. Luminous eyes lift slightly and a set of dark shoes settle in front of her vision. The hem of a black hanbok almost brushes her knees. The killer edges of claws prick at the periphery of her senses, and her legs are beading with blood from ten points.
… Bleeding?
Demons don’t bleed.
But he stops her from lingering on that fact.
“Yes. You can’t erase your nature.”
Jinu. The traitor, the liar, the one who saw a fool and made her dance and juggle and stumble for entertainment. Could she blame him for spurring the show on? She made it so easy, falling for his lies. Trusting him. Thinking he had a shred of goodness in him. Her desperate need to have someone like her, someone who could understand, someone who couldn’t help what they were but still chose to be different (as if that ever matters) left her vulnerable to his games.
“But,” His snake tongue is at play again, coiling to strangle the wisps of resistance from her. “You might erase the memories,” he says.
Gwi-ma grins behind him.
Rumi shakes her head, immediate, but weak, so weak. That ache digs deeper, spreads farther. She is a bone-deep bruise being pressed. She can’t be tempted, she’s not. How could she bear to give up those memories? Her entire being, her whole life spent fighting against the origin of her cursed blood? More than that, how could she surrender Zoey and Mira, even in memories? She is in the dark and they are the only thing she can see flickering in the smog of her mind, warm and golden.
The memories are too precious, she can’t—
(You don’t deserve them.)
“Shut up,” she whispers.
Jinu lowers himself to one knee, crooking her chin with a finger.
She thinks about biting him. Tearing into the hands that only wanted to use her instead of hold her, and god, she had just wanted to be held, by anyone, even if it was him (because she couldn’t have them, she can’t, not ever).
He must see that feral urge on her face because he draws back, smiling in that self-deprecating way of his. “If you just accept what you are, serve as you’re meant to, you don’t have to be haunted anymore.”
(Why suffer more than you must? Let me ease your burden.)
“After all,” Jinu continues, empty and defeated with that false smile on his face. “We can’t escape this existence.”
We can’t escape Gwi-ma, is what goes unsaid between them.
She used to feel sorry for him. Now she wishes that it had been true, that he had never crawled his way through the Honmoon, and instead remained trapped on the other side of it with that monster leering behind him. Would she still have ended up here, if not for him and his lies?
(Your lies.)
“Just look at what happened, when you… tried.”
He saw, then. He watched.
“I trusted you,” she says, for lack of anything else.
“I know.” He dips his head, dropping his gaze. He’s trying to lower her guard. “But now there’s truly no more secrets between us. There’s no need to fight anymore, either. After all, we’re on the same side.”
He holds out his hand again, slower this time, and leaves it suspended in the gap that separates them from touching. It’s almost a mockery of the first time they met, where she had been toppled by the force of his uncaring stride, and left to pick herself back up. He hadn’t needed anything but her defeat then—but now, he wants her obedience.
His eyes lift, and then do not waver.
She doesn’t dare to think there’s a touch of pleading to them.
(You were never one of them.)
A chuckle emanates from the flames while Rumi stares at Jinu blankly. “Well, halfbreed?” Gwi-ma calls. “Shall I take it all away? Remove that leash from your throat?”
Her chest burns.
Rumi is on the couch. There’s an arm thrown over her shoulder and Mira’s leg is pressed against hers. Zoey is splayed out across their laps with her earbuds in, fixated on building a beat that had been developing throughout the day in her head. A K-drama that Mira loves to mock is playing. Rumi isn’t paying attention, soaking in the contact, the ghostly brushes of Mira’s hand along her braid, the soft tug of her playing with the end, and Zoey wiggling to that rhythm she’s already said she can’t wait to show them.
Rumi is at the table. There’s an attempt at something—something that was meant to be edible, but Mira had lost track of time, enlisted against her will into a search party for Zoey’s phone. When the steam darkens into smoke, they share joint expressions of “oh shit” and run to find the pot overflowing and the pork slices curling in on themselves like shrimp to escape the heat. The three of them solemnly try it anyways, the edges of the meat crisped, the noodles falling apart, and they all make a face, Mira and Zoey letting their first bite slip off their tongue. It’s not good. Rumi eats it anyways with a very tight smile, so Mira lunges across the table to take her bowl from her with an embarrassed flush as Zoey says, “Babe, Mira—I can’t, I’m sorry, oh my god Rumi I don’t know how you swallowed that I’mgoingtopuke” and rushes to spit what’s left in her mouth away, thrown by the conflicting textures of charcoal pork and soggy noodles.
She’s with them on the streets, three goofballs in disguise sampling the stands. She is with them on the stage, dripping with the sweat and beaming with satisfaction—then on the floor after a hard cry fest— and on the kitchen counters at 3 AM with a snack and a melancholic story from one of them that leads to them holding hands and cuddling together in someone’s bed to make up for the lack of it in the past.
“Rumi?”
“Yeah?”
Zoey knocked her head against Rumi’s shoulder, slumping after a long day of doomscrolling and snacks. “Where would we be, you think, if demons didn’t exist?”
I wouldn’t exist, Rumi thought. “Well, you’d be… hm. A marine biologist that educates people through rap,” Rumi jested. “Famous, adorable; there’ll be shirts with your face on ‘em.”
Zoey rolled her eyes. “As if there aren’t already.”
“True, but you’d have turtles on these. And Mira…”
“What about Mira?” Mira settled down beside them, loose from a yoga session that Rumi and Zoey studiously did not watch, did not sit spellbound as Mira stretched like a feline in front of the floor-to-ceiling bay windows and contort into shapes that had their mouths go dry.
There’s a lot they don’t talk about. Just girly things.
“Dancer, maybe an instructor.” Zoey answered before Rumi, tugging her eyes away from Mira. Her ears are red. “Or a cover girl model. Makeup brands slapped with your name, and you’ll be slapped on every billboard, the whole shebang.”
“So basically, nothing changes,” Mira said with a dry smirk, bracing her back on the arm of the couch and throwing her long, well-defined legs over the two of them. Rumi nervously sets her hands on the fabric of her leggings. Mira didn’t seem to notice. “Well, what about you?”
“Me?” Rumi’s face showed a tinge of embarrassment. The other two share a curious glance. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“Come on Rumi, you gotta give us more than thaaat,” Zoey nudges her. “We’ve got our demon-free alternate reality future planned out, now tell us yours!”
Rumi shrugged, a helpless smile and half-hearted laugh tugging from her at her maknae’s insistence. “Well, I don’t know that I’d still be singing, not if you guys aren’t. I might like to try something else.” There was so much out of her reach when the first thing she had been taught to grasp was a weapon. Hard to think of a future past the “can she/will she” be free to ever enjoy one. “But honestly… I think I’d just want to be wherever you guys are. Even without the Honmoon, I’d like to think we were meant to meet.”
Zoey squeed, tearing up. “Awww, are you calling us your soulmates? Our fearless leader is such a softie! I don’t know what I’d do without you guysss…”
“Nooo,” Mira groaned. “Stop that, Zoey, it’s too early for us to be—” she sniffed, her attempt at an impassive expression cracking as her lips quiver, “to be crying!”
Rumi slapped her own cheeks but tears already streaking down her face. “No! No crying!”
Of course, they bawl their eyes out.
Even now, on the other side of the Honmoon, Rumi is with them. She wants to stay with them, hold onto them, even if they could never want the same.
She’s just greedy like that.
“Go fuck yourself, Jinu. You might be a coward unable to face your past,” she barks out, harsh and jagged. “But I’m done hiding from the truth. It’s all that’s left of me.”
Jinu blinks, his hand stinging from the harsh slap that levied it away from her. “That’s your choice?” he queries, quietly, like he’s surprised, uncomprehending that she would choose to keep her pain and her regret alongside the joy that was buried deep within them.
Neither of them gets a chance to say anything else. “Enough! You’ve had your opportunity Jinu,” Gwi-ma flares. “It’s time to bring those hunters to ruin, and you, girl, will be instrumental in their downfall, whether you accept it or not.”
Before Rumi can spit back, she’s lifted off her feet again, brought high above Jinu and made level with the facsimile of Gwi-ma’s eyes. She grows colder in the proximity, but the scar on her chest burns yet, empowering her to fight.
“I won’t betray them!” she screams, straining in that phantom grip. The Honmoon ripples with her dual-layered voice, a cascade of light along an unrelenting night, and it draws a hush over the dark realm.
Gwi-ma doesn’t respond right away—his gaze lifting to the fading threads of the Honmoon, something thoughtful, terrifying in his silence. The songbird voice of a hunter has never been heard here before, even when caged in a beastly shape like it is now. Eventually the last thread of the Honmoon fades back into transparency, and Gwi-ma looks at her.
Rumi’s marks catch alight, glowing as bright as his flames, and she’s screaming for a different reason as his attention settles back onto her.
“You never had a choice,” he says, final and unmoved by her pain.
And—
It starts when she is small. She remembers Celine—
And she had to be strong.
She remembers a little girl.
Smiling in arms that weren’t afraid to hold her close.
She remembers Celine, and—
She couldn’t keep up, Celine too afraid to risk her hands catching hers.
She remembers the tree and a blade—
Shimmering with the warmth of a hug, too big too hold.
She remembers a dancer, angry and at first indifferent to the duty she felt forced on her—
Holding her heart to keep it from leaking out, “Nonono, why did you—"
She remembers a rapper, nervous and fumbling, with words that cut to the bone—
Stroking her face, unwilling to let go, “Don’t go, give us a chance, we can do it better this time, Ru—"
Rumi remembers—
Her chest aches.
She—
She remembers that it hurts. She writhes, the light of her memories draining out, and a demon is looking up at her. There is regret plain on his face, shadowed beneath the brim of his hat. “Sorry,” he apologizes, and she doesn’t know why. “Me asking was really just a formality.”
Ask? What had he asked—
There’s another flare from her king’s fire, scorching her from the inside out, and her skin blazes back.
All that once shone turns to rust.
Chapter 3: i got a problem doin' things i'm not supposed to
Summary:
They're not even allowed to hold her.
Notes:
Hey. So. I'm flying by the seat of my pants here. Halsey, Suga, "Lilith" snuck in here.
Chapter Text
She killed her.
“Mira…”
She killed her. Rumi cried and begged and broke in front of them and Mira killed her for it. Rumi cracked into a thousand fault lines and the tip of Mira’s gok-do was the pressure point that shattered her into too many shards for them to pick up, and she killed her.
“Mira.”
She’s shaking. She’s more unsteady than she’s ever been—no tireless, overworked sets of choreography had ever destabilized her like this, left her floundering in her own skin. She’s—she’s trying to hold Rumi together. Mira ran her through with her gok-do (no, she didn’t, she didn’t, she swears she didn’t mean to, never wanted to, but Rumi threw herself on it and Mira let her, she didn’t stop her, she gave her the means, she is murderer and accomplice and so goddamn sorry) and now she’s trying to cover the hole before everything she cares about seeps out of it and throughout it all her hands won’t stop fucking shaking.
“Mira!”
Mira wrenches her head up to see Zoey holding her own hands up. There is horror on her face and ash is falling from between her fingers. Zoey is crying harder than ever, barely able to breathe through the heaving sobs that are quiet in how much they take out of her, snot and spit and a mental breakdown given a body because she can’t hold Rumi.
Mira inhales sharp, looks back down, past her own hands, past the hands that had held the thing that killed Rumi, past the hands that had opened her best friend up and were now pitifully trying to stem the tide, and—
“No, no. No. This isn’t happening, it’s too much. Rumi, please, please, come on,” her voice comes out pitiful, warping with hysteria. The edges of her vision are fuzzing and Rumi is bleeding through her fingers and drifting into ash around them. She looks at Rumi’s face and—
She wishes she didn’t.
She’s empty—she’s broken—she’s the monument of their happiness crumbling to dust, to nothing—she had smiled on the blade the same way she beamed at them when they came out in their costumes, like she was looking at something beautiful, but now her mouth is agape and the eye that’s left, golden, is wide and glassy and she does not look at peace, no—she looks terrified.
“I can’t—Mira, I don’t know what to do! We can’t let her go, not like this, she’s not—she deserves—"
Rumi slips away, bit by bit. It is not in the way of the demons they’ve slain before. She goes slowly, terribly, and there is blood seeping onto the ground as the cinders rise. There are tears cutting through the ash that spirals and catches on their faces. They are doing everything they can to delay the inevitable, to hold on to her, but turns out Mira is as useless at keeping Rumi from drifting into nothing as she was at trying to keep her from growing distant, from leaving them behind in the shadow of her lies.
And true to form, Mira ends up with nothing.
Zoey is still sobbing and Mira is staring numbly at the—at—on her fingers, on her arms, her clothes. The two of them look like they fell into a bonfire gone cold, unwilling witnesses to the cremation of a girl who once sat alive between them in the middle of the night, snorting over awful movies and choking at the dirty jokes they whispered innocently to each other like they had no idea of the connotations.
And now there will be a space where she sat.
There will be a hole where she lived.
There will be silence where she used to laugh.
“M-Mira—”
Mira’s not breathing. She can’t. But then she does, and the fact that she can and Rumi can’t twists stomach. She leans over, scrambles away as the sick crawls out of her throat.
She can—she tastes it. The ash on her lips.
Rumi.
She and Zoey talked about it before. Talked about it often, after learning Rumi had never kissed another. A fantasy where Rumi let them in, lowered the shoulders that always hiked up in defense at sudden touches, where their overworked leader would soften in their arms instead of stiffen. They confessed that want, that desire, that hunger to taste a shy mouth, that soft and consuming and aching love to pull Rumi close in the same way she pulled the two of them into her orbit, planets circling a distant star. What would their lives have been like without her? they wondered. They knew. They would have floated aimlessly in the dark, always missing something. Something in them was always meant for the other, and for her. They whispered this truth to each other on the couch long after Rumi had gone to bed and held onto a hope that burned with a fervency parallel to Rumi’s building enthusiasm for that golden glow.
This is not how Mira wanted Rumi’s first kiss.
Her stomach aches and she’s weak from exertion when she finishes. She can barely hold herself up. Her hair is out of her face, held back, and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” is bouncing in the air and in her skull around them and it’s only after a minute that Mira realizes it’s her voice killing the terrible quiet. Zoey pulls her close and they are still crying, trying to keep what’s left of them together. “I didn’t mean it, Zoey, I didn’t, I never wanted this, I want her back, let this be a dream, please, I can’t—”
Zoey can’t even speak, only shakes her head above Mira’s as she tugs Mira to her chest. Their hearts are thundering with pain, loud and wailing.
But their grief is not sacred, and a moment is all they get to tend to the ashes of their future.
The Honmoon undulates, a whimper.
Zoey lurches. “Mira,” she gasps wetly, and reaches down to yank Mira’s face up. Grief twists her features, though what fills her gaze now is chilling, turning her eyes to pitch, twin dark ponds whose depths wait for those who can’t swim. “It was them. She said—him, Jinu! The Saja Boys. This, all of this, leads back to them.”
Mira clenches Zoey’s waist hard enough to hurt but Zoey doesn’t wince, going distant with the same realization. Her mind races, putting it together quickly, precisely. “The demons pretending to be Bobby.”
Demons that had pretended to be their manager, their caretaker.
“Takedown,” Zoey follows, the word whispered like something dirty, cursed. It might be, now, for all the hell it brought down on them. “They used our faces, didn’t they?”
They must have, because Rumi had been surprised to see them, terrified that her flight from the stadium had been cut off. She had been stripped of her protection, the jacket she wore like her hoodies left behind on the stage, a shield against touch, and oh, that meant she had been touched, and outed, and then betrayed twice, once through illusion and the second time in truth.
Demons led them to this, but they played their own part, and Mira would never forgive herself for it. Rumi had been in a desperate struggle to outpace the Honmoon tearing this whole time, to outrun being condemned as something she clearly never wanted to be, and the monsters masquerading as boys had capitalized on it. Found out her secret and flayed her for it. Used the people who should have always been on her side to do it, letting their insecurities fester between them and pull them apart.
Because they wouldn’t have reacted this way, they couldn’t have, not in any other situation but this one when they were so close to victory but their doubts closer—and Jinu, closer to Rumi than anyone.
Jinu.
“You’re right. All this shit,” Mira’s bones vibrate. She totters to her feet, yanking Zoey up along with her. She lets the pain stay, but she doesn’t let it lay quiet and still—she wouldn’t know what to do with it. Instead, she spurns it, lets it boil into something familiar, something violent. The way her temperature rises, the way her skin goes hot and her eyes burn and her jaw clenches, this is what she knows. “Jinu. The Saja Boys. If it weren’t for them… Rumi would still be…”
Alive. Hiding. Afraid.
It rings hollow, even in its truth.
Because at the root of it, this happened because Rumi didn’t trust them, and they proved her right not to. Jinu was just a symptom of their separation. There was a distance, a gulf flooding between them and Rumi, and they didn’t think to grab oars and cross over to her. There were missed cues, overlooked signs, and uncertainty—in herself, in them. Her eyes always drifting to him, Mira noticed, like he was a lighthouse.
Except he led her close, then let the lights go out as the storm rolled in.
Mira should have known better. Should have dug deeper. Seen the signs. She was the walking, talking definition of abandonment issues, and somehow she missed seeing her reflection in Rumi because Rumi didn’t get angry—she got scared.
Now there is ash on her fingers and there is the hilt of a murder weapon filling the space between them.
Mira shakes her head, hard enough to make her head pound worse than any bass. She can’t sit and nurse her bruises; she’s learned a long time ago that it only opens up the opportunity to hurt her worse. She’s built to takes hits and get back up and throw one harder.
And the truth is, she thinks if she sits this time, if she lets herself rest with the grief, she will lay down with it and she will never get back up again.
Her gok-do, the awful, ugly thing that she once thought beautiful and trustworthy, sits in her grip, its edge starving for more.
Zoey shifts on her heels and her shin-kal fan out like talons; she smiles hollowly down at them. “There’s no going back,” Zoey says. “There’s no way we can save the Honmoon with just a duet.”
“Yeah,” Mira replies quietly, taking a step forward that Zoey matches. Her spear is held out, away.
“We can’t stop them.”
Their stride picks up.
“Not a fucking chance,” hisses out bitterly from Mira’s mouth, focused ahead.
“We’ll make it hurt, though,” Zoey hums, that sad, sad quirk to her lips. “Yeah? That’s the least we can do.”
Mira breathes, lets it sit in her chest, and feels the ache of it. She reaches for Zoey's hand and pauses for a second to just—look at her. The half of her heart she has left. Zoey looks back just the same, a mirror of pain and love and fury.
Winning is a child’s fantasy. Survival is not in the cards. The Honmoon chooses three, and they are now only two. It is a matter of course, then, a primal drive to right the balance, that pushes them onwards now. The only way to fill this pit in their souls is to chase after their third in any way they can, and it is as much their choice as it is a law of causality: they were three, and they will be three again.
“So long as I carve up that smug bastard’s face, I’ll be satisfied.”
They leave the stadium. They follow the thunder of feet on the streets. Thousands of souls, meandering to their doom, to the devils that flicker on the LED displays lining the buildings above them. HUNTR/X merch litters the ground, symbols of hope and joy now little more than garbage. There’s a strange tension filling the crowd, a refrain of anxiety dogging their haggard steps. Mira and Zoey fall in line, forms tense and predatory, anticipating this last hunt with all that’s left of them.
Overhead, overlaid with the symbol of the Saja Boys, Namsan Tower looms. No one else but them knows the double-meaning of their moniker—that it is not a pride of lions that await, but reapers eager for a fresh harvest.
There is a finality to their every step. There is ash trailing in their wake. There is a broken heart cracking with every beat in their chests. There are whispers in their ears that try and fail to speak over the vengeance pulsing in their veins. Hand in hand, they are what was made of them and they wish they had a chance to be something else, something softer, something that could have held Rumi’s hand in their other in spite of the lies, spare her the pain they and the world put her through.
The tunnels of the tower’s stadium close in on them. Wary of the light giving them away in the dark, they let their weapons return to stardust, packed in like cattle with the fans.
Like a tide, they are pushing into the stadium.
The roar of the crowd, of the pride, bellows out around them.
The lights kick off.
Five haunting figures hover over a backdrop of hot magenta.
Chanting reverberates within the shell of the tower.
Pray for me now.
They’re pushing through, and the Saja Boys' voices tick up.
The remnants of the demon hunters are trained on Jinu, not straying from their path even when jostled by the victims intoxicated by their insidious death track. They are stalking the sides, closing the gap, ensuring their advantage as the Saja Boys lose themselves to their own sound.
And then—
Jinu leans down, a cold cut across his face in the mockery of a smile as those magenta flames twist into a gaping maw behind him.
“I’ll make you free, when you’re all a part of me!”
They lunge in unison.
Mira’s gok-do cuts through the dark like a shark in the water, a wave of Zoey’s shin-kal torpedoing towards vital points—the head, the heart, and, pettily, perfectly, the groin.
The demon recoils, gat falling from his head, and the fear that strikes clear across his snake-like gaze fills them with feral satisfaction.
But nothing strikes home.
A black saingeom flies, diverting Mira’s path and sending her stumbling away all the while deflecting Zoey's shin-kal and sending them ricocheting into stardust. Mira grunts, snarls, and turns to renew her assault. Across from her, she sees Zoey skid to a stop, taking her stance, the two of them facing off someone new, someone—
Someone who wears a hanbok with a feminine cut, a plunging neckline showing the marks lancing across collarbones and hinting at more below, the ripple of something painful peeking out.
Someone whose violet hair is loose and flowing to the floor in careless waves.
Whose patterns glow with the same vibrancy as the flame cackling on the stage.
Whose saingeom is the silhouette of the sister that danced beside their blades, clenched in a dark, taloned hand.
Whose face they cradled not long ago, though asymmetrical horns of lavender crown it and both eyes bear a molten gold gleam.
Jinu has slunk away, and the stadium is silent, the Saja Boys poised but still, threatening but restrained by something beyond them.
This is a spectacle for their king.
Mira can’t comprehend the vison before her. Her gok-do trembles, growing heavy, her hands unable to stop shaking until she returns it to the veil. “Rumi?”
“Rumi,” Zoey echoes, covering her mouth, tears trailing like comets down her ashen face, swaying with the force of her disbelief.
But that unreal gaze flickers between them—
“And here I thought hunters were supposed to come in threes,” muses a voice they had resigned themselves to never hearing again, never deserving to hear again, and it is layered with something that they had yet to come to know.
A vile terror grips Mira’s spine.
There is no recognition in those eyes.
“Where are you hiding the other one?”
Chapter 4: i won't kneel at your altar
Summary:
Let the pyre grow higher.
Notes:
I had thoughts about this and then I did not. I'm sleep deprived. I don't know how to capture voices. There's a happy ending somewhere in the future, but I'm beginning to think it might be a bit bitter to swallow. Right after I posted the previous chapter I had to rush my wife to the ER and it turned out she needed emergency surgery. All is well now but my mind is a mess. Can you tell? Sorry that I'm always ending on a cliffhanger.
"Altar", Written By Wolves.
Chapter Text
A ghost stands before them.
Apart from them.
Against them.
The blackened saingeom sucks in light, a void juxtaposing the stars flickering out in Zoey and Mira’s hands.
Rumi stares at them, clinical, detached, and so, so far away.
Zoey can’t blame her.
“What… do you mean? Rumi, you're—” Zoey is transfixed on the piece of them they thought lost. Her shin-kal twinkle out—how could she ever raise them against Rumi in the first place? again?—and her stance falters. She’s leaning forward, on the verge of a sprint, a leap; she can’t help it, she never can when it comes to the ones who tether her, who keep her from going adrift, but something beyond that weighty guilt sticks her feet to the ground, makes her heart sink.
That something is a black saingeom, leveled at them.
Which, fair, Zoey can’t help but think a little hysterically. They deserve to be on the other end of it.
“Where is your third?” bites out Rumi, like it isn’t her, like she isn’t one of them. She looks at them like one does a stranger, or an intruder. An unknown threat.
“Rumi, I’m sorry, please. Don’t do this, don’t act like—we never meant to—” Zoey is drowning in her own words. “You can’t be serious. After everything. Tell me this isn’t—that you’re—”
If it’s not real, then Rumi’s dead. And if it is, if Rumi is on Gwi-ma’s side, then she truly lied in every way.
Both will break her anew.
“… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rumi replies, bored.
And why, why does she sound like she’s telling the truth?
“It’s not her, Zoey,” Mira chokes out. She sounds overwhelmed, like she hates herself, like she’s breaking saying it, denying herself the hope that has already stolen Zoey. “She’s dead. So quit wearing her face, demon!”
A slow, assessing blink is the closest thing they get to a reply, and Mira snarls. But the way Mira’s gok-do shatters into nothing gives her away. Mira seems surprised, but Zoey isn’t. It is against every warning Celine imparted them about dropping their guard around demons, but in front of them is the image of Rumi, and Rumi is still on their skin and fingers, fingers that clench around nothing.
Zoey itches to reach out, to reel in, to dig into fabric and skin and hair and never let go. The time between watching her crumble to ash to now seems like both an eon and a mere second. It’s difficult, wrapping her head around it, hard to understand how they are where they are now when only yesterday they were readying for Golden, thinking that the worst that could happen was…
Well, anything but this.
Everything seems so unreal, but it’s clear neither of them can bear to wield a weapon before that face ever again.
“Rumi,” Zoey starts, slow, a step forward. She is crumpling, a wet tissue losing its shape as tears spill and her lip quivers. She is at risk of tearing apart but she won’t mind if it’s Rumi—she’d deserve it for failing her so utterly, for ever making Rumi think she wasn’t worth it, wasn’t enough for them to keep, that her patterns made her other when she would always be one of them.
That blackened blade swivels.
They can’t deny it, not when the saingeom is a dead giveaway. Something in the Honmoon curdles around the edges of it, screaming at the wrongness corroding it, perceiving a part of itself that had withered and decayed beyond recognition, but a part of itself nonetheless.
Something is wrong, wrong, wrong, and Zoey is starting to get an idea of what it is, beyond the obvious.
Mira shudders.
“Rumi,” Zoey calls again. There’s a disinterested glance in her direction, and the tip of that black blade is raised to her. She’s throwing out a line, a guess, a wish. “Do you remember?”
Rumi’s nose flares.
“You talk too much.”
That is the only warning she gets.
Zoey yelps, leans, lets her momentum take her out of range of the saingeom that shoots out of the red cloud bursting in front of her.
Through the haze, across from her, golden eyes narrow. Confusion blankets that marked face. “I missed?”
“Zoey!”
Mira is there the next second, gok-do catching the follow-up though she shakes with it. Rumi is bearing down on Mira in turn, frowning still. Those eyes, though, are still locked on Zoey, fangs bared in a rictus of fury.
She shouldn’t have been able to escape. Rumi is faster than that.
They both know it.
Zoey breathes. Hope is such an insidious thing.
“It’s her, Mira,” Zoey says with certainty, bouncing back in to relieve Mira of the pressure. Her shin-kal are tossed at Rumi’s feet, not with intent to harm, but to startle.
Rumi disengages, sneering at them.
“Zoey, look at her!”
“I am looking,” and she is, she is. It’s Rumi, and it was Rumi before, and it’s still Rumi now, patterns or no patterns, horns or no, and they were idiots to ever doubt it. Zoey won’t do it again, and she knows Mira, who despite her hangups hasn’t pressed forward with her gok-do, won't either. It’s not even a matter of will: it’s against their natures. The only thing keeping Zoey going, and Mira, after what they did, was that ravenous thing called vengeance. Ensuring Jinu didn’t live long enough for an encore seemed secondary now to the fact that Rumi is standing in front of them.
“And it’s her. She just doesn’t remember us,” Zoey says, firm and unyielding with this truth.
Mira grits her teeth, parrying a swing and swiping halfheartedly at Rumi—trying to keep her out of her dead zone and little else. “You can’t be serious, Zoey. Rumi’s dead, and this… this is a demon.”
“It’s still Rumi—you know it too! So what if she’s a demon? I can’t do it again Mira, I can’t go through that again. Don’t ask me to.”
Zoey hadn’t mean to say it like that. She hadn’t meant a lot of things, today. Her sense of balance is skewed, and she’s toppling over the edge. She has too little control and too much hurt spilling out of her typically careful words.
Mira shatters from them; her gok-do slackens. “I wouldn’t. Zoey, how could you think—shit!”
A roar emits from those magenta flames, and Rumi is snarling in Mira’s face with renewed fervor, driving her back, marks burning bright and angry. Not in rage, though.
In pain.
“Deal with them, pet.”
He’s hurting her.
The hunters whisper something: a name, or a prayer.
It means nothing to a demon.
“Where are you hiding the other one?”
The demon traces her gaze throughout the tower turned hell pit, piercing through the crowd. She knows as all demons do that hunters come in threes, so that is why her blade remains level with them while she searches for another soul threaded with their precious Honmoon.
But it is just the two of them. They stare, stricken, while she takes careful steps to situate them in front of her instead of at her sides, calculating the cleanest way to take them both out. Her saingeom, a blackhole almost as hungry as the pit of her king’s belly, quivers. There’s a shiver building at the base of her spine, crawling up her neck, and she calls it anticipation. Her core twists with nerves, and it must be excitement.
Here is the thrill of the hunt, prey at her fingertips.
She can’t remember the last time she hunted. How long has it been since she was free? Since the collar around her throat slipped and she could shed the trappings of restraint?
The smaller one inches forward, eyes wide, mouth moving, pleading. For what? Mercy? She is not a thing that knows it, only the crackle of a pyre filling her ears.
“You talk too much.”
It hurt to say. Hurts, in her chest. Is Gwi-ma punishing her for her voice again? It’s never hurt there before. Some new torment. She would adapt.
A step shrouded in the mist that carries demons between realms, through space, has the demon and the hunter face to face in an instant, but that black saingeom does not taste mortal flesh when it falls.
“I missed?”
The girl stumbles away—escaping her blade—why? How?
The demon had the advantage.
The demon doesn’t miss.
She was slow.
She’s never slow.
The demon stares, momentarily stunned, and then a gok-do catches her saingeom before she can follow to rectify the humiliating failure. It trembles more than the demon thinks it should against her, but the demon cannot overcome it when the way it glows against the pitch blade has her chest erupt with agony. The pain shows in a grimace that bears her fangs.
These hunters’ weapons were deadlier than the demon thought, causing pain with proximity alone.
It’s hard to hear, the roar of agony flooding her ears. The hunters are speaking, she knows, but it’s hard to think, hard to parse what they’re saying. It’s nothing important to a demon, anyways.
Shin-kal racing towards her feet, thokking into the stage in a neat row, has her back off the taller hunter.
Sloppy work, for being so-called demon slayers. Those should have been aimed at my head, the demon muses, before stiffening.
Her marks catch, smolder, and turn to shackles.
She is disappointing him.
“Deal with them, pet,” the King demands flatly. The fire coursing through her, inciting a strangled hiss that alarms her opponents, says, Or else.
What can she do but obey?
Rumi snarls like a dog with a shock collar, patterns flaring and eyes blazing. Mira and Zoey don’t get a chance to prepare—Rumi’s next swing sweeps out, sharper, more forceful, to the point of being wasteful, even.
Years of acrobatics, of predicting the next line and feeling the next step to another beat, is the only thing that spares Zoey from that saingeom whipping out. She backpedals, pivots, and recalls her shin-kal to her hands despite the overwhelming sense of wrongness that spawns with them. “Rumi—please, don’t do this—we’re sorry, we never meant to—”
“Zoey, focus!” Mira tenses when she catches the saingeom again, rocking with the force of it. She uses the momentum to hook it with her gok-do and twist Rumi around but then a foot catches Mira in the ribs, throwing her off. Rumi is quick, but like clockwork, Zoey is already there to give Mira time to recover.
Rumi heaves her blade at Zoey, who spins away in a leap and throws her shin-kal at Rumi’s legs, trying to ward her off again.
Except this time, Rumi doesn’t dodge. The shin-kal connect, sink into her, and her eyes glint but she doesn’t stop, even as Zoey lands wrong from shock, from dismay, from hurting Rumi again.
The black saingeom screams towards her head. Zoey can only watch.
And then Mira is staggering away, desperately trying to catch her footing, clutching Zoey close and dripping with red.
“Mira!”
Gwi-ma laughs.
They don’t get room to breathe. A wordless explosion of pain billows out from Rumi’s throat and her blade catches air, again and again, as she darts after them. Mira lashes out after a stumble, pulling at a thread of the already frayed Honmoon with her gok-do to blow Rumi back.
Rumi lands on her feet, and her marks flare brighter. She buckles under them.
“Mira! Your arm… why did you—"
Mira’s face is tightly drawn and she’s glaring down at her elbow like it’s betrayed her. Her forearm to her wrist is painted with red. The gash is a gape in the skin, and there is a color more than red peeking from it. She shakes it off, refixing her attention on Rumi. “Why did I what, Zoey? You want me to stand by and let you get hacked at?! I can’t—I can’t do that, even if it’s her.”
Rumi leans back up, but her posture is hunched, animalistic. Behind her, Gwi-ma croons.
“You look tired, hunters. Having trouble fending off my pet? Why don’t you take a rest…”
It tears at Zoey and Mira, the way Gwi-ma calls Rumi.
“Why don’t you shut the hell up,” Mira mutters, not having the strength to yell.
The Saja Boys are watching. The fans, the fans who were once theirs watch also, engrossed, spellbound by the violence.
And Gwi-ma burns, whetting his appetite with the show.
Yesterday feels so far away.
Rumi looks at them like a beast, driven by instinct, survival. To her, it must be a choice between them or her.
And she has already died once.
“She doesn’t remember us. You took her memories, didn’t you?” Zoey murmurs.
Gwi-ma hears. His maw curves into a scornful crescent.
“She begged me for it.”
Zoey shakes her head, slowly. “No, she wouldn’t.”
Rumi doesn’t beg.
But she did.
“She begged to forget your betrayal.”
Mira shifted her weight, pale in the face. Her gok-do flickers.
“She wanted so desperately to forget the way your words and weapons carved into her heart. Poor girl, the human side of her only ever held her back. Sentiment, attachment, love,” Gwi-ma taunts. “But now…”
Rumi surges towards them.
“She is perfect.”
Mira’s gok-do kisses its corrupted kin, the sanctified metal crying not in song but in a lamentation as the blades meet. Mira is faltering, and it’s not only from exertion and pain but from her own fears, her own hesitation facing Rumi that has her losing ground near instantly to Rumi’s sword. She has to kick her away. “Rumi—please, stop!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t hate me, I won’t blame you if you do—” Zoey breaks in, a bee sting to Rumi’s legs—she hates it, hates it so fucking much, and hates herself even more, but if she can just stop Rumi—keep her from coming at them—
The Honmoon tears, its threads draping around the demon wearing Rumi’s face like a funeral shroud, grieving. She doesn’t stop, even with black oozing from her knees to her feet, shin-kal gleaming innocently against the wet fabric and ichor of demon blood, buried in uncaring flesh.
The hunters are stuck on the retreat, and they are tiring.
Gwi-ma rumbles with a laugh at their futile efforts. “The irony. She tried so hard to deny this part of her, went as far as to take her own life with your help—only to end up mine. And she is happier for it. Have you ever seen her so free?”
Free?
Zoey is knocked to the ground. Zoey looks into Rumi’s eyes just as the demon lands on her; they are like wet glass, reflecting only her face and nothing else. The patterns on that grayed skin twist like barbwire, glowing bright and angry. Pain contorts her face, but it is empty.
It hurts.
It hurts so much to see her so trapped.
A black saingeom is lifted by two taloned hands.
Zoey lifts her own hand, touching Rumi’s face. “I’m sorry, Rumi. Sorry you couldn’t trust us, and sorry we couldn’t save you.” Zoey closes her eyes, and the bone-deep exhaustion has her surrender. Is this what Rumi felt? The shame, the weariness like rocks around her ankles, the… the impending relief of not having to keep going? “I love you, and I forgive you. For this, for everything. Don’t blame yourself, okay?”
And the blade—
Doesn’t fall.
Gwi-ma blazes.
When she opens her eyes, Rumi is panting in her face, eyes wide and—searching, patterns flaring, but she’s looking—she’s not taking the shot, she’s mouthing—
“Zoey?”
But then Rumi’s choking, the shaft of Mira’s gok-do coming flush with her throat, Mira reeling her off of Zoey. Terror and desperation are plain on Mira’s face, two things Mira hates to show above all. “Zoey, what the hell are you doing?!”
“Mira, stop! Stop! She remembers!”
Rumi’s claws flail, clipping on the gok-do that abruptly stills.
And then Rumi is burning—not through her markings, but literally, smoke curling, violet flames bursting to life on her skin and catching on her hanbok.
Gwi-ma is setting her alight.
The scream that tears from her throat is soul-shattering.
“You dare?” Gwi-ma utters.
Mira recoils, letting her gok-do dissipate into nothing. “Rumi!”
“I tire of this.”
Gwi-ma begins to inhale. A sea of blue, a sea of souls, begins to roll towards him, and the Saja Boys stand back to let the feast begin.
Jinu’s eyes are on Rumi.
Mira hits her knees. Zoey can’t get up. Their own souls are being wisped from out of their chests.
Zoey can feel it, this indescribable sense of loss, of emptiness building inside of her. Zoey doesn’t even have the strength to stand, but she crawls—towards Mira, who despite the flames grabs onto Rumi and shivers from them, falling back and curling around her, shaking from the pain with growing cries. Towards Rumi, who said her name.
To the two halves of her heart, to the two souls that match her own.
“I can’t—” Mira whimpers, flames licking at her too, now. “Rumi, it hurts. Zoey. Zoey, it hurts.”
Yet she doesn’t let go.
Not until Rumi pushes her.
Not until Rumi throws herself away, taking the fire with her, away from them.
Mira’s arms reach for her weakly, enervated by Gwi-ma’s hunger.
Rumi doesn’t look, doesn't let her, either of them, touch the flames consuming her entirely.
“Not like this,” croaks a hoarse voice. Rumi’s voice. “You can have me, but not them.”
The rush of souls pause.
Gwi-ma looks down. “You think you can dictate what I do? You, a halfbreed mutt?”
The pyre that is Rumi climbs to her feet, sways like a flame about to putter out. “I’m not talking to you.”
“What?”
Rumi tilts her head up.
Screams.
In the echo of her cry, the Honmoon tears, worse than ever before, a spiderweb in a hurricane.
Zoey and Mira give an anguished cry when they feel their bonds sever.
Gwi-ma barks out a stunned laugh. “You are only doing as I wish! Your Honmoon is shattered!” Gwi-ma jeers, though there is an undercurrent of something wary.
“I am righting a wrong,” Rumi corrects. “The Honmoon was reinforced through fear. This one…”
Rumi’s patterns go dark.
The flame devouring her goes out.
“This one will be built from sacrifice.”
And then the light is blinding.
Chapter 5: am i hard to love, am i cold to touch?
Summary:
They want her home.
Notes:
You know in A:TLA where Sokka and Zuko are in the air balloon, and Sokka says his girlfriend became the moon, and Zuko goes, "That's rough, buddy?" Mira and Zoey are Sokka, and Celine is Zuko.
Erin LeCount - Marble Arch
Chapter Text
The days bleed into night, the nights burn into pointless days, and it’s quiet.
The Honmoon is an exposed bone, gleaming beneath the lonely tower they exist in. It’s silent, they find. Its song is unheard, if it sings at all, and it mists in and out of view like a phantom, like something fleeting, untouchable. There is not a trace of gold to it.
They don’t sing.
The TV stays off. Their phones remain silent, or maybe they’ve just run out of battery. They don’t check. Bobby gave them space after countless one-word texts, after stilted phone calls with too much silence on the other end. They had spoken to authorities and then little else—the Honmoon had done the rest.
The Saja Boys disappeared, their concert claimed as a cult gathering, hallucinations blamed on the fumes in the air from a gas leak that never existed, further exacerbated by tainted water that never got passed out. They attacked HUNTR/X and kidnapped their leader, and everyone is urged to be on the lookout.
Their fans are anxious, distraught.
They are mourning.
It’s a performance in drawing a mask over their pain, on pushing falsehoods through raw throats and letting the infant Honmoon weave their tale—the Honmoon that caressed them only the once as they stumbled to their feet and to each other, wailing for a love they couldn’t reach, for a girl that blew away like dust with the rest of the demons, like a hand slipping out of theirs. It is too easy, the way it lets them escape scrutiny. Too gentle, untangling them from their culpability, of their part in allowing Rumi to break and use her pieces to save them.
Now, they sit in her room. They leave the mess—it is sacred, a reminder that she was there. There are notebooks scattered with forcefully gouged out lyrics, snippets from that awful song Zoey tore out of her own notebook and set fire to in her bathtub, triggering the fire alarm (and Mira silently took out the batteries and said nothing of Zoey’s red eyes, shaking shoulders—she only offered her own to bear the weight of Zoey’s grief). There’s an overturned trash can full of crumpled paper, and even that they don’t pick up. Rumi’s bed is unmade, and it still smells like her.
It’s the only way they get even the idea of sleep, pretending she’s beside them, breathing between them.
When they wake, if they truly ever slept at all, they are tangled and broken like two puzzle pieces from different boards shoved together. When they open their eyes, they drown in the memories carefully placed like art in a museum: a bookmarked page in a novel Mira remembered loving there, a silly, not so great doodle from Zoey here; vacation charms dangling from hooks, photos of them beaming from her vanity that sat half-covered by a sheet there, like Rumi had been uncertain of her reflection but could stand to look at it if they were in it; Mira’s hoodie, bundled up in the blankets and tucked halfway under one of her pillows, and a purple jellyfish plush Zoey had won and bestowed upon Rumi with all the preening of a peacock.
There is fanart and photos of them hung up on every wall, in motion, in harmony, glowing in the painted lights, lost in the moment and in each other when nothing had interrupted their melody, and Rumi—
She is only in some of them.
Signs, signs everywhere.
Signs Rumi quietly, fearfully, loved them.
How did we ever doubt her?
—
Awards lines the walls. Sunlight seeps through the windows, its indifferent permanence leaving those within the room cold despite the warmth it should have gifted.
Celine stares at them blankly. The lines on her face are deeper, the exhaustion in her thin frame more plain (though it could never equal theirs).
Has she always looked so small? She’d been larger than life, training them. Her reputation legendary, her authority undeniable. Her shadow has always hung over Rumi even when she wasn’t in the room. Yet now it’s hard to believe she had as big a stake as she did in Rumi’s life, now when she hadn’t so much as reached out to them past asking what happened, frazzled by a Honmoon that was not golden, but white.
When they told her about Rumi over the phone, she went silent.
Why hadn’t they noticed?
Why hadn’t Mira picked up on the way Rumi bent, stretched, and rolled over at a word from Celine, but never received praise?
Why didn’t Zoey see her shrink under Celine’s gaze like she was trying to fit into an outline of someone else, like she was afraid of blurring the edges?
It gnaws at them in the quiet, subjects of Celine’s disappointment now.
“Do you understand what you’re asking me? It goes against everything I taught you—"
“Bullshit. You taught us wrong,” Mira bites out, a tired snap of anger drawn more from reflex than anything else. She doesn’t have the energy for more.
“… Maybe so. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible.”
Zoey shifts forward in her chair, sleepless nights presenting themselves in bruises beneath her ringed eyes, gaze piercing Celine like an insect to a corkboard. Her face was flat in a way neither of them had ever seen before, an expression distinctly un-Zoey. “Do you really believe that or are you just trying to stop us? Because I’ll tell you now, you can’t. We won’t give up on her. Not like you did.”
Celine processes her words like a slap to the face. “I loved her too,” she said, fumbling with the words that showed her inexperience with them.
To Mira’s ears, it sounds like a lie pushed through clenched teeth. “Did you? Did you really? Because looking back, it actually looks like you hated her,” Mira says cooly, her crossed arms going tight around her, trying to restrain herself. She ignores Celine’s blustering, pushing out the heat that’s burning her tongue. “Did you see her? How she was breaking because of your stupid fucking insistence on lying to us? How she repeated your mantra to herself like a punishment? You loved her with conditions!”
“I did the best I could!”
“Your best?” Zoey laughs sharply, and then stands from her chair—not suddenly, not quickly, but in a way that shows she would not be denied or ignored. She presses her hands into Celine’s desk and leans in low. “It wasn’t enough.”
Celine recoils—slight, barely there, but there nonetheless. A shudder of a breath comes out of her when Zoey pushes off the desk, sitting back down rigidly. Zoey doesn’t apologize, just waits.
Celine closes her eyes, trying to fight a wave of—guilt? Good. Shame? Even better. Self-loathing? Well deserved, Mira would say.
After a long stretch of silence that Celine spent composing herself and Mira endured by bouncing her leg while Zoey sat unnervingly still, the older woman sighs. “Regardless, I… don’t know what to tell you. It’s never been done before. Why would it have been? Not even the demons want to stay on that side.”
Mira taps her fingers against her arms, or perhaps it would be better to say jabs, her nails leaving indents. “If there’s a door, it makes sense for it to work both ways. If demons can get through, so can we.”
“Do you hear yourself?” Celine balks. “It’s madness, and that’s assuming she’s even—”
“Don’t. Say. It.” Zoey hisses.
Celine backs down, carefully, and something enters her eyes as she appraises them. Something like pity.
Mira stiffens, blood running hot.
“Girls… she couldn’t help how she was born. We tried. I tried,” and they bristle at that, but Celine doesn’t let their fury stop her. “But what you said happened at the Awards? The only way she could have been taken to the other side is if she’s dead, and—”
Mira kicks the desk, startling Celine. “What is there about ‘don’t say it’ that you don’t get?”
Celine shakes her head again. She looks between the two of them, and Mira can see the shutters coming down over her expression. “We will get nowhere with this. I do not have the answers you’re looking for, and you won’t accept the truth.”
“You’re right. Hard to get anywhere with a liar,” Mira intones, and stands, grabbing Zoey’s and helping her up. “We’re wasting our time here. Since you won’t help us, just stay out of our way.”
Celine drops her eyes to her desk, steepling her fingers together. “You risk everything by trying,” she says, simply. She is old, tired, and made up of twenty-three years of mistakes and loneliness. She is only one of three, and she cannot stop them.
“To bring her home?” Zoey wonders. “Don’t you know? That’s worth everything.”
—
“We’re really doing this,” Mira muses, almost stunned by their own insanity. She feels heavy in the way weeks of poor sleep will do to a person, and light in a way that could stem from a variety of things—poor eating, dehydration, anxiety. Hard to say—every minute is too long, each day a blink.
She knows Zoey is in the same boat when she only hums back, looking at her shin-kal like she doesn’t recognize them.
In front of them is a tree and in front of that tree is a grave.
In front of them is a tree and beneath that tree there are two headstones, but they only acknowledge the one, because the other shouldn’t exist. Fuck Celine for wanting it to, Mira thinks.
They stand in front of a tree, and the tree pulses like a heartbeat, slow and steady.
Zoey peeks at her from her side. “Ready? We don’t know what’s going to happen, if this will even do anything… but are you ready to find out?”
Mira affixes her gaze on the tree. “To piss off Celine? Always.”
Trepidation has their hands sweat, the anxious feeling of taking another step and feeling nothing but air threatening to dissuade them, but they need a door, and so they press their weapons to the Honmoon like they are the key. They need an opening, a space to squeeze through, so they pull at its netting with the edges until the spiderweb threads go taut.
They don’t want to hurt it—but if they can’t make themselves whole, they will tear themselves apart trying.
The Honmoon chose three, and they are two.
The Honmoon chose another to match them, but it behaves as if she doesn’t exist, as if she’s not needed.
They can’t abide it.
Underneath the blades of their resolve, after what seems like an eternity of fruitless prodding, there is a stirring on the other side of the Honmoon, encouraging their efforts.
“Oh,” Zoey breathes. “Mira, did you feel—"
The Honmoon suddenly lurches.
They do, too. Their souls shiver as something stretches from the veil—not where they push or tug, but from its core this sensation rouses, and reaches towards them—to hold them still, to keep Zoey and Mira from crossing the boundaries. It is nothing they have ever felt before; it is a thing as hungry as it is afraid, pushing against them even as it fights to hold them close.
“What the hell?” Mira strains from the effort, voice tightening beneath the pressure repelling her. Her gok-do is flaring, and the Honmoon is flaring back just as heatedly. “All of a sudden it’s like—"
“It’s fighting us,” Zoey finishes, though instead of being astounded, she is bitterly frustrated. “I didn’t expect it to be easy, but—” the Honmoon pulses, and Zoey wobbles. She is bracing against the threads of the Honmoon, spitting curses and insults under her breath, as though she hadn't spent years of her life trying to keep them from coming apart. “Stupid… ass… thing! You won’t stop me! I’m coming through whether you like it or not!”
She squares her feet, flipping one of her shin-kal into a reverse grip, and rears back—
But a voice stops her.
Tired, lost, confused—
“What… are you doing?”
And unmistakably Rumi's.
Zoey freezes midswing. Mira jolts like she'd stuck her gok-do into a light socket. As one, they look to each other, and they know.
Zoey is quick to turn back, reaching, hands out, shin-kal gone, like she can touch that immaterial thing that filled the air, the song of their heart. “…Rumi?”
Mira straightens. It was bodiless, but it echoed from within the Honmoon, and the physical manifestation of the Honmoon was the tree before them, still and unmoved by the ghostly wind that followed the voice. “Rumi, can you hear us?”
They wait.
There is no reply.
Without pressure, without a trigger, they feel the Honmoon ease out of sight, and that hungry, starved thing within it retreats, slipping back into slumber.
And when they frantically try to poke at the Honmoon again, nothing happens.
But they heard her. And they won’t stop until their voice reaches hers, until she hears what they have to say, until they draw out her own words, pull out her insecurities and regrets until they are all bare in their truths.
And they will love her.
Chapter 6: scared of my own image
Summary:
Rumi isn't going to make it easy.
Notes:
I struggled with this. Spiraled. Had an idea, then scrapped it, then said *shrug* and slapped this together because my brain said it would hurt. The story is becoming a completely different beast than I first thought I was wrangling.
"Doubt" by Twenty One Pilots and "Everything Goes On" by Porter Robinson, League of Legends fueled this mess.
Chapter Text
Rumi’s voice always left an echo. She never truly realized how her timbre carried, how the vibrato of her throat was felt by all lucky enough to catch the sound of it—but Zoey and Mira did. Yet while the tree stills and its roots shimmer and dim, the echo fades too soon: a fleeting thing, like a moment that slips from reluctant hands clumsy enough to drop a delicate treasure.
It’s terrifying to think they might not hear it again. Her voice became less a claim on existence and more like a sigh—one where the world exhaled all at once and forgot to breathe again.
Their world.
Shin-kal press into the chords that none but they can see, and a gok-do is on the verge of digging into the roots of the tree, as though trying to pry up a splinter.
They speak, they whisper, they scream.
At the edge of the sacred site, the grounds of the Honmoon tree, Celine watches. She watches as they return again and again, day by day, and shrink in its looming shadow. She hates that she can see something of herself in them, even if they’re somehow still so full of determination and hope that it stings her heart with shameful resentment. She hates that they think there’s something to bring home.
(She hadn’t been allowed hope when she had a body to bury.)
But she never wanted them to feel what she did—still does. She’s stuck watching, understanding that she is observing history repeat—not quite word for word, but rhyming nonetheless. It makes her ill. Makes her want to leave them to their grief, to process however they can, even if it leads to self-destruction.
And yet… Celine's hand brushes the handle of her sickle. The weight of her role has her consider stopping them—from undoing the one good thing Rumi managed, from tearing apart the thing Celine dedicated her life to reinforcing, to prevent anyone from enduring what she has.
Were they truly risking the sanctity of the Honmoon for one girl? For one so tightly wound in the coils of demon kind?
(She doesn’t think about how she would have given up everything for the same chance.)
She should stop them. Drive them off. It would be kinder. They wouldn’t know, not yet—but to linger in the presence of the Honmoon when you are less than three is to drown in the voices of those gone, until you yourself are a ghost. Its song will grow deafening until you are haunted by all that was unsung, until you chase the sounds you can’t remember in dreams.
It would be a mercy to kill their hope.
(Why are they stronger than she was?)
She skirts the edges of the boundary—the invisible line where those of demonic origin would be repelled.
(Rumi bit her lip, and her marks blazed beneath her sleeves, and Celine looked away when the tears could not be held at bay, only turning back when Rumi ran out of them to cry.)
Her eyes remain fixed on Mira and Zoey, and she remembers when those girls first came to her—Mira rigid, always on the edge of pouncing or fleeing, and Zoey as flighty as a hummingbird afraid to land. She remembers how, one day, she came to see them settle, drawn into Rumi’s orbit as Celine had once been to Rumi’s mother, and—
She remembers Rumi looking at them both the way Celine once did to Ryu Mi-yeong—like she didn’t deserve to breathe the same air they did.
(She remembers Rumi asking her once, only thirteen—
“Am I a mistake, Celine?”
And Celine pretended not to hear.
Because how do you tell the daughter of the woman you loved that everything about her tears you in half? That you are pulled taut, floundering between resentment for a love lost and devotion to her legacy despite the heartbreak that helped spawn it?)
Rumi was the consequence of a choice Ryu Mi-yeong made—the only one Celine could never forgive. And when Rumi died, when she melted into the Honmoon like wax to a wick, Celine told herself she had done all she could. That she had upheld her promise to the best of her abilities—but even she was helpless, always helpless, to the whims of fate.
(She had tried, in dreams.)
Now Mira and Zoey speak to the wind like they’re trying to snag the strands of life that had been severed. They saw into the threads of the tapestry that knows what needs to be done, and they try to rewrite the song the Honmoon has sung for a millennium—humming to themselves, singing to her.
To the girl Celine couldn’t bear the sight of.
And at some point, Celine hears the Honmoon… whimper.
It stills her with grief.
It pulls her with dread.
Her fingers brush the handle of her sickle—plain, but sturdy—and she is hesitant, reluctant… yet duty is built into her bones. It is all she has left to stand on. She is memory given shape, the outline of lost eulogies, and she cannot allow the Honmoon to be desecrated like a grave pillaged for someone who chose to be buried.
(Did she choose? Celine wonders. Did she think that was all she was allowed? Was it her fault?)
But the moment her fingertips graze the pommel—
The Honmoon roars.
A wave slams into Celine’s gut—a ripple of terror turned into a seismic event inside her very being. It reaches into her, snags the tether tying her to the Honmoon, and pulls tight, unyielding, like a rubber band on the verge of snapping right across her heart. Her soul.
Her knees nearly buckle.
Don’t touch them, it warns—frantic, frenzied. Not them. Never them. Nevernevernever—
It is a star bursting inside her, violent and burning. The Honmoon reacts not with silence but with punitive force. It yanks her back—not her body, but her connection to it, the bond that once made her its chosen.
The threat is clear; if she takes one step closer to Mira and Zoey, with hands on a weapon and her mind on swinging, even in defense of the Honmoon… she’ll be cut loose.
You are forbidden, the Honmoon thunders. You are unwelcome.
Not if she means harm. Not if she forgets who those girls are—to Rumi, and to the Honmoon itself, and perhaps even to herself.
She takes a staggering step back, and then, just beneath the voice of the tree—
She hears something else.
A whisper. Small. Tired.
Familiar.
“Don’t… hurt them. Please, Celine.”
Rumi.
Celine runs like it’s the most terrifying thing she’s ever heard, unseen by all but the phantom of a child she failed.
(She doesn’t return. Not that night, or the next, or the week that follows.
She wonders to herself, in the shadows of a room where a shrine is dedicated to a woman who once smiled like sunshine and still chose to dance with demons, if she’ll ever be welcomed again.)
Time bleeds out of an hourglass, meaningless when it isn’t held, and there’s no telling how long they work themselves to exhaustion, day after day—until suddenly they register being back home again, blinking away sleepless nights and collapsing in a tangle in Rumi’s bed. Ever since the Awards, they don’t seem to fit quite right, but it’s the only comfort they have left.
“…What if we can’t reach her because she doesn’t want to come back?” Zoey whispers, hands threaded with Mira’s as she lays on her side. She’s looking off into space, blinking past the lump that is Mira sprawled out on her back, focusing on a Polaroid of them. She’s too far to make it out, and because of that, Rumi seems a blur in the photo. Like something unclear, fading from their lives quietly. Not quite captured.
Mira’s gaze cuts to her, an unshakeable slant despite the dark shadows making them seem glassier than they are. The lights are dim, but the blinds allow her eyes to catch the light in an unsettling way.
“I don’t give a shit what she wants,” Mira declares bluntly. “Not when she has no idea what she’s done to us, and no idea how much we love her. I need—” Mira cuts herself off, knocking her head back and letting her jaw clench to glare at the ceiling. “God, Zoey, I need to apologize to her. I’ll get on my knees if I have to, because I never wanted to do that, but somehow she got it in her head that—what am I supposed to do with it?”
She squeezes Zoey’s hand—gentle, but like letting go would break her. Then Mira shudders an aggrieved sigh. “I figured it out, a little bit ago. She’s good at confusing other people’s wants as her own. She’s even better at thinking she doesn’t need anything. Why else would she do any of this?”
Zoey shifts. Thinks about it with a solemnity that rarely finds her where others can see it. Only Mira and Rumi were allowed. “Celine told us she was born that way. A half-demon. And she talked about the Golden Honmoon like it would fix everything—seal away the demons. Even get rid of Rumi’s patterns.” Zoey’s gaze flits around, lashes fluttering against her cheeks in distant, dark thought. “But how would she know?”
Mira turns over, eyes sharp. “What?”
Zoey stills, like she hadn’t fully registered what she herself said. Then she continues, haltingly, like she’s still putting her thoughts together, gaining speed as the words spill out of her mouth. “What if—Mira, I don’t think Celine had any real idea what would happen. There hasn’t been a Golden Honmoon for generations. And never one with a half-demon—that we know about. What if instead of getting rid of Rumi’s patterns… there was a chance it would get rid of her? Seal her away or…”
She doesn’t finish. What’s unsaid hangs over them like a guillotine.
After the thought settles into something sick in their stomachs, Zoey swallows. “What if Rumi was thinking the same? What if she was thinking it would be easier this way? Maybe she’s been planning out how it would go, and—and after how we reacted…”
Mira’s face pinches before she throws her other arm over her eyes. “It’s like we gave her a fucking green light to exit life,” she hisses.
Stroking Mira’s scarred knuckles with her thumb, Zoey bites her lip. “Did she think we’d never understand? That there wasn’t a chance we could have reacted better—if she had just taken the time to explain before everything got to this point?”
“…Could we have?”
The way Mira asks, low and pleading, opens Zoey’s heart like a wound. She doesn’t know. The past is set in stone, and now a grave marks the lost what ifs.
While she tries to gather her words, Zoey’s eyes focus on that photo again, sitting innocently on the bed table. Mira with her small smirk, Zoey with her grin, and—
A blur where Rumi’s face once was.
Zoey sits up. “Mira.”
That tone—the one that sets off fight or flight—has Mira sit up too. “What?”
Zoey points, and her finger is shaking as she begins to slide off Rumi’s bed.
“The picture. Rumi. She’s—”
Mira looks. Squints, like she isn’t sure what she’s seeing. Blinks. Then pales. “What the hell?”
Mira hurries over to it, not quite running, but something close, as she rips herself off the bed. Zoey whips her head toward the vanity. The many photos of them, too few including Rumi, clipped to the mirror’s half-covered edges, she sees, and—
Rumi is blurring in all of them, like a watercolor painting beginning to smear into something unrecognizable.
“This is insane—” Mira pulls out her phone. Photos with them are the same. Videos are worse—Rumi is like a ghost. Translucent. Hardly there. Barely heard. Flickering like a mirage. “What the fuck? Zoey, she’s—she’s fading?”
Zoey’s heart sinks. She pulls up social media, and the phantom effect is reflected there as well; mentions of HUNTR/X are reduced to referencing them as a duo instead of a trio, fan accounts devoted to Rumi are empty, and Zoey’s posts for her birthday? Nonexistent. Like they were never there.
Like Rumi was never born.
It has to be the Honmoon. Whenever things got too supernatural, too hard to explain, it skewed events, rewrote history… replaced memories with something easier to swallow.
But for Mira and Zoey, it’s forcing razor blades down their throats.
Rumi isn’t someone to be forgotten—not some thing better off unknown, unseen, and unheard. Bad enough it kept her from them, now it’s trying to make it seem like she never existed?
“It’s erasing her,” Zoey realizes, shaking hands on her phone.
“Fuck that,” Mira is running her hands through her hair, pacing. Sits on the edge of Rumi’s bed. Stands. Pulls out her phone. “I’m calling Celine,” she says, strained, and the line rings.
Goes dead.
Mira, stone-faced, tries again.
And again.
When Celine finally picks up, Mira doesn’t get a chance to say a word—because Celine says, tremulous in a way they’ve never heard before—
“I know.”
(Because at the estate, the compound where all hunters eventually converge to meet, in that room that always stayed locked and forbidden to Rumi, Celine’s looking at a photo of Ryu Mi-yeong.
And she’s not pregnant.)
“It’s not the Honmoon. It’s Rumi. She’s choosing to be forgotten,” Celine says quietly, closing her eyes, lingering on the thin connection she has left, and she feels her in a way that the others have fortunately never had to learn.
She feels Rumi unspooling her own thread.
Chapter 7: i can never say it on the phone
Summary:
Rumi, drifting. Zoey, Mira, and Celine, trying to map the way back to her.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Music, soft, forgiving, hums around her.
Something warm swaddles her. The sensation of an embrace a child never got cradles her sweetly, makes it hard to think, makes it easier to believe she was always meant to be held.
It’s not scary.
It’s not peaceful.
It’s just safe, and it sinks into her bones, her marrow, this care she’s never experienced before, a shelter that’s finally, finally managed to protect even her heart and soul from the elements beyond them.
The Honmoon holds her.
She can breathe, if she wants. The dark pulses around her like a heartbeat, and it stirs something under her skin, but she can’t see—whether it’s because of the space or if it’s because her eyes aren’t open is uncertain.
There are almost phantom flashes of color bursting somewhere in the dark, behind her closed eyelids—like koi fish rippling the surface of a black pond.
She drifts in the black, content to sink deeper, be dragged by this wave that sings, You can rest. I have you now.
The Honmoon has her.
She can drift for eternity.
But something is there; the world above, beyond, begs her to surface.
Then—
Color detonates around her. A kaleidoscopic fishnet burns into her retinas, and she spirals, recoiling from the brightness, and the sound that comes from it is not human or demon, it just is, the only language the Honmoon knows.
The lullaby that was soft, a vinyl record lost to the background of her comfort, crescendos into a panicked siren song.
Suddenly she is Rumi, and her patterns match the netting of the Honmoon, writhing all around her. Her violet hair fans out in phantom currents and swallows her as she thrashes, her skin reflecting the glow that bursts into existence with no reprieve.
Her skin—
She still has her curse, even here.
She still blazes with the brand she was born with, even here.
Her safety shorn from her, Rumi curls into a ball, hands clapped to her ears to try and drown out the song that isn’t the Honmoon’s, a song that is reaching into its waters, as though searching for a pearl—it’s beautiful, but more than that, it’s terrifying.
Because it hunts for her.
“Stop, stop, stop, stopstopstop,” she chants, still pulled along by the Honmoon through its being, though she has no idea where, or if it matters, only that it’s not away enough from what’s chasing her.
It doesn’t stop. The song cuts through like a hook to water. The colors light up again, brighter, a ship’s searchlights peering into the depths. The strands race with vibrance, and she slams her eyes shut to save them from the brilliance.
Something wants her to be seen.
Someone.
Oh. That’s right.
Mira and Zoey.
The net around her tightens with their song. The sound of them fills her—the light of them warms her—but their smiles slip away like water in her mind, replaced by the devastation, the betrayal she had wrought onto their faces instead.
Why are you looking for me?
Rumi shakes, opens her eyes to squint at the evidence of their strength, their resolve, flashing all around her. She reaches out, as though to touch, and the Honmoon follows through.
Their song is a wound: aching, dripping guilt, and weeping without end.
I did that to them.
Rumi huffs in what could have been a sigh, or the makings of a pained laugh.
They were always too good for her, and even now, they were proving it by trying to find her.
Why?
“Why are you sorry?” she hums to the melody.
We hurt you, their lament cries back. Come home.
You don’t need to go.
We love you. We’re sorry.
Please come back.
And—it’s everything, to her.
But home is what broke her in the first place.
All she has left are the pieces of herself she can see refracting the light around her, jagged and sharp. If anyone but the Honmoon tries to keep her, she’ll cut them. She’s not a thing meant to be kept.
If they pull her out—
The Honmoon shivers around her.
If she leaves, she wouldn’t be fixed. If she leaves, she won’t ever be able to atone for the lie she’s upheld all her life. If she leaves, she'll hurt them again.
If she leaves—
She’s a part of it now. The Honmoon. It’s not gold, but it’s hers. There are no tears in its fabric—she has painstakingly threaded this net with her own soul. She is part of the whole and she doesn’t know how to be separate, anymore.
She can’t.
But Mira and Zoey are still hurting because of her, even now, and that can’t be allowed to continue.
“It will be okay,” she says instead to their song. “I’ll make it okay. Let me carry this alone. You can let go.”
The song that is not theirs but also not hers begins to weep. It feels her reach for dissonant chords—her own—and she follows it to where it entangles lovingly with theirs and with the world above.
The Honmoon resists for the barest moment—it is part of her, but separate—as though asking, Are you sure?
Rumi smiles, small, sad, and answers with a tug.
“How the hell do we stop it? Her?” Mira demands, knees bouncing hard enough to shake the floor, fingers steepled and elbows braced on the desk.
Zoey, silent, in a way that was becoming more common than it should, only watches, intent, as Celine pours through books written by hunters of the past. Diaries, excerpts—and poetry, even—but they’re bare bones when it comes to anything true. There is no manual on how to keep someone intent on being erased.
“It’s unprecedented,” Celine says, clipped. “What she’s doing… I’ve only…” she falters, something haunted flitting across her face, before continuing, “Perhaps, if we find a way to anchor her—”
Mira catches the pause the way a shark does blood in the water. “What do you know?”
Celine startles. “Nothing,” she replies—not like she’s lying, but like she hasn’t caught up to herself.
“No,” Mira presses, unrelenting. “That look, you’re hiding something. How do you even know what Rumi’s doing?”
For a moment, Celine’s eyes go distant—and track, like distant comets being pulled into orbit, to the picture frame on her desk. Zoey knows what’s in it, though she can only see the back from her position; the Sunlight Sisters, squeezed together, happy and whole.
“I’ve seen something similar,” Celine admits.
Zoey blinks, leans forward. “You what? Where? Who?”
It should be obvious. It is, the moment it leaves her mouth.
The third Sunlight Sister, who Celine speaks even less of than Ryu Mi-yeong.
The one whose name falls from her mouth like grave-dirt, digging up old hurts.
“Yoo Hye-rin.”
“She retired,” Zoey says in time with Mira, glancing at each other. “Right?”
Celine’s gaze is still trapped in that photo. “Yes. Living in the countryside, enjoying the life of an ordinary woman.”
“And by ordinary…” Mira leads.
Celine stops. Sits, hard, like she’d lose her footing if she didn’t.
Then she speaks.
“She chose to forget, Yoo Hye-rin.”
Mira and Zoey wait, because Celine pauses, but not like she’s finished—instead, like she’s bracing herself for pain, like the words scrape her throat and she needs a moment to power through them.
“After Ryu Mi-yeong died,” Celine continues, creasing the edges of the book in her hands absentmindedly. “Everything fell apart. I was… struggling, with Rumi, and she couldn’t handle—it was easier, to forget what led to it all. She gave up the Honmoon, her connection to—” the unsaid presses Celine’s frame into something small, vulnerable. “To us. She was a hunter right down to the core. Told me that the only way to keep going, to not risk what was left, was to let go.”
“You mean Rumi,” Zoey breathes. “She was scared she would hurt Rumi?”
With a jerky nod, Celine shut her eyes.
No wonder Celine wanted Rumi to keep quiet, Zoey thought, ill. What chance did Celine think Rumi have with the two of them, when someone once looked at a child—an infant, most like—and thought her a threat too great to survive?
It made her sick—with fear, that they could have lost Rumi sooner, and guilt, because they proved her right.
After a moment, Celine looks away, to them, with a solemness that always followed wisdom. “This role we play, it can weigh heavy. Especially when you are forced to bear it after losing those meant to hold it with you.”
And it’s terribly sad, the truth of it bared right in front of them. It makes too much sense, looking at Celine now, turned brittle in a way lonely things do.
Celine, and Rumi. Two sides of the same coin.
Celine, standing on her own through circumstance, and Rumi, by the pressure of a choice she had no say in.
Zoey was torn between savage anger and broken sympathy.
There were no winners, no right thing here. Only hurt, and what was done to try and ease it.
Beside her, Mira stills. Covers her face. Composes herself in the way her shoulders draw up and her face dons an unflinching mask of stone. “So Rumi is following in Yoo Hye-rin’s footsteps. How do we keep her from succeeding?”
Celine drops a book with less care than they’ve ever seen from her—another dead end.
“I can only guess. If she’s erasing herself from the world, then perhaps we have to keep her memory alive. Make the fans remember, keep the space she once filled empty for her, because that’s what the Honmoon is going to try and fill. It changes the narrative, it’ll try to make it seem like she was never there. That includes filling the holes she’ll leave taking herself out of the picture.”
“So,” Zoey fumbles for something, anything, ideas on how to do just that. “What, we spam social media with, ‘Remember Rumi? Y’know, our leader who is trying to get you all to forget she ever existed and leave like—‘”
Zoey shifts, folding in on herself, as her voice breaks off. “Like she doesn't matter… and of course she'd say something like, ‘Oh, it’s okay, don’t worry about me, don’t waste your time,’ because she’s an idiot. A stupid, hardheaded dummy. Celine, I don’t even have pictures of her anymore. How could she do this to us?”
Mira grabs her hand. Zoey crushes it. Mira doesn’t flinch.
Again, Mira asks, sharp as glass and just as fragile, “How do we stop this?”
Celine is quiet for a moment.
“Everyone else is forgetting…” The way Celine says it makes Zoey look up. Celine’s eyes are narrowed, something contemplative as she strides around her desk to stand before her wall—where another picture of Celine hangs, arm outstretched over empty space.
No Rumi.
“But not us, somehow. Not yet,” Celine’s fingers hover over the void. “It can make hunters forget, I’ve seen it, so we’re not immune to its power, but… Maybe it’s us. Maybe it’s not the fans. No one was closer to her than us, and so it’s not so easy to make us forget.”
Celine turns, and her expression is dire, but—showing a resolve that rarely found its way there when it involved Rumi.
“We are her anchors,” Celine theorizes. “We’re what’s keeping her here, still. That’s what we need to use to bring her back. What ties her to us is what we can use to tether her to reality.”
“Then we start talking,” Zoey says immediately, tangling her hand tighter with Mira’s and setting her jaw, drawing both Mira and Celine’s attention. “Not about what the world remembers. About what we remember. Every moment that’s ours with her. We hang on and we don’t let her take it from us. We share it with her, whether she wants us to or not.
“And we will remind her, over and over again, for the rest of our lives if we have to—that she has a place here—that our home isn’t home until she walks back in.”
Notes:
A bit shorter, but I needed to dive into some context I feel like. Hope you enjoyed! Today's pain is brought to you by "Blinding Lights" by Loi.
Chapter 8: you explained the infinite
Summary:
Some things can't be undone.
Notes:
this chapter was brought to you by sleep deprivation and "Saturn" by Sleeping At Last
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Thread by thread, note by note, Rumi untangles the past from the future.
Like knitting in reverse, she separates herself—what she was, what she never will be again—from Mira and Zoey’s weeping chords. Unwinds herself from the world and its glittering future. Lets her thread begin to dangle in the dark between the colors, through the gaps of the Honmoon’s net.
She hums, fingers twisting at a knot; the Honmoon trembles with the grief she pretends not to feel.
She smiles, letting her frayed chord slip further away; the Honmoon cries, because that is what it feels beneath the mask—a wound it cannot explain, a loss so rupturing that its song stutters.
It doesn’t understand; it only knows that its hunter, the seed that had helped it blossom anew, was hurting—is hurting still, and may never stop.
It is torn between resistance and compliance.
The world outside tore her apart, flayed her.
But in here, in its embrace, she is breaking in a way it has never seen a soul do before, tearing at her own existence by choice.
Was the hurt any less?
It can only croon, pulsing with an ache reminiscent of a broken heartbeat, witnessing a soul shatter itself because it thought its cracks unlovable. Can only try and wrap itself around the pieces, preventing her from being lost in so many fragments as to never be found whole again.
Its strings swell as the first tear bubbles into the void. Then another, and one after that, until a stream like a galaxy is pouring from its hunter’s eyes.
Still she smiles like broken glass, tenderly pulling apart the stubborn heartstrings tied to hers, blue and red, threading them together gently and leaving hers—lilac, tattered—dimming with each untangled inch discarded to the expanse that trembles around her.
It’s too much. It’s too much for a thing that’s language is song, love, and connection, to witness a soul shatter itself because it thought its cracks were unworthy of being touched.
It cries.
And then—
Rumi stills.
Something tugs—not at Mira and Zoey’s thread, but—
Hers.
They go to the tree.
There is no better place to do this, no place closer to be heard.
It’s cold, and only growing colder, and it doesn’t make sense—it’s a balmy summer night, but something like fog is moving through Zoey’s brain, chilling her.
She touches the tree and—
Feels a tug in her chest.
A faint yank.
Something coming loose that shouldn’t, and—
She’s leaning her forehead against the bark, crying over something she doesn’t—
Doesn’t remember—
“We have to hurry,” Zoey gasps out. “She’s… she took something, I don’t know what, I can’t, but—”
Mira looks the same, her eyes wide, her face petrified as she presses a single hand to her chest. Her lips quivers. “What the fuck, Rumi,” she bites out, reflexive aggression born from pain.
They feel it in present time.
Rumi unraveling herself from the world.
From them.
Like she’s something that can be so simply lost.
“I’ve had it, I’m done,” Zoey hisses, pushing off the tree with a stubborn jut to her lip. “Rumi! I know you can hear me! And guess what?” she calls out, loud and fierce like a war cry. “You’re going to LISTEN!”
She glares hard into the bulk of the Honmoon tree. Envisions Rumi on the other side, hiding.
Always hiding.
“You don’t get to disappear like this! You don’t get to! Because I remember you and I refuse to forget!”
The bells catch, tinkling.
Zoey forges on; it is not a sign to relent, but to push, to shove, to bulldoze through the veil Rumi enshrouds herself with.
“Do you remember all the nights we stayed up late giggling over stupid videos?” she presses, only to receive silence. She continues like it doesn’t sting. “How many times we tried to recreate them? All the times I heard you snort and try to pretend you didn’t, like when we drew on Mira’s face in her sleep? Do you remember how we laughed so hard we couldn’t even run away when she woke up?”
The talismans shift.
Like a breath, held.
“Well, I remember!” Zoey snaps out, eyes hot and teeth bared. “And your laugh, Rumi, when you’re not holding back—god, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard, and you don’t get to take that from me!”
Her voice went high, angrier than it’s ever been, and her neck is flushing, the heat rising to her face as she shakes with her emotion.
The tree shivers.
Rumi pauses, startling as the knot she was untangling tightens.
“You—” Zoey chokes out, clenching her hands into the fabric of her pants. “When I first came to you guys, I was so scared. I was flailing to find my place, where I fit without overstepping or falling short, trying not to make a fool of myself with something so big, so important, and you—you sat me down and said…”
She lifted her head, face softening in remembrance.
“‘I see you, Zoey. Stop trying to be less. You’re the one I’ve been looking for, and you’re perfect.’”
Zoey shudders, the word leaving her like something sacred.
“No one’s ever told me that before you,” Zoey continues, quieter—but not weaker. Never weaker. Zoey’s silence is as much a storm as her words—the hush the calm before it crashes down on you.
“So don’t—don’t go thinking you’re anything but perfect the way you are, even if we messed up. The way you always wake us up too early in the morning, the way you can’t handle spice, even the way you freak when you something in your closet isn’t color-coordinated—and your patterns, even if you don’t think so. Every part of you is perfect, because they’re you, Rumi, and I can’t live without you.”
And her trembling hands reach out and—
Fractured hands tug at the blue knot snagging on lilac, frantic yet gentle—it won’t loosen.
Why won’t it loosen?
“I’m not letting you go, Rumi,” Zoey whispers, feeling something in her ribcage catch, her heart stutter. Something right. Her ferocity cracks with relief—then hardens into determination. “And you can’t make me.”
With that vow, Zoey turns around, wiping at her eyes with both hands.
She’s said her piece—not everything, not nearly, but the rest would wait until Rumi was back.
Mira’s face flickers from the torrent of Zoey’s plea disguised as a declaration. Her jaw works, flexing—
Searching for the words—
Words that don’t drip acid, or land like blows, because she’s sifting through hurt and grief trying to find a shard of something soft that won’t worsen the cracks she helped make.
But words don’t come as easy for her like they do Zoey, or Rumi, or literally anybody else.
So she can only start with the first thing her teeth catch on, and go from there.
“I’m sorry, Rumi,” she whispers.
The roots of the tree stretch far and dig deep—maybe even deeper than the ache in the hollow of her chest. If she dug them up, would the hole compare to the one in her heart?
She doubts it.
“I push. A lot. Sometimes too hard. We all know this,” her voice fades, coming back rough. “But this time, I wonder if I didn’t push enough. If I’d just stood my ground, made you tell us sooner, would we be here? Because I knew, Rumi—I knew you were hiding something. I wonder if it would have been enough. If it would have saved you from thinking we didn’t need you. That you were better off—”
Her eyes slam shut. She breathes hard, squares her shoulders.
“When Celine first reached out to me, I was suspicious as hell. It was too good to be true, you know? Good things don’t come easy to me; I learned that early, with my asshole family. But she picked me up at the airport, had me auditioning as soon as we got to Seoul, and you—you were there. Watching. The look in your eyes pissed me off so much in that moment—like you were searching for the smallest mistake, the tiniest flaw.”
Mira huffs, the slightest smirk coming to her face.
“But then I realized I was the only one you looked at like that. The only one you paid attention to. And you know what?”
Mira crosses her arms, looking up now, something unbearably fond and awed crossing her tired features.
“You picked me.”
The air shivers.
The Honmoon flickers into view.
The red twines around the lilac without recourse, snaking into the blue knot—and her hands are tangling in them, the song she hummed turning discordant as she struggles to keep them apart.
“I wondered what you saw in me. Then you danced with me, really danced, to see how we flowed together. For hours, you listened to my directions even though I was only testing you, trying to see how long you’d put up with me. You danced until you were stumbling, but you didn’t stop.”
Her lips quirked, slight but there, a hint of fondness coming to her voice.
“And after? You complimented me like I hadn’t just put you through six different choreography sets from hell. Brushed off my snide comments. Just grinned that stupid dorky grin of yours and said you couldn’t wait to work with me. Then you stayed up to help me move all my shit in, and I couldn’t say no, because of how stupid you looked, like it was all you wanted—to make me at home.”
Rumi looks down. Her arms are spiraled with the ribbons of their song, and they are binding the lilac to her.
The chord of the song she tried to end ellipses, trailing off only to start anew, louder than before.
“So,” Mira’s voice tremors. “Come home already, because it doesn’t feel right without you.”
The tree shudders, the bark groaning.
The wind brushes the talismans and bells into movement, then—
The Honmoon stills as a third voice, weary and worn from carrying too much alone, carries into the air.
“Rumi,” Celine says—with a catch to the name. With a trace of something forlorn and terribly ashamed scraping it.
The sound slides through the Honmoon.
Rumi has not seen this violet thread before. It is sharp—thin—the same color as her demonic patterns before the Honmoon turned her pearl.
It drifts slow, almost hesitantly towards her.
Celine’s slips don’t so much as whisper as she steps close to the tree, hands folding the lapels of her cardigan over her.
The Honmoon remembers her. Does not trust her. She feels it in the way the pressure increases, subtle, like the tree before her is a sentinel looming, denying her entry.
But she does not seek entry. She only seeks an audience.
She remains quiet; a sign of care, of picking and sorting through her thoughts to compile them, to unleash them with the greatest effect.
The Honmoon pulses in tune with her heartbeat, slow but building.
When she breaks the silence, her voice is rough, brittle, with a belated truth.
“I should have held you.”
The violet braids itself around her, bypassing the red and blue entirely.
Rumi’s heart breaks.
“Why didn’t you love me?” she asks softly, watching it curl around her with the helplessness of a child long gone unanswered.
I do, the violet murmurs remorsefully. All of you.
So please, listen. Let us show you.
Rumi shudders.
Shuts her eyes.
Listens.
“I should have held you from the start,” Celine says to the air, to the wind, to the ghosts and the empty grave. “Nothing I say can fix that. No apology would be enough. I let grief tie my hands, and I failed to do the thing I swore to your mother. I failed you, failed to protect you, because all I did was hurt you and convince myself it was for the best.”
The grass gives beneath her as she kneels.
“Seeing you shine on stage… I was proud. I never showed you that. Never told you.”
She presses her hands into the dirt.
“Watching you love them quietly is like looking into a reflection. It hurts.”
She rests her forehead on her pale knuckles, ignoring the sharp inhales from Mira and Zoey.
“I spent the years of your life thinking I could be there to catch you, but I let you fall.”
Celine shuts her eyes.
“I cannot undo what I have done,” she admits, kneeling low, in the truest apology she could ever give—discarding her pride. “But I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for it. Not just in Ryu Mi-yeong’s memory, but for yours.”
She closes her eyes. “If you allow me, though I know I do not deserve to—I will hold you, Rumi. Like I should have from the start—”
She feels the Honmoon stir, like the surface of a pond rippling.
“Because you are my daughter.”
And she feels her chords catch—
And there she is.
She falters.
Her hands shake too much to grasp the chords of song, to pull at the knots, to undo the memories of those fighting to keep her.
Blue, red, violet—lilac. Thread by thread, they wind around her, cinching around the thinning remnant of herself to keep it whole, connected to her even as she tried to reduce herself to pieces. The Honmoon’s song, her song, skips in the void.
The colors burst like distant fireworks—pop, pop, pop—in time with the rising drum in her chest, in the same rhythm as her patterns.
She is being put back together, and she’s not sure she wants to be.
She doesn’t move—can’t, bound as tightly as she is, made to listen—their voices reach her in segments, then in wholes, and play back again on loop.
Listen, their songs sing.
She chose this, she reminds them—chose to unmake herself before anyone could realize how broken she really was, how sharp her edges were. It was easier to fade away than to believe she still had a chance at belonging. To think that anyone would want her: cracked, jagged, and afraid.
But their souls begged to differ.
Zoey, Mira—even Celine.
Their threads pulse around her, and the Honmoon sighs.
The first tug is gentle.
Rumi sucks in a breath she doesn’t need, the lilac around her quivering like it wants to escape. It can’t—she can’t—and then she is drifting towards the boundaries, into the dark where the threads slip between the net of the Honmoon.
She tries anyways—tries to resist—but the blue snares her wrists, firm, and the red circles her waist like a protective brace. Neither are willing to lose her, to let go.
The next tug is less polite.
The Honmoon whines with her, unsure of what she needs, less certain of what she wants. It fears for her, and she fears for herself—
Then the violet weaves through the gaps—shaking, almost, but there.
Just as afraid as she is.
The blue and the red warm around her, and the cold she hadn’t realized was there is chased away.
Her pulse skitters in her veins. She twists to look at the sanctuary she was leaving behind, winking with starlight and the ripples of the Honmoon. It had been quiet—she had been safe. She doesn’t want to leave. The fear that races through her is consuming.
But their voices are coming through, echoing around her in the space; Zoey’s vow, Mira’s demand, and Celine’s promise.
I’m not letting you go.
Come home.
I will hold you.
Her fingers twitch, and she doesn’t know if she’s still resisting or just too exhausted to hold on.
The pull is insistent, and she helpless to its gravity.
Then, the world tilts.
Then, the Honmoon parts like a curtain—
And before she can process it, Rumi’s slipping out of the tree, tumbling into arms that finally, finally catch her.
Notes:
my eyes went blurry and my mind went blank with this, i feel like a trash can and all i have to offer is garbage ;n;
Chapter 9: all i want is nothing more
Summary:
She is held, and she is kept, and she is home.
Notes:
*sighs and moves the chapter count one final time*
FFS CELINE, she wanted her screen time so bad. blame her for the chapter count. final chapter will be an epilogue.
"All I Want" Kodaline
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
She’s a dream slipping into their arms, and they latch onto her, refusing to wake.
There is no gentleness to their hold — it is crushing, suffocating, desperate; they are a barricade of shoulders and arms. They knot themselves around her, like an inch of distance between their bodies would dissolve Rumi into a fading memory they can’t grasp. Like to do so would resubmerge them in the nightmare they lived without her. The more of her they touch, the realer she is.
In their arms Rumi breathes like she’s forgotten how, in shallow gulps and whispered hitches, but she does, and it’s enough that they breathe again too. Mira feels each uneven pull of Rumi’s lungs, and Zoey is rocked by every shudder, and they both want to crawl into the space between Rumi’s ribs and breathe for her, to cry, to bear the weight of existing because they helped make it too heavy for her to carry.
And Celine—she buries her face in Rumi’s unbraided hair, holding all that she can reach, fingers light and trembling but there on fevered skin. Her breath is short. Her mind is blank.
She does not shy away from Rumi.
Are you watching, Mi-yeong?
There are no words that can capture the relief, the break in their heartache. There are only emotions given voice, and a body learning touch and love and what it meant to be kept.
Rumi shines softly, a hearth drawing in lost souls from the cold.
The Honmoon hums around them. They feel it in her, a static buzz beneath their fingers as it observes; it is a mother allowing its child to venture beyond its protection, all the while dreading the growing space between them. It is wary, uncertain—but the way Rumi folds into Mira and Zoey, a flickering, golden flame being stoked into a blaze by their embrace, makes the pressure it exudes taper off.
Rumi is too tired to speak. Too lost to know which direction to go, how to follow their whispers about home, let’s go home, we miss you. She doesn’t make a sound when Mira hefts her up, only presses her cheek to Mira’s collarbone and drifts to the sway of careful steps.
At some point there is a shift, and a squeeze of bodies pressing in together.
Her head tips onto a shoulder. There is a hand in hers. Another tucks her hair behind her ear.
Then—
Music.
A song finds its way through the fog to her. It is not the Honmoon’s.
It is one she barely recalls—yet the memory of it, once found, beckons her like a lighthouse.
She remembers a too big bed. Long shadows. She was afraid of her own—until the lullaby blanketed her thoughts.
The hand that stroked her hair feels the same as it did back then.
Or—no.
It was more hesitant then.
Now, there is no question in the press of it.
No unspoken doubt.
Just the pressure of it, there, and the wordless croon of a once forgotten cradlesong in a space that seems too small for the emotion it carries.
It’s carrying her home, she thinks, and she tries to sing back. She’s not sure what leaves her throat, only that the touch shudders—and then she is pulled closer, tighter—and there is warmth curling around her from all sides. The hand doesn’t leave her temple.
She is so… warm.
She didn’t realize how cold she was, in that consuming place.
That’s when she realizes there is still some part of her in it, a part that she’s leaving behind, tangled up in the Honmoon.
She wonders if she’ll miss it.
(She won’t. Her doubt in herself, in their love for her, is a fraying thread, trailing into the dark spaces of the Honmoon where forgotten songs decompose.
It is happy to let it go for her.
She doesn’t need it anymore, her heart knows. Even if the rest of her is slower to catch up.)
The press of shapes around her ease. She is lifted into a steady rock of motion—and there is a faint smell, beyond where her nose presses to Mira’s skin, that makes her go boneless. It reminds her of being a child, socked feet sliding through empty hallways to a table where the food was filling but the company hollow; then a teenager—of late nights and early mornings, locking hands with Mira and Zoey, falling into motion underneath Celine’s instructions until the Honmoon hummed for them.
Her chest aches with it. Her hope was stronger, then.
She is settled then into a softness that has a familiar give. It dips further before she can move, and then she is bracketed on either side, pulled into one body, burrowed into by the other. A chin hooks over her shoulder, shuddering, long strands whispering soft across her cheeks; a downy head tucks underneath her jaw, wetting her collarbone where lashes flutter like butterflies, nervous to land.
There is no space but this one where they exist in tandem, and she falls into a dreamless sleep, knowing she doesn’t have to reach for them—because they are already there, arms squeezing not to rouse her, but to reassure themselves that she is there too.
Time unfolds in strange ways.
She is not truly cognizant, not for a blink or for a millennium. She only knows that they, the souls that cradle hers, linger against her as long as she does in that strange state. With steady breaths and panicked gasps, they stir only from nightmares that seem to fear her; her senseless whispers chase them away when she feels them jerk against her, drawing her instinctively out of that fugue state, and only when their chests calm and they crush themselves back against her does she curl back into slumber.
In between the slips of consciousness, the slow sandfall of time between her hands, she stirs at a hand against her cheek, and fingers pressed gently to her neck. Her eyes shutter open, just a fraction, and—
Celine is leaned over Mira, who positioned herself closest to the door.
(And Rumi is home, in her bedroom where once the bed had felt too large, now struggling to contain the weight of love that rests upon it. The curtains are still that unassuming cream, everything perfectly in place—and dusted. As if she had lived here this whole time. As if Celine had made sure—)
Celine’s hands are on patterns that glow, refusing to be hidden.
Rumi stills, and she is suddenly, painfully awake.
That ineffable gaze that haunted Rumi is fixed on the skin shimmering underneath the press of a finger, where a pulse beats steady—until it flickers.
Celine looks up.
Breath hitching, Rumi’s eyes, now wide-open, lock onto those black pools that stare right at her, glimmering in the pale light of night, and she is horrified when they overflow, spilling over gaunt cheeks.
Celine doesn’t speak. Her hand on Rumi’s cheek just gets firmer, still gentle, but saying, I’m here, and Rumi nearly whimpers, overcome with—
Hold me love me please please please Eomma please look at me just look at me just love me I’m begging please
Rumi swallows it like she always does.
She must be dreaming.
Must still be in the Honmoon, drifting.
But Celine is solid, and Rumi’s chest is tight, the hope that had shriveled as the years went on blooming into something she couldn’t trim fast enough, running over the edges, into her own eyes.
She cries silently, afraid to wake Zoey and Mira, even as Zoey huffs, forehead pressing against her chest in an unconscious headbutt, and Mira’s hands around her stomach cinch tighter, a lifeline.
She cries openly, and Celine wipes the tears away for the first time since Rumi came up to her knees, her thumb gathering them with precious care.
She cries like a kid trying to keep quiet, and Celine’s face does this broken attempt at a tender, exasperated smile, and—
It’s not perfect.
But it’s them.
The sleep that comes after crying your heart out soundlessly in front of the woman who raised you is deeper than dying.
The waking is twice as fragmented. Each time her eyes open, the cold that had suffused her all her life is less, until she feels wrapped not only physically, but spiritually—and she knows, then, that she is tied so tightly and intricately to Mira and Zoey that undoing it, even if she wanted to, was henceforth impossible.
Their love for her was undeniable.
It makes it difficult to justify what she did, even to herself.
She has… a lot of apologizing to do.
The pressure within her ribcage hasn’t lightened but shifted—instead of the ache of trying to contain something that didn’t fit, she feels… full. Sated. Like she had been starving all her life, eating scraps too quickly, but finally someone put a hand on her shoulder and a plate in front of her and told her, Slow down, there’s more where that came from.
She has been fed their love, and she is glowing with it.
It’s a wonder they haven’t woken from the lightshow that was prancing in gradients along her patterns, all pastel and gentle.
She sits in this moment where their breathing lulls her thoughts into something tame despite the darkness that begs to creep in. Feels their chests swell against her back and front, their arms shift from the machines that work tirelessly to keep them going inside their skeletons, and they lock around her like she is the only reason they function at all. Like she is as vital to them as they are to her.
Mira’s hair drapes over her throat, her breath a warm fog against her neck. Zoey’s cheek smushed against her collar. Fingers twitch against her skin and the fabric of a shirt she doesn’t recall putting on. Their legs tangle in hers. She’s so warm she loses track of it—of where she begins and they end.
Even in sleep, Mira and Zoey reach to claim pieces of her without knowing that she’s been theirs, quietly, completely, this whole time.
Is this what it feels like to be wanted?
Rumi shifts, rising up on an elbow gamely, trying to ease her way out of clingy entrapment. The jaws of their embrace only close tighter. She huffs fondly, taking a moment to brush Zoey’s bangs tentatively when the maknae gave a snort in her sleep. Zoey’s face is pinched, taut with dark-ringed exhaustion even now, and Rumi lets her finger trail to the furrow between her brows, rubbing it in hopes to smooth the tension away. She succeeds.
The way Zoey relaxes into her with a near inaudible sigh is almost enough to have Rumi succumb to that heady, unusual comfort she never wants to get used to, but her limbs ache, her legs twitching with a restlessness that is only growing the longer she is awake. Piece by piece, fighting off their squirming limbs and grips that rival the mythological kraken, Rumi manages to throw herself quietly over Mira, sacrificing Zoey to Mira’s ironclad embrace.
The door is ajar. She slides through it.
The hallways are clean, and they haven’t changed despite the years it’s been since Rumi’s walked them. The pictures on the wall are evenly spaced, and she trails along them, noticing new ones that feature her and her girls. Notices others with just her, photos that only Mira and Zoey or even Bobby could have taken, candid photos where she’s just… her. Still hiding, but not Rumi the popstar—
Just Rumi, the girl afraid of her own shadow. Just Rumi, the girl Celine raised.
The girl who asked Celine to kill her.
Rumi stops in front of one where she’s mid-laugh, crisscrossed on the floor with her guitar, sheet music fluttering around the limp form of Zoey on the studio couch. Mira had taken this one, catching the moment Zoey surged with indignance, frustrated over lyrics that just didn’t click right, and faceplanted into the cushions with several choice words that their fans would blush hearing.
She’s not sure what she feels, seeing Celine choosing to keep Rumi’s image in her house despite never having been able to look at her.
She only knows that it aches in the way her cheeks dampen.
Wiping the tears away roughly, she scolds herself. After the hell she put everyone through, she’s the last one who deserves to cry.
In the midst of her pity party, Rumi hears a clatter from the kitchen—and that’s when she smells it, the scent of simmering broth, scallions; there is the low crackle of a skillet searing with oil, carrying the aroma of meat caramelizing.
Before she realizes it, Rumi is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, one hand cautiously placed on the frame.
Celine is so focused on what’s sizzling at the stove that she doesn’t notice Rumi, hair twisted up in a claw clip like an afterthought, sleeves pushed up, an apron tied at her neck and waist. Behind her, on the dining table able to seat six, the surface is already covered with dishes.
There’s kimchi fried rice, the egg perfectly crisped at the edges the way Rumi likes. Galbitang steams from the pot, the scent of garlic mild but distinct. There’s a pillar of mandu on a plate, set in the middle of the table, and sweet hotteok, drizzled with honey, resting just beside it.
There is more, some Rumi isn’t so familiar with, but it’s hard not to clue in to the fact that most are her favorites, things she remembered asking Celine for seconds when she was younger.
That twisted ache is there again, pulsing with her heartbeat. Her breath catches in an inhale at the sharp pressure of something too tender and fragile trying to break its way through.
“Oh,” Celine notices her then, and startles, something she never does. She nearly drops the spatula that was tossing about bulgogi in the pan, and hurriedly turns the burner down so she can hurry to Rumi, wiping her hands down her apron with a frenetic energy.
“You’re—awake,” Celine says haltingly, eyes scanning over in a way that made her feel like a nerve exposed. “Are you… how do you feel? I made food; your favorites… and others, in case your tastes have changed.”
Rumi stays silent. Her tongue is too heavy to lift.
Celine must take it as something wrong, because she—comes closer. Her hands outstretch, and Rumi’s gaze drops to them like a stray spying a net.
But her wariness doesn’t stop Celine from touching her, right over where her patterns blink all the colors, like a traffic light undecided.
A full-body shudder overtakes Rumi, and before she can stop it, she’s crying again, leaning towards Celine.
And Celine pulls her in, face crumpling as she tucks Rumi under her chin.
“My girl,” Celine whispers. “I’m so sorry I didn’t try. I’m sorry I gave up on you. I’m sorry I failed to be what you needed. There are not enough words to make up for it, and I fear there are not enough years for me to show you. But I promise, as I did then—I will hold you for as long as you allow me to. I love you, Rumi. I’m sorry I made you doubt that.”
And Rumi believes her.
After the tears, Celine sits her down with a different sort of awkwardness — one not born of a stilted desire to avoid contact, but as though she was struggling to resist hovering and only partly succeeding. Rumi is still sniffling when Celine piles her plate with meat and dumplings, fills a bowl for the galbitang, another dish for the rice, and slides her a cup of ginseng tea when Rumi shakes her head at the offer of banana milk.
Staring at her plate, Rumi is overwhelmed for choice, and her stomach makes itself known when she takes too long trying to figure out where to start, still dazed by the turn her life has taken. She takes her metal chopsticks with a shaky hand, and pinches them around a strip of bulgogi—
But before she can put it to her mouth, the thunder of feet followed by Zoey slamming into the doorframe makes her startle and drop it with a splat onto herself. She whirls her head around, seeing Zoey braced on the frame like it was the only thing keeping her up, and her dark eyes are wide and fixed on Rumi. Behind her, Mira is staring just the same, mouth parted with relief.
“Uh,” is all Rumi can get out before Zoey barrels into her, nearly taking her straight out the chair with a fierce hug. Mira does, yanking them both under her arms.
Zoey sobs, shaking her head into Rumi. “You dummy, you—you didn’t even—why didn’t you wake us, I thought—I was scared you were—what if we were dreaming and—!”
“We thought you were gone,” Mira voices more eloquently, though loaded with just as much pain as Zoey from the thought. “That you were still there, and we didn’t reach you.”
Zoey dissolves into hiccupping gasps, and Mira clutches tighter at both of them, a hand on the back of Rumi’s head pulling her to where Mira’s heart hammers from adrenaline, the remnants of waking afraid and missing a piece of herself.
Lowly, Mira presses her lips to Rumi’s ear, and the next shudder has nothing to do with tears.
“You don’t get to disappear again, Rumi. Not from us.”
“Not ever,” Zoey adds fiercely.
And it’s too much for Rumi not to reciprocate, fingers twitching upwards from where her hands hung suspended over them—she clutches at them desperately, with the same tremulous emotion.
“I’m here,” Rumi whispers, ribs squeezing around a heart that feels too full. “I’m home.”
Notes:
NGL i struggled bad with this, wrote it one sentence at a time for the first half until Celine possessed me. Hope you enjoy either way! We'll get into the soft polytrix in the epilogue. :)
P.S. I have COVID and so I wrote the first chapter of a modern!Hanahaki!AU of polytrix because if I can't breathe NEITHER CAN RUMI! (i won't drop anything for it until i get this finished and hop on the Werewolf AU I have in mind (not as long as this i hope TnT)
P.S. on top of googling korean foods/drinks i googled trees in seoul and apparently they have some trees that smell like semen. the cringe i cringed if google can be trusted.
Chapter 10: the first thing they said was, "you've never looked better"
Summary:
Couch time!
Notes:
"Marble Arch" Erin LeCount
I had to break this into two, so there's one more chapter coming to soften this all up and I mean it this time! No more adding to the chapter count! I've been beating my head over this for two-ish weeks now so I'm sorry if quality is boo-boo or the characters are not charactering, I always feel like I slip up the closer I get to the end of something TnT
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The elevator doors slide open like an exhale and a tension from somewhere deep within Rumi releases. She steps out, and from her shoulders drops a weight she doesn’t remember carrying.
When she breathes deep in reflex, she finds herself marveling, for perhaps the first time, that she even can.
That’s the beauty of coming home.
Her girls flank her on either side. They stay near, always close enough to touch — like to not risks her vanishing, even way up here, where low clouds sometimes kiss the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Celine’s estate had been an unexpected comfort, with Rumi’s childhood bedroom and the oddly too small bed. Still, after three days of existing in that bizarre limbo of feeling like a child afraid to misstep and an adult who was overwhelmingly loved, Rumi needed something more. She needed a place that settled her.
And that’s here. Here, with Mira and Zoey, where no one can reach her but them. Their hands were bound to hers; or rather, hers were bound to them, and they had no intention of ever letting go. Floating away, being forgotten — none of that was possible, not after they tore Rumi back into reality in a resurrection she’s still trying to process.
They had been willing to tear the Honmoon apart for her. The songs she had tried so desperately to separate from her own made it clear — her purposeful diminuendo of self was denied, and they recomposed themselves around her, refusing to allow her to fade.
“Couch?” Mira rumbles from her side, her voice hoarse. Rumi catches her staring at the walls, but not to avoid Rumi’s eyes, more like—
(She’s anchoring herself with every unblurred image of Rumi, smile crooked and proud in its permanence. She’s back, Mira assures herself. Rumi’s here. She’s real. She’s not going somewhere we can’t follow, not anymore.)
Mira squeezes Rumi’s hand, and she responds in kind, bumping against her lightly with how close they walk together.
“Couch,” Zoey affirms, too quick, not nearly as loud as she’s expected to be, but she pauses in front of another frame — a candid of them training, only captured by Celine’s steady hands, Rumi righting Zoey from a stumble with an easy grin while Mira folds her arms off to the side, clearly exasperated.
Catching her distraction, Rumi lets her hand slip out of Zoey’s for a dizzying second that has Zoey whirling back, desperate to catch her — only to crumble in relief when she’s drawn snugly into Rumi’s side, patterned hand steady on her waist.
“Couch,” Rumi crooks her lips helplessly at them, the two halves of her heart that refuse to beat without her.
(They shiver at her voice — a sound that was nearly lost to memories, fed to the emptiness until it became quiet.)
Rumi stumbles a little when they tug her forward, settling her into their beloved couch cushions like she isn’t capable of it herself. Zoey immediately slots back in beside her, fumbling with the remote, going to their ‘Warm & Fuzzy’ watchlist for soft comfort movies. Mira, in turn, hesitates to leave for blankets and snacks, reluctant to surrender her link to Rumi for even a second. She seems to comfort herself with Zoey’s presence beside Rumi because she finally withdraws after flexing her jaw, steps a little hurried.
“What do you guys want to drink?” Mira calls out moments later, arm laden with a quilt and the other holding open the fridge door.
“Do we have peach iced tea?” Rumi rises slightly, a precursor to her getting up, but Zoey reels her in firmly.
“Nuh-uh, you’re not going anywhere,” Zoey scolds gently. She reaches out, taps Rumi’s nose with a too-wide smile and nervous eyes. “House rules, your cute butt stays on the couch.”
“House rules? When did we update those?” Rumi smiles soft and shy, but slips back down obediently. It’s all she can manage in the wake of Zoey’s anxious possession of her.
Before Zoey can answer, Rumi’s phone buzzes distinctly — an afterthought that Zoey had carried for her — and they all flinch as the outside world disturbs the sanctity of a place meant only for them.
“Oh, Rumi, here, sorry,” Zoey passes it over, even as her fingers twitch around it like she’s reluctant, like she doesn’t want anyone to intrude on this space the three of them share.
Rumi handles it with all the care an explosive deserves, wary of the notifications she’d yet to bother with both after and regarding the Awards, but the banner at the top of her phone isn’t from social media.
It’s from Celine.
While Rumi stares at it, Mira drops down beside her, flaring out the blanket over them. Rumi pretends she can’t see how they each lean over, but she feels it, inexorably — Zoey’s chin hooking over her shoulder, Mira’s thigh pressing firmly against Rumi’s. Their solidarity, unspoken but known, gives her the strength to swipe into her messages.
Celine:
Did you make it safe? Did you have any issues? Let me know if you need anything.
Rumi’s breath sticks to her throat. Celine hardly texts her for anything beyond work, or a belated birthday (because the day Rumi was born was the worst day of Celine’s life, and she had only ever been able to acknowledge Rumi after the fact).
So that she is, now, is… new. Unfamiliar.
Not bad. No.
It aches, in a good way.
Rumi:
Yes, ma’am, we made it safe. No problems so far. Thank you for checking.
Rumi spends a moment hovering over the digital keyboard, chewing through this new, wild feeling.
Then, hesitantly, she tacks on something she never has—
Rumi:
<3
The text bubbles pop up.
Drop away.
Pop up again.
Celine:
I love you too, Rumi. <3
Rumi shudders. Clicks the phone off and hugs it to her chest. Arms slip across her torso and back, locking around her, and she isn’t afraid of breaking for once because she trusts them to put her back together.
The TV screen flickers in their peripherals, but none of them are paying attention. At some point, Mira winds up reclining on a mountain of couch pillows, guiding Rumi down onto her chest and making a grabby hand towards Zoey until their maknae squishes them underneath her eager weight. They’re quiet, lungs stacked on top of each other and nearly syncing in rhythm—
But the tension building, quietly, tilts them into discord.
Zoey’s chest stutters against Rumi’s back, and her fingers, having undone Rumi’s braid and occupied themselves with carding through the length of violet, still.
“What were you thinking, Rumi?”
And Rumi has nowhere to go, trapped as she is between them — not that she would run from them, not again. Still, the question rips through her in a bolt of panic. It’s hard enough that Zoey’s hand drifts to her waist, skating her skin to rub a thumb along the base of Rumi’s spine where her shirt has ridden up.
Mira’s hold on her tightens, going taut beneath the both of them.
“… When?” Rumi asks, because she’s not sure where to begin.
“You know, that’s a really good question.” Zoey’s breath hits her ear, hot and dangerous in how it makes Rumi’s spine shiver again. Zoey’s tone, deceptively light in the way rain is until you’re soaked through, does nothing to douse the heat sparking at exactly the wrong time in Rumi’s gut. “Let’s start with the Idol Awards. What were you thinking, Rumi?”
“Right now, Zoey?” Mira, below her, feels like a wire stretched thin and ready to snap in two. Rumi glances up to see her staring past her shoulder, where Zoey rests her chin on Rumi. Mira’s mouth is already pulled low, and Rumi’s chest goes tight at her eyes — flickering and seeing something she can’t.
(Demons aren’t supposed to bleed. Rumi isn’t supposed to bleed. Rumi isn’t supposed to—)
Mira’s gaze shoots to Rumi, intense and consuming in how she takes Rumi in, hands heavy and fastened to her waist, conveying all that Mira doesn’t say — don’t leave. Stay. Breathe. Live.
God. How bad did Rumi screw up to make Mira look seconds away from breaking over a question?
Against Rumi’s shoulder, Zoey only shakes her head, denying Mira’s unspoken plea. “We have to talk about it, Mira. For all our sakes. And so that nothing like it ever happens again. I don’t want us to ever reach that point again, and for that to happen, we need to know what was running through all of our heads.”
When Mira’s eyes glance towards Rumi, pained, guilty, Rumi frees a hand from between them to cup it to her cheek. “She’s right,” Rumi admits to Mira as Mira leans into the touch. “Even if none of us are exactly comfortable with it, I know that I want to talk. And to hear what I did to you both, in full, so I can apologize, but I’m getting the feeling it will never be enou—”
“No,” Mira cuts through, lashes trembling against Rumi’s palm. She is a study in the contradiction of sharp and soft, the first to cut through nonsense and the first to melt when you least expect it. Like always, she holds Rumi’s gaze unflinchingly the moment Rumi turns on herself. “No. It’s not all on you. I’m the one who kicked all this shit off. If I hadn’t—”
“Mira,” Zoey interjects, lifting up, but that’s not what stops Mira.
“Hey, no, hush,” Rumi’s hand drifts from Mira’s cheek to cover her mouth gently. Mira stares over her hand, trembling lips brushing Rumi’s palm. “Let’s get the whole story, all of us, before we break down into tears apologizing. I can only afford one crying session a day now with how we’ve been going.”
The playfully honest words land awkwardly, but it helps. Mira uncoils slowly, huffing with a forceful roll of her eyes, and Zoey groans out a, “Truth, my face has been swollen for daysss.”
“Fine,” Mira concedes wetly, trying to affect a strong facade. “Since you’re such crybaby, you can go first.”
So Rumi does.
“I think before I start,” Rumi haltingly begins, “I should preface this all with — well, the truth. With the biggest secret I have ever kept from you both, from everyone, from the moment I could first think,” and to illustrate her point, she lifts her hand and stretches it out. The skin ripples, patterns become rushing rivers that pulse an unsteady swirl of purple and magenta. Their glow is muted but present in a way that shoots them all back to that awful night for a terribly long moment.
“The truth is I’ve had these patterns since I was born. My father, he was a demon.”
Rumi pauses to let that sink in. Mira’s gaze remains steady on hers, waiting (listening, Rumi’s traitorous heart beats, thrilled), and Zoey—
“Like Romeo and Juliet,” Zoey whispers low, the satisfaction of being right lighting up her face. “I knew it!”
Rumi lets out a little shocked laugh. “I never thought of it that way. I guess they were. I mean, Celine definitely disapproved of them.”
“That’s ‘cause Celine had a hard-on for your mom,” Mira states bluntly.
“Ew? No? Why—why would you say it like that?”
Zoey giggles, leaning down to peck Rumi’s cheek, still bunched up from how her lips curl in disgust. The patterns beneath her lips spark, a blush building beneath them. “She’s just calling it like it is, bubby. Celine has wayyy too many photos of your mom to explain away in a platonic manner. When I think about it, I’m pretty sure you inherited your repression from her.”
“Re—repression? I’m not repressed!”
“And I don’t like abs,” Mira lies right back. “Are we playing opposite day?”
“You two are ridiculous,” Rumi grumbles, then flattens her lips into an unsteady line. “We’re getting off topic.”
The levity drains away.
“Right,” Mira says, exhaling as well. “So, your dad’s a demon, which makes you a half-demon. Celine knew the whole time — I’m still majorly pissed about that — and the cherry on top of the clusterfuck is that she’s made you lie to us the whole time. Tell me if I missed anything.”
Rumi drops her head down to lay on Mira’s chest, avoiding Mira’s piercing gaze. She plays with the hem of Mira’s sleeve. “Made is… a strong word. I had a choice. Even if she told me not to, I could have told you, shown you before the decision was made for me.”
“Really?” Zoey presses softly. “Because I remember hearing ‘our faults and fears must never be seen’ way too many times, and I’m beginning to think Celine meant it differently than we thought. Or maybe ‘more specifically’, is what I should say.”
“Celine had her reasons,” Rumi tries to counter, but Zoey shakes her head, and Mira shifts in a way that encourages Rumi to look at her.
There is a furrow between Mira’s brows, and in the worried lines of her face, Rumi sees the need to reach her, to get her to understand.
“Rumi,” Mira says, slow and steady as she seems to come to a realization before Rumi, “she conditioned you to fear being honest. How can you say you had a choice?”
Mouth parting, Rumi can’t quite grasp a defense for that. She settles for facts. “Either way, I lied. I have to own that.”
Mira’s jaw ticks. She hugs Rumi to her chest, fingers tangling in her hair, and Zoey sidles closer, a hand stroking the tension from Mira’s face. Zoey’s content to let Mira lead them deeper, airing out their wounds so they can finally scab over.
“Just… don’t tear yourself apart over it,” Mira mutters against her temple, meeting Zoey’s gaze. “Yeah, I’m still upset — we’re still upset — but it was never about you being a demon, Rumi. I want you to know that. I’m pissed and hurt because you felt you had to hide a part of yourself from us for so long. I let you in, showed you all of me, and trusted you were doing the same because you promised you weren’t hiding anything.”
“Mira…”
Mira doesn’t stop, words spilling out in an inescapable torrent, wavering between firm and crumbling. “And I get why you did. It took me too long, I was too late, but I do understand. Except, that’s not even what hurt me the most in the end. You want to know what did?”
She’s afraid of the answer, but Rumi knows she needs to hear it, so she can only hide her face, burying herself against Mira’s chest. It does little to spare her the blow when Mira quakes beneath her, her breath catching wetly.
“You threw yourself on my weapon, Rumi. You made me hurt you. Why would you make me do that? Why would you do that, and then—save us, just to try and force us to forget you after? Like a life without you would ever be worth it? Did you think any of that was fair to us? That you had the fucking right to make that decision for us?”
Rumi can’t answer. Can’t speak. There’s no excuse worthy that she can muster when Mira bares the brunt of her pain, the pain Rumi caused by hurting herself time and time again, so openly.
“Tell me,” Mira crushes Rumi to her, the hand on a patterned waist near bruising. Rumi doesn’t make a sound, surrendering to the ache. Mira is shaking beneath her. “Rumi, tell me why you thought you had the right to break our hearts and then the nerve to try to make us forget how it even happened!”
So much for not crying. Zoey’s arms tangle around them both, like she’s trying to keep them together while Rumi tries to speak, strangled by her own grief, and Mira turns her blotchy face away to cover her eyes.
It’s too much, being pressed between them while her patterns flare, jagged and spiking with darker colors. Rumi pushes—up, up, even as Mira jolts to grab her and Zoey clings tighter to her back in panic. “Let me sit up,” Rumi manages to whisper out. “I can’t talk like this.”
Even overwhelmed as they are, they hurry to accommodate, shifting and fumbling until they settle on either side of her. Mira wipes at her eyes roughly and Zoey’s lip wobbles, hands folded too tightly in her lap like she’s trying not to fidget. Rumi rubs at her own cheeks, swiping away the tracks of tears, trying to put together her thoughts. To organize the truth as she knew it.
And they give her the time to. They wait, heartsore but patient, in the way Rumi had only fleetingly dreamed was possible.
Rumi drops her hands and lets her fingers curl like claws over her knees. She stares down at her patterns, light rushing along them like a river rages.
Everything always circles back to them, doesn’t it?
“I’m sorry,” she starts, ignoring the frustrated sound Mira makes when it’s clearly not an answer. “I have to say that first. I never should have burdened you with… that.” Another strangled noise, a growled ‘You’re missing the point—‘ “But in the moment, all I could think about was fixing my mother’s mistake. Celine’s. Me.”
“You’re not a mistake,” Zoey’s quick to blurt, looping an arm through hers to tug her closer, into a hug. “Don’t say that, you—you’re not even allowed to think that, okay? You can’t call one of the two best things that have ever happened to me a mistake.”
“Ditto,” Mira croaks, though her tone is flat in her upset.
Rumi huffs, helpless to their fierce defense of her even against her own self. “Okay,” she concedes for their benefit. “I won’t. But that’s where I was coming from. I grew up believing anything with patterns was a demon, and that all demons were evil.” Rumi flips her hands over, releasing her knees to stretch out her fingers, dappled with color. “And then I’d look in the mirror and see… these.”
“These aren’t evil,” Zoey takes her hands, lifting one to her face to hold it against her own cheek. Rumi stares, the glow of her patterns catching in Zoey’s eyes. “They never could be, not on you. They’re beautiful. The only thing evil was Celine letting you believe this about yourself for so long. Making you hate yourself like that—how old even were you when it started?”
“I was—” Rumi thinks back to sitting before a grave. Thinks about a brush running through her hair and being too small to see over the headstone. About questions unanswered and her first thought being ‘Something’s wrong with me.’ “Four, maybe? Five? It would have been the first time I remembered asking about them.”
The wounded sound they both give makes her shrink.
“Rumi.” Mira clenches her jaw, breathing measured carefully. “Hold me back.”
“What?”
“Hold me back before I go find Celine and throat-punch her.”
“Oh, no, no, don’t do that—” Rumi pulls away from Zoey to hold down Mira’s thigh when she goes to rise. “It’s fine! It’s okay! Celine, she—she did what she thought was best, okay? She tried, but there’s not exactly a manual on raising a half-breed.”
Zoey goes still, eyes shimmering and Rumi knows immediately that she’s seeing high school hallways instead of them. “Half-breed? Did she call you that?” Zoey demands, voice pitching. Rumi has to yank the maknae back down when it turns out Mira’s not the only one she needs to worry about.
“Oh, she’s dead.”
Mira’s trying to get up again, and Rumi panics, tossing herself halfway on her lap to discourage her and pinning Zoey’s hand between her knees as she holds it between her own. “No! She—guys—stop, she never said anything like that! That’s all me, it’s just what I am!”
There’s a sudden slack in tension. Where Mira was straining against her, she’s suddenly pulling Rumi in, yanking her fully into Mira’s lap and planting hands on her biceps. With a hard shake, she glowers in Rumi’s face.
“Don’t you dare—you’re not a fucking dog, Rumi!”
Rumi’s gaze dances over the taut lines of Mira’s face. “Mira,” she tries to speak, but another shake discourages her.
“No,” Mira says, tone cracking. More than fury, there’s hurt, like she’s choosing to feel what Rumi denies herself. “No excuses for her, or for you. Don’t you ever call yourself that again. Ever. You hear me?”
When Rumi can’t answer, lips parted uselessly over being called out for something she took as fact, Mira’s shoulders hitch up. She presses her forehead to Rumi’s, not releasing her gaze. “Rumi. You’re not less. You’re not some animal or stray or whatever the hell you got going through your head, okay? You’re… kinda everything to us. I hate that you can’t see it.”
“You really don’t get it, do you,” Zoey scoots closer, tilting into them to land her head on Mira’s shoulder and peer up at Rumi tiredly, but achingly fond. Her fingers span Rumi’s thigh, always needing contact, a tether that reminds them all that Rumi’s still here. “If you’re half of anything, Rumi, it’s our world. You know, someone really pretty and smart once told me, ‘Stop trying to be less,’ and you know what? I think she really needs to practice what she preached. Effective yesterday.”
Rumi groans, pulling back from Mira just to sink further into her, hiding her face in Mira’s neck. “You girls, you’re something else,” she lets out an abortive laugh, more out of shock than humor. “I’ll… try. To be better about how I talk about myself. BUT! Only if you don’t go and fight Celine.”
Their maknae hums consideringly. “Okay, I’ll agree to that—on the terms that every time you slip up we get to hit her. I’ll keep tally!”
“Zoey, I like the way you think.” Mira grins against Rumi’s hair in time with Rumi letting out an affronted gasp.
“This is extortion,” Rumi grumbles, well aware of her chances. For Celine’s sake, she’s going to have to be on her best, most self-affirming behavior.
The heart-to-heart isn’t over, the truths not fully spoken into the air—but bit by bit, Rumi sheds the lies she wore as armor. She starts from the beginning, and retraces her steps to freedom, pointing out every landmark that served to catch on her chains—from Celine’s strict conditioning borne of fear for her (and of her) to the mounting disgust Rumi felt for her own reflection that rose parallel with the spread of her patterns.
That relentless drive for Golden, to be golden, in every way, so that she could finally share space with them and not feel like she was a thief grasping with dirty fingers for what didn’t belong to her.
Then Jinu, who she in fact did not tell about her patterns, but happened to find out during the bathhouse battle. Jinu, who could be silly and smug and an asshole in the fondest way. Jinu, who spent four-hundred years suffering and only paid it forward in a bid to be free, letting Rumi serve as his collateral. Jinu, who could have meant something, but hated himself too much to give himself the chance.
(The faces Mira and Zoey make at that linger in Rumi’s thoughts, but surely it’s just disgust for the demon who tore them apart.)
Then the Idol Awards. Rumi’s hopes set aflame in the haze of red stage lights. The decision she made stepping into starlight that would haunt their nights for years to come.
This is where Mira falters, like she’s not sure she’s allowed to hold Rumi any longer. This is where Mira’s voice breaks the stream of Rumi’s thoughts. Her feelings of betrayal that she won’t dismiss, the pain of being lied to by one of the two people she trusted most with her own vulnerabilities—and the agony of being made to do the one thing that was antithetical to her very being. Hurt her family.
And Zoey, squeezing onto her lap, hugging them both, shares her own grief. The painful stretch of being torn between the two of them, a coin being flipped and landing on the side that lifted her weapons towards Rumi because how else were they meant to react, truly, when they had just seen a demon masquerade as Bobby, and Rumi’s scream had torn at the Honmoon they all strived to protect?
Celine had made killers of them all.
Rumi speaks of waking up in the demon realm, to Mira and Zoey’s horror. Of suffering Gwi-ma’s voice in a way that flipped Rumi’s understanding of demons on its head, though it didn’t excuse the whole of them. The fog that she had sunk into, only to have it cleared with Zoey beneath her and the shaft of Mira’s gok-do yanked tight against her throat.
The sacrifice.
The dreaming. The song of the Honmoon, filtering through Rumi, becoming her as she became it, on the brink of becoming something other. Feeling Mira and Zoey’s pain and desperation to reach her and thinking, No, it would be better for you to forget. Better to let go, before the ruins I made of us crush you both.
And then… them. Zoey and Mira and even Celine. Them, their songs, their memories, their outstretched hands refusing to let her fade.
The light they left on to bring her home.
After it all, Zoey whimpers, "I'm so glad you came back."
Mira holds her tighter, lip wobbling. "You're not allowed to leave again. Ever. Got it?"
And Rumi doesn't doubt it, just like she'll never doubt her place in their arms again.
Notes:
the final chapter will be up tomorrow or the next day, just gotta look over it with eyes that aren't blurry — you're in for soft bedtime and bathhouse x.x (debating adding NSFW scenes to it but not sure yet)
Chapter 11: i was housed by your warmth, thus transformed
Summary:
I couldn't utter my love when it counted, ah, but I'm singing like a bird 'bout it now.
Notes:
I'm at peace. Here is the promised happy ending.
"Shrike" Hozier, if you want to feel how Rumi feels.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
When night comes with the end of yet another rom-com they paid little attention to, given the heaviness of the truth finally settling over them, there’s no question—at least not for Mira and Zoey. The moment Rumi rises gingerly from the couch, they do too, making her blink at them.
“Going to bed?” Mira rasps, eyes still shadowed with exhaustion and red-rimmed from being emotionally ripped open.
“We’ll come too,” Zoey says, not allowing a word otherwise when she links her pinky to Rumi’s.
And just like that, they wait for her to lead so they can follow.
Before she can stop it, that ache in Rumi’s chest bleeds into something she’d been trying not to name for years, warmed by their care. How silly of Rumi to think that, once they were home, they’d surrender her back to her too-big bed and drift off to their own four walls without her. How silly of her to think, even for a second, that she could ever tame that wild thing in her chest that beats only for them.
“I love you both,” Rumi says aloud, and lets them misinterpret it as they always do, both shooting her beaten but tiny, enduring grins, faces somehow glowing despite everything from her affection. “But if either of you kick the blankets off again, there will be war.”
To unrepentant giggles and a snarky ‘Sure, whatever you say’, they trail down the dark hall to Rumi’s room, the way lit only by her patterns shifting in pleased hues; Zoey “ooh”-ed the moment they cut out the lights, with Mira no less fixated, whispering a ‘gnarly’.
Their attention makes her flush brighter, and her patterns mirror it.
And it’s a little bit strange, how the walk Rumi usually makes alone is now bursting at the seams with their presence. Mira’s hand finds the small of her back, and Zoey has yet to let go, keeping their pinkies locked together.
Rumi wonders if this is what it’s like to be kept.
When Rumi opens the door to her room, she pauses, tilting her head. She immediately spots the discrepancy.
Her bed’s unmade.
And Rumi knows, as sure as the sun sets in the west, that she always makes her bed in the mornings, if not before she leaves. She distinctly remembers the nerves making her hands shake the morning of the Idol Awards, pulling the sheets up.
And frankly? Right now? Her bed is a mess in a way it’s never been before, and definitely not the way she left it.
Mira and Zoey shift on their feet when she turns to look at them, expressions sheepish and tender in the way bruises can be.
“Okay, so—funny story—or, not really? Not at all, actually, but it was just too hard to sleep, and in here—” Zoey starts, then stops, biting her lip.
“You already know we missed you,” Mira mutters in a quiet concession, Zoey nodding hard beside her like a bobblehead. “And this was as close as we could get to being with you.”
The confession rocks through Rumi.
The evidence of their love sunders her. Makes her ache. She hates herself for how she did that to them — and loves them all the harder, selfishly, greedily, for showing how much they cared even in her absence.
What did she do to deserve them?
Swallowing hard, hands twitching, she tugs Zoey closer, reaching for Mira. “I’m here now,” she assures them, heart cracking as Mira falls into her like a tower crumbling and Zoey whines like a puppy finding its way home under her arm. “And as the leader I decree we all need to sleep like babies tonight.”
In a rehearsed fashion, with muscle memory built from being at Celine’s in Rumi’s tiny bed, they settle in — a chin tucking here, an arm folding there, and legs draping over each other. Mira lies on her back, propped slightly on the pillow, with Rumi’s head on her shoulder and Zoey attached to Rumi like a tiny backpack. Mira’s arm, surely to be found dead in the morning, is sacrificed to curl beneath them and rest on Zoey.
Rumi releases a sigh, sinking into the beginnings of a doze — only to jolt when Zoey abruptly pulls her in tighter.
“Zoey?” She feels Zoey press an ear to her back, a slim finger tapping at a pattern that shimmers gold on Rumi’s shoulder.
“Shhh,” Zoey hushes her urgently. “I’m testing something. Hypothesizing.”
Mira shifts. “Hypothesizing wha—”
“SHHH!”
The three of them go quiet, Rumi and Mira blinking at each other since neither could see Zoey.
“Got it!” Finally, Zoey relaxes against Rumi’s back. Her hold loosens, but is no less secure, and she grins against Rumi’s shirt hard enough she feels it against her skin through the fabric. “Rumi, did you know your patterns, like, glow in sync with your heartbeat?”
“Uh, no, actually. The glow is new, so—”
“What? Let me see,” Mira insists, pushing at Rumi firmly until she’s on her back, Zoey pouting at being dislodged. Before Rumi can fully grasp that Mira’s face is smushed against her boob, Mira’s already glaring off into space, listening hard and holding Rumi’s hand up to watch the patterns flicker. “Huh. She’s right. Oh—” The patterns are shimmering quicker. “Shit, is this too much? Sorry—”
Mira yanks herself up hurriedly, looking contrite, but Rumi only shakes her head, ears red. “No, just not used to—that. Being close.” Rumi’s pointedly trying not to think about how her heartrate ticked up not from discomfort, but from the thrill of having Mira against her. Still, probably best that she’s not… right there, anymore, threatening her composure now that Rumi’s patterns give yet more of her away. “You’re fine, really. Now that you know, there’s no reason to keep you both at arm’s length anymore.”
That seems to settle Mira, who eases back down — not quite on Rumi’s chest, but in just as nerve-wracking a position, her breath gusting against Rumi’s neck. “… Cool.”
Zoey plops her head on Rumi’s shoulder, staring at her close with doe eyes. “Does this mean… bathhouse?” she whispers the word with a reverence that Rumi hopes to understand soon.
Mira perks up. “Spa day with Rumi?”
“You did promise,” Zoey reminds her, gently. “But if you need more time, we can wait. However long you need.”
“Yeah,” Mira adds. “No pressure.”
But with both of them staring at her, naked hope painting their arresting features, Rumi can only huff out a short, tickled laugh. “Yes. Bathhouse. Spa day. Whatever you girls want. I’m here for it.”
With a “Finally!” from Zoey, who bolts up, squeeing loud with her arms outstretched before shaking them both, and a “Fuck yeah!” from Mira, who squeezes Rumi like she’s a stress toy, letting out her own victory cry—
Well, Rumi can only think this must be what healing feels like.
The steam curls up her shoulders, and Rumi tips her head back, letting out a reflexive, shuddering groan that seems abruptly louder than she hoped. She flushes when both Zoey and Mira’s stare at her, hazy in the warmth distorting the air, mumbling an abashed apology that her patterns reflect with a shy pink.
“Wow,” Zoey sinks a little into the bath, mouth barely above the water and eyes saucer-wide, fixed on Rumi. “It’s, uh, hot in here, huh?”
“I would hope so,” Mira smirks, the curl of it lazy and relaxed as she, too, takes in Rumi. Her arms slip out of the water to drape over the rim of the pool, her stare wolfish in its intensity. “Enjoying yourself, princess?”
“I’m feeling years of tension melt away,” Rumi admits, sighing and pretending the blood rushing to her cheeks is just from the heat. It’s — hard, not to notice that they’re both looking at her and her patterns like she’s something sacred, like something ripped straight out of myth.
Although that could be because that’s what Rumi tried to make herself.
“I bet it feels good to let go a little,” Zoey says, drifting a little closer now that the awkwardness ebbs. The fog of the bath makes her look softer, and under the water Rumi feels fingers wiggle between hers. “You don’t have to carry it all by yourself anymore, either.”
The soft grin Zoey directs at her makes her patterns shimmer a touch brighter, edges of content pearl braiding with pink and gold, and Rumi squeezes Zoey’s hand reflexively, ducking deeper into the bath the more she nears — and the water lights up like Rumi’s staging a rave underneath the surface.
“Careful with her, Zoey,” Mira murmurs, distracted by her own awed curiosity. “We’re lucky this is private. If anyone walked in, they’d think we’re getting electrocuted.”
“Shush,” Rumi mumbles, partly burbling through the water. Unsanitary? Maybe. But the pools get routinely cycled and cleaned, they had assured Rumi, so the only thing getting in her mouth is water that had—
She stops that thought hard, and the glow burns brighter.
“Wow,” Zoey gushes, running her hands over the surface like she can touch the light. Across from her, Mira stretches her legs out under the water, admiring them through the soft pink radiance. “What are you thinking about to go all supernova like this?”
Girls, Rumi thinks. “You,” she says.
The word hits the water like a stone that sunk instead of skipped.
“Oh,” Zoey squeaks, right before Rumi realizes what escaped her mouth (though the other option wasn’t any better) and flashes in a dizzying show of distress that can only be described as ‘if oops were colors’.
“Smooth,” Mira snorts, though her cheeks tinge. “You do realize that you don’t have to wait for us to get naked to flirt, right?”
“That’s—” it’s Rumi’s turn to squeak. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud,” she mumbles, sinking lower and refusing to look at them.
“But you did mean to think it,” and Mira sounds unbearably pleased by it.
Zoey takes a soldiering breath, looking frazzled herself as she tugs a little at Rumi’s hand. “You know it’s okay, right? You’re allowed to… look at us like that. I think it’s been made pretty clear how we feel.”
“You guys are dating, though, I shouldn’t—” Rumi’s ears are on fire, and they only burn hotter when Mira peels off her side of the tub like a siren from a rock to cut through to them. She settles on the other side of Rumi to side-eye her with that vulpine tilt to her gaze.
“Do I need to bring up how Zoey was fawning over that dude… what’s his name, Listerine?” Zoey shoots Mira a look that’s halfway embarrassed, and Mira only glances at her coyly before continuing. “None of us are the type to be conventional. And since we’re in the business of being honest…”
Zoey follows, answering some wordless cue Rumi has yet to learn. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she says softly. “We had a feeling, you know? But there was always this wall between us and you, and no matter how we tried to climb it or break through, we couldn’t reach you.”
There’s a ripple of water, and Zoey lifts Rumi’s arm up by locking their hands together. The skin, damp and dotted with the bathwater like gems, is bedazzled by Rumi’s unease, her hope, her want.
Zoey lays her own brand on Rumi’s knuckles, stealing her breath. “Now we know, and that wall you had up? It’s gone. We can see the way you look at us, Rumi.”
The way she’s desperately trying not to look at them right now, given that her patterns are highlighting Zoey and Mira’s every dip and swell of flesh beneath the water. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rumi says, very eloquently and not at all in a stammered rush.
Mira hums, low and with a hint of mischief. “You sure about that? Because I think your patterns disagree.”
And the first touch to them, Mira’s fingers skating over a shoulder that ripples with pastel pinks like sunlight on water, tears a gasp from Rumi’s lips. The patterns flicker gold.
“And you’re gonna be, gonna be golden,” Zoey giggles, lifting Rumi’s hand up to plant a kiss on damp knuckles. “Ohh, since you don’t seem to know, how about I guess what they’re saying for you? I’ve got a good guess.”
“Wh-what?” Rumi croaks, entirely undone and defenseless.
Zoey leans in, close enough that her lips brush Rumi’s ear. “They say, ‘I’m in love with you’.”
And when she pulls back, Zoey’s eyes darken in a way that seemed impossibly directed towards her—towards Rumi, trembling, exposed, and one more touch away from shattering.
And Rumi? She doesn’t deny it. They hear it in the silence that once served to hide her. They see it in the ticking of her patterns, flashing faster and faster. Even if Rumi wanted to lie, her own nature wouldn’t allow her.
“Relax, bubby,” Zoey whispers, letting a hand skate along Rumi’s neck and thumb a pulsing artery. Her eyes drop pointedly to Rumi’s lips, then back up. “’Cause if you haven’t noticed, we’re in love with you too.”
And when Zoey leans in again—Rumi does the first brave thing she’s ever done for herself.
She leans in too.
Lips meet in a fatally soft collision, a little damp and warm like sunlight on skin left cold for far too long.
Rumi’s not experienced, but Zoey doesn’t seem to mind, only pressing closer, harder, until Rumi’s squeak from being backed into a very naked Mira is swallowed by her. Mira braces against the rim of the tub, letting Rumi flow into her lap with Zoey following. The squeeze of hands on her waist only makes Rumi twitch, gasping again — and Zoey slips past the seam of her lips to explore with all the tenacity of a deep-sea diver, eager for treasure.
It's only when Rumi’s lightheaded and on the cusp of tilting over that Zoey pulls back. Their maknae is unfairly composed compared to Rumi’s volcanic cheeks and pants, beaming through a sigh that has Zoey swaying back in for another greedy kiss. “Your lips are so soft, Rumi,” she mumbles. “Like pillows I don’t want to leave.”
Rumi blushes, too flustered to manage a compliment in return, before Mira cradles her jaw and guides her face towards her.
“My turn?” Mira murmurs, a touch pleading and already a little breathless when she slides a hand along Rumi’s jaw. She turns Rumi to look at her, her eyes half-mast, flickering over Rumi’s face, her swollen lips—
Rumi nods, short, eager, and — Mira kisses her like she wants to savor her. Lets the fingers on her waist drift across Rumi’s toned stomach, abs rippling from the scratch of careful nails, and Mira melds Rumi into her with a firm hand, leading their lips in a dance that she’s eager to teach Rumi the steps to.
All the while Mira holds her close, Zoey cradles her hand between her own.
And Rumi’s never felt so warm. So wanted. Really, she’s never felt so much, period. She’d gone from using fibers and threads as armor to hide the ugliest parts of her to being bare, unveiled, and explored like she’s art. Like she’s sculpture they want to bring to life through their touches and shared breath. It’s overwhelming, this gentle luxury she once thought she wasn’t allowed, this heat that they stoke within her and between the spaces of their bodies, their souls, stars flaring like fireworks, every explosion screaming—
Love me.
Hold me.
Touch me.
From her, to Mira, to Zoey, to her again, an infinity loop of love they won’t stop feeding each other.
Her doubts are pulled from her lips and swallowed by theirs. Her thoughts are made fuzzy, soaked with their warmth the way liquor hits blood. She’s intoxicated with the slide of them against her, tongue and cheek and even the messy, perfect bumping of teeth. She can barely get a breath in between them consuming her and pulling off her only to set fire to her oxygen when they kiss over her shoulder, the hushed noises of their pants and kisses rendering her faint with want and pride and—
“I love you,” Rumi says when they part. She knows, finally, the way they always have, how she means it, and that they know it too.
Mira sniffles. “Took you long enough.”
“What she said,” Zoey laughs tearfully, choked up as she leans her forehead on Rumi’s. “Oh, and don’t be upset, but I bet Mira I’d wind up rescuing the penguins from the melting Artic before you’d get around to saying it.”
“You did! Thanks for reminding me, babe,” Mira says, leaning forward to peck Zoey’s sheepish expression away. When Rumi pouts, Mira kisses that away too.
Suffice to say, the bathhouse becomes Rumi’s second favorite place, the first being wherever her girls are.
Notes:
FML I nearly dropped a completely separate one-shot that isn't finished yet (my attempt at a spicy NSFW demon!Zoemira summoned by the Honmoon to essentially force Rumi to confess (i need your suspension of disbelief pls i'm just a poor fanfic writing trying to make fantasies come true no matter how nonsensical)) instead of this epilogue. LMAO put me to bed and give me cough drops i'm so tired
More seriously, this fic is a lot of firsts for me. My first poly fic (and though maybe it hasn't lived up completely to the physical aspect, I hope it did so emotionally), my first KPDH fic, the first time I've written kisses, and the first time I'VE FINISHED ANYTHING (though my own flip-floppy chapter count tried to do me in; I originally planned for only, like, 3-4 chapters... can you imagine?).
This is it guys. Tearing up genuinely 'cause I never thought I'd finish a story in my life, but this here? Feels like an ending I'm happy with. I hope it's at least half as satisfying, if not more so, for you all who propped me up and blasted me with kudos. I know the journey was rough but I hope this feels like a breath of fresh air after choking on all the angst.
Are there still things I want to visit with this? Yes. There are plenty of things I want to tackle, from first dates to first times, to slice-of-life and not so slice-of-life moments. Rumi is still tied up with the Honmoon in a way I want to delve into, and she is in a sense a bridge to me. There's so many ideas both sweet and painfully bitter I want to write up in time, but I've got some other projects I want to test myself and grow with. If you're interested in keeping an ear out, just check out the series this fic is in some time in the future.
Thank you all again for coming along with me! <3
Pages Navigation
ShiroPL on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 04:42AM UTC
Comment Actions
Dem0nic_Child on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 04:50AM UTC
Comment Actions
Medynaunt on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 06:21AM UTC
Comment Actions
WolvezRock17 on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 07:51AM UTC
Comment Actions
sibul on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 08:35AM UTC
Comment Actions
Laxmn on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 11:58AM UTC
Comment Actions
BeyondMoonlight on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 01:18PM UTC
Comment Actions
ThatOneBlueTiger on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 04:30PM UTC
Comment Actions
Riellelrielle on Chapter 1 Sun 06 Jul 2025 11:29PM UTC
Comment Actions
Nooby1332c on Chapter 1 Tue 08 Jul 2025 01:58AM UTC
Comment Actions
RadioNo1 on Chapter 1 Wed 09 Jul 2025 02:50PM UTC
Comment Actions
wolfangs55 on Chapter 1 Fri 18 Jul 2025 11:23AM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Fri 18 Jul 2025 11:58PM UTC
Comment Actions
katofthenorth on Chapter 1 Fri 18 Jul 2025 11:10PM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Fri 18 Jul 2025 11:58PM UTC
Comment Actions
gveret on Chapter 1 Wed 30 Jul 2025 10:50AM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Wed 30 Jul 2025 11:22AM UTC
Last Edited Wed 30 Jul 2025 11:22AM UTC
Comment Actions
redrover801 on Chapter 1 Thu 07 Aug 2025 05:11AM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Thu 07 Aug 2025 09:57AM UTC
Comment Actions
ProfessorSpork on Chapter 1 Thu 07 Aug 2025 07:02AM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Thu 07 Aug 2025 09:57AM UTC
Comment Actions
Oogablast on Chapter 1 Thu 07 Aug 2025 07:17PM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Thu 07 Aug 2025 07:41PM UTC
Comment Actions
DuckingKween on Chapter 1 Fri 08 Aug 2025 07:16AM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Fri 08 Aug 2025 11:00AM UTC
Comment Actions
Kazut0o on Chapter 1 Mon 08 Sep 2025 10:35PM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Mon 08 Sep 2025 11:05PM UTC
Comment Actions
smirk47 on Chapter 1 Tue 09 Sep 2025 04:57PM UTC
Comment Actions
rainysatan on Chapter 1 Tue 09 Sep 2025 05:14PM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation