Chapter Text
Backstage hummed like the inside of a live wire, as though it, too, was vibrating on the edge of their biggest performance to date. The air was sticky with hairspray and apprehensive with sweat, rhinestones and glitter shedding onto the floor like crumbs of fallen stars. Every heartbeat in Rumi’s chest thudded with the same restless rhythm as the crowd chanting beyond the wall: wild, insistent, near-violent in its joy. She was surprised the plaster hadn’t broken through.
Mira was cracking her knuckles, muttering war crimes under her breath as she pummelled the punching bag they’d begged Bobby to drag in earlier. Each strike landed precisely, the cold snap of her fists sharp in the silence between. It could have been any other performance day, except – dead-centre on the bag she had duct-taped some glossy magazine cut-out. Was that–?
“Wait. Is that what I think it is?” Zoey slowed her pacing behind the couch, squinting. “Why is there a photo of Abby’s oily –”
“Abs,” Mira hissed, jabbing again. Thud. “I – ” thud “– hate – ” thud, “– abs!”
The laminated six-pack split down the middle like a chest cavity. Mira looked vindicated.
Zoey’s hands flew to her stomach like she’d taken the hit herself. “You’re so scary, Mira. Like—terrifying. I love it.” She leaned over the back of the couch until her chin was almost on Rumi’s shoulder, as if sharing a secret even though the whole room could hear.
“Tell me you don’t think that’s kind of…” she tilted her head, eyes narrowing like she was appraising art. “Hot.”
Rumi snorted, leaning back into the leather, pretending she wasn’t drunk on this – on them. She loved these kind of moments before a show. The sweat, the laughter, the nerves – it all reeked of belonging.
The kind of belonging you carved out with your own hands, not the kind you were given.
“Hot?” Rumi scoffed, though she could feel Zoey’s breath on her neck, and that was its own kind of heat. “Maybe if you’re into the whole barely controlled anger management thing.”
“As if you’re not. And anyway, this,” Mira corrected without looking up, landing a final uppercut that sent the poster sliding to the floor, “is revenge. And revenge is hot.”
Zoey swooped down and grabbed the torn photo before Mira could stomp it into the carpet for good measure. She slapped it against her front, the rippling abs dwarfing her tiny frame. Rumi bit back a laugh.
“Come on, Ru.” Zoey smirked, full of theatrics, “You’re telling me you wouldn’t pay money to watch Mira rage-punch a Saja Boy off the face of the earth?”
“Oh, I’d pay,” Rumi said, deadpan. “But not because it’s hot. Because it’s public service.”
Mira barked a laugh mid-punch. “Exactly. You get it.”
“And I’d pay double.” Zoey declared, clutching the ruined poster tighter to her stomach as she walked around with it, as if testing out the look. “Charity and entertainment. Double win.”
Mira sauntered over, eyebrow lifted, and prodded one perfectly lacquered nail against Zoey’s new belly button, making the smaller girl yelp. “You wish you had this washboard, Zo.”
“Excuse me?” Zoey’s mouth dropped open. “I thought you hated abs. And I could have it, if I wanted.”
“Oh, for sure.” Mira said cooly. “Like how I could have a dick.”
Zoey gasped, scandalised. “Rumi. Back me up.”
Rumi did not even blink.
“My bet’s on the dick,” she shrugged.
Zoey spun toward her, pouting. “Et tu, Ru? What a cruel, cruel world. Betrayed by my own bandmates.” She clutched a hand to her chest for dramatic effect.
“Please,” Mira stretched her arms out high overhead, drawing out her height. Her head was tilted down at Zoey. “You love it when we gang up on you.”
Zoey narrowed her eyes, but her smile was too quick, too golden to be contained.
“You say that like it’s a kink.” She teased, tilting her chin up.
Mira’s smirk widened. “Isn’t it?”
Rumi groaned, though her lips twitched.
“Well, ” Zoey tipped up on her toes, daring, just shy of Mira’s mouth, “you two better watch your backs. You’ll never see me coming. And I bite.”
Rumi snorted. “Is that a threat or a promise?”
“It’s cute.” Mira’s gaze flicked down to Zoey’s lips, her smirk all teeth. “But we’ll see whose more deadly in the end.”
Zoey let out a noise somewhere between a gasp and a giggle, teetering backward.
Rumi didn’t miss a beat. “Guess I should start planning the funeral, Zo. Don’t worry, it will be a lovely service.”
Zoey whirled around, turning to drape herself dramatically across the couch. She pressed the mangled abs to her chest as if shielding a mortal wound.
“Ah well,” she sighed, eyes fluttering shut, “at least I’ll die with the two of you by my side.”
Rumi’s laugh slipped out despite herself, stretching her legs, boots creaking, watching Zoey and Mira orbit each other like they couldn’t help it. She wanted to memorise the brightness of their faces, the electricity leaping between them. Rumi let herself soak in it – every tilt of Zoey’s grin, every glint in Mira’s eyes, every second she was permitted to stand inside their pulsing halo of light.
She wanted them carved into her, permanent as scar tissue.
Perhaps if prayed hard enough, the world would freeze them like this – the three of them, always circling, almost colliding, forever suspended on the cusp of something greater.
Or maybe, after tonight – after everything changed.
It would finally tip.
The stage manager barked twenty minutes, and the room lurched. Time cinched muscle-tight, skin-close.
Zoey was fiddling with one of her buns, strands coming loose, and Rumi beckoned her over. The smaller girl flopped down beside her without hesitation, too near, thigh pressed into Rumi’s, as though there wasn’t enough room on the four-person couch.
The bun slipped further as she sat, a strand bouncing against her cheek. Rumi reached before she thought, brushing it back.
“Hold still,” she said, already grinning, already buzzing, because tonight was it. Tonight was everything. She reached to gather the remaining strands back into place, and her hands shook ever-so-slightly, not from fear, not really, but from the giddy voltage running through all of them.
“There,” Rumi said, “Beautiful. Idol Award-winner ready.”
Zoey ducked her head, grinning at the floor, and Rumi knew she had delighted her.
Golden. Tonight, they would sing Golden. Tonight, they would stand in front of the world and declare themselves incandescent, whole, unbreakable. And maybe – just maybe – the song would stretch across the fissure inside her, spanning the hollow she kept hidden from them before it was too late.
It had to.
If they sang it true enough, if they gave themselves over, the Honmoon would have to take. It would have to relent and swallow her demon half whole – the rot, the curse, the shame, all of it. She could finally be finished with that part of herself. That burden.
Celine had promised her that.
She wanted it so badly. She wanted perfection, wanted it until her ribs ached. She wanted it because it meant keeping this safe. Them.
She wanted to be perfect for Zoey and Mira, whatever the cost.
One last song to seal her shut. After tonight, no more half-life. No more darkness. Just Zoey and Mira and, at last, Rumi – whole and finished and human.
“Rumi.”
Zoey’s hand slipped around her wrist, tugging it gently into her lap. Grounding her. Her eyes were dancing, close, sweetness fizzing out of her like carbonation.
“You’re zoning out,” she teased, voice lilting. “Don’t go soft on me now.”
Rumi summoned a grin, too quick. “I’m just picturing the look on their faces when we bury the Saja Boys alive.”
Mira snorted, adjusting her jacket. “Now that’s my girl.”
Heat inched up Rumi’s neck. She turned away and hoped they wouldn’t see it.
But Zoey leaned closer, conspiratorial, her forehead brushing Rumi’s temple for half a second too long.
“You’d better be,” she whispered. “You’re the glue tonight, unnie.” And then, quick as a match strike, Zoey pressed a kiss to Rumi’s cheek as if to seal the words.
The glue. The crack that had to hold. Rumi swallowed. If only Zoey knew how wide it ran.
“Exactly right,” Mira drawled, patting the sheen off her forehead with a towel. She cast them a look, sly and affectionate. “You’re the glue. We’re the fire.”
“Oh, we’re more than fire,” Zoey announced grandly, straightening up, beaming at them both. “We’re golden.”
Mira arched a brow, lips twitching. “Someone’s been practicing for the press.” But her smile was softer than her words, and when she caught Rumi’s eye, she winked.
Then Mira flung the towel at Zoey with enough force that the smaller girl had to duck, squealing, “Unprovoked!”
Their laughter filled the room – loud, graceless, glowing. It was this: messy and stupid and radiant, this brilliant closeness that kept Rumi stitched together. God, she loved them. It ached, how much. She wanted to bottle it, save it for when she was lonely, drink it all up until she drowned.
So when Bobby burst into the room, saying the Saja Boys were fighting, saying they were on now, Rumi was already rising. She did not hesitate to pull her girls in close.
“Okay. This is it.” Her voice shook, but it held. “For the fans.”
“For the world,” Zoey said, smile smaller now, but determined.
“For us,” Mira finished.
And that was it, the three of them moved without speaking, pulled by the same invisible thread. Mira slung an arm over both their shoulders, Zoey hooked her pinky through Rumi’s behind her back, and suddenly they were a knot of limbs, tangled and laughing, heartbeats thrumming in sync as they moved toward the light.
The roar of the crowd grew louder with every step, a tide rising to swallow them. It wasn’t nerves anymore – it was lightning arcing through them. It was a heat that ate through their veins, lit their hearts to glowing.
Rumi swallowed hard, pressing herself into them as if that could fuse them into one body, one soul. Her secret pulsed in her chest: tonight, maybe, the brokenness would end. Tonight, maybe, she would be made whole in their light.
How was Rumi to know how true that was – that tonight, for the first time, they would finally see her entire?
That this stage would not crown them, but crucify her.
That the song meant to seal the world, in the end, only sealed her fate.
***
The lights felt like molten gold on her skin, warm and rich and perfect. It soaked her skin, gilded her bones.
The crowd was a single, breathing organism roaring back their name; Rumi’s chest felt stretched wide enough to break open, and she let it – her solo burst from her like a flare tearing open the dark. Her voice, sharp and clean, bloomed out over the thousands as she sailed above the crowd, all but spilling from her ribs.
And she swore she could feel it – the Honmoon, glimmering in the corner of her vision, rippling over the sea of fans, trembling at the cusp of sealing.
For one impossible instant, she was free. She was more than her flesh, more than the ruin she kept hidden under her sleeves, more than the shame she’d chewed and scratched bloody for years. She was nothing but sound and radiance, adored and infinite among the thunder of her fans, the pulse of her girls in her heart, lifting her higher still.
This. This was what she had worked toward her entire life, it was the summit of every sacrifice, every lie, everything. This was all she had ever wanted – all Celine had ever asked of her.
Acceptance. The world chanting her name as though she had never been broken, never been wrong. And soon it would be true. The Honmoon would take. She would no longer have to live as half of a horrible whole. She would be healed. She could finally forgive her mother. Finally forgive herself.
But the chord broke, quiet.
The lights cut out, plunging her into shadow. Silence crashed down so sudden it rang in her ears.
For a heartbeat, she thought: this is it. She thought it might be the Honmoon snapping shut. The dark before the dawn, perhaps.
But then came a new sound. A new song. It slithered from the speakers and ran down her spine like a nail, chilling and thin, each note prickling her skin with instinct.
A song she knew. A song she hated.
Takedown.
The crowd shrieked even louder, thinking it a surprise encore, delirious with glee. But Rumi felt the blood drain out of her body.
No. No. How–why– ?
She had all but begged them – pleaded with Zoey and Mira not to make her sing this. It didn’t feel right, this venom on her tongue, each line twisting every darkest fear she carried into a weapon. Anything but this. She had told them she couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
But the monitors, the lights, the speakers surged mercilessly on. Her body moved against her will, mouth dragged by muscle memory into words that clattered against her teeth, sharp like shards of glass.
So sweet, so easy on the eyes, but hideous on the inside.
The fans lost their minds, the stadium shook with delight.
Rumi’s mind staggered under it, a desperate confusion taking hold. This didn’t feel like triumph anymore. Or salvation. It felt like punishment.
Like someone had stripped her bare, forced her to sing her own sin in front of thousands.
Why would they do this?
Why would they do this to her?
Zoey and Mira were beside her again, moving in perfect sync, every step of the choreography crisp, radiant, professional – but Rumi had never felt further from them in her life. It was as if all the warmth between them, all the connection, had been torn away, leaving three shells distantly orbiting each other. Hollow and estranged.
Then Zoey broke formation.
Rumi looked up, confused, but Zoey was suddenly there, too close, smile sharpened into something wolfish. Her hand skimmed Rumi’s shoulder – not supportive, but shoving, hard. Mira followed close, prowling, their voices entwined with hers in barbed-wire harmony, tightening into a dissonant snarl.
Rumi didn’t understand, why were they staring at her?
'Cause I see your real face, and it's ugly as sin. Time to put you in your place, 'cause you're rotten within.
Her knees almost buckled. Their voices rang too loud, too brittle, the lyrics cracking straight into her skull. This wasn’t their choreography, wasn’t anything they had practiced.
She tried to search Zoey’s gaze, looking for the joke, the lifeline. But her eyes burned with something completely unrecognizable to Rumi – a sort of sadistic hatred worn like a mask, so foreign it looked obscene on her friend’s beloved face. Mira’s smirk was somehow worse – wide and rancorous, as though she’d been waiting and waiting for this moment.
Had they planned this without her? Rehearsed it behind her back?
The lights strobed white-hot across the stage, blinding her, slicing any thought or sense into static.
But then Zoey lunged, coming at her fast – fingers hooking her collar cruelly, ripping. The fabric tore down Rumi’s arms. She gasped, stumbling, only to be shoved forward, harshly, into the spotlight’s dead centre, squinting into its sear. Mira grinned at her, radiant and merciless – the smile Rumi adored sharpened into something almost executional.
The crowd gasped, but not in joy this time. Not in awe. Their shouts had curdled into confusion, into horror.
I don't think you're ready for the takedown.
Zoey and Mira moved as one, inhumanly fast, circling her like predators. The people she loved most in this world – and in this moment she couldn’t recognize a single trace of them. Not one glimmer of love; suddenly strangers, suddenly predators. Rumi’s chest clenched so hard she could barely breathe.
And then –
Her jacket was gone. Ripped from her entirely.
Her arms were bare.
Her patterns burned up her skin, slick and luminous. They crawled into the open like oil gliding on water, catching fire beneath the lights. They were utterly undeniable.
“No—” The word tore raw from her throat. She folded herself in tight, arms a cage clutching at her body, nails scoring crescent-deep into flesh, trying desperately to hold herself shut. As if it would help. As though pressure alone could shove the truth back under her skin.
But it was too late.
Zoey and Mira weren’t dancing anymore. They were circling her, slow and deliberate. They were hunters, pulling the orbit tighter, until all that was left was her. The crowd’s roar blurred, pressing her in, rooting her feet in place.
“We see what you are,” Mira said then, not for the fans. For her. Cutting straight into bone.
Zoey’s voice lashed through the music next, inches from her face: “You’re a demon.”
Rumi shook her head so violently her vision scattered.
“No, no, no—” Her palms clamped to her ears, but the music kept pounding, the voices slicing straight through. Her chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself, breath snapping too shallow to keep her upright.
This couldn’t be real. They couldn’t know. She had been careful – so careful – every second of her other life covered up, stitched shut, just like Celine said, just like she practiced since she was a child.
Hidden. Controlled. Perfect.
So how? How did they see it? How had Rumi not seen it?
Had she been blind? Had she been so desperate to believe in their love that she obscured herself from their hate? Was she too busy hiding herself to notice what they themselves had been harbouring? So desperate to belong that she never saw the disgust simmering behind their smiles?
Of course. Of course. They must have loathed her all along. To do this now, to strip her raw before the world – they must have despised her more than she ever feared they could.
She had been so, so wrong to dream, to believe. Stupid, pathetic, rotten, to think she could ever fix anything.
“A mistake.” Zoey shoved her again, but Rumi barely felt it compared to the impact of their words.
Their voices dropped lower, guttural, final. “You have been since the day you were born.”
They carved her open. Because they weren’t insults, not really. They weren’t even cruelty – they were truth, the marrow of what she was spoken aloud. She stared at them through the blur of panic, eyes wide, searching their snarling faces for a flicker of reprieve, for some sign of the girls she loved. Anything.
But then it struck, glass shattering inwards: this wasn’t just them.
This was her.
Their mouths only moved, but it was her voice filling them, her own loathing made flesh. All the filth she tied to buried, every restraint Celine had put in place, every poison-thought she had fed on in the dark – now they sang it out for the world to hear.
So maybe it had always been written across her skin. Maybe she had never hidden it at all. Maybe she hadn’t ever been even slightly close to perfect.
Her skull felt like it was collapsing inwards, thoughts swirling until she couldn’t stand the pressure.
They knew.
They knew.
They knew.
She curled tighter, pressing her arms across her chest as if bracing against some outside force. But the agony wasn’t coming from them – it was erupting from within. Her very heart felt as if it were cracking, crumbling into fragments that scraped down her lungs and snagged on her gut, tearing her open from the inside.
The lights above her warped – too bright, too sharp. She felt rived beneath them, cut open for the world to inspect. Her vision narrowed. Black edges clawing in. The taste of iron on her tongue.
And then—
“NO!”
It tore out of her. But not only her.
Two voices, one human, one deeper, wet with shadow, something she had never heard before. They tangled together in her throat like a curse. Like a revelation.
The Honmoon above them flared, red as fresh blood spilling across the air, searing the night. The overhead lights burst into shards.
Darkness devoured everything.
The crowd’s scream fractured into infinite splintered shards, each one a jagged mirror of her wreckage.
And Rumi, trembling in the void she must have deserved, couldn’t tell whether this was the end of her life – or the beginning of her death.
***
Rumi had run blind, stumbling through the dark, body unfamiliar and weak – no longer hers but some mangled cage rattling its hollowed self to splinters. She felt like a marionette, each step jarred bone against bone, uncoordinated and distorted. Loose hair stuck wet to her eyes, her mouth, her throat. She couldn’t suck enough air in – every breath sawed at her lungs.
Her skin seared where the patterns flared, molten veins burning her alive, and she could only see through a fevered haze of gold leaking across one eye.
Her mind had narrowed to a soundless panic. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t remember how to be a body, only to give her legs the frantic command –
Move. Move. Move.
Away from the stage. Away from the spectacle. Away from the monster revealed.
But the monster followed. It always followed. Because it wasn’t behind her. It was sluicing under her skin.
The stairs swayed like an abyssal mouth opening beneath her. She shook and shook, so violently she struggled to slowly make her way down. She felt dizzy, so dizzy. She clawed at the air, at her own ribs, desperate to tear herself open, to spill it all out, to stop existing for a moment, just one moment of silence. But there was nowhere left to empty into. No one left to hold it. Only her own body, traitorous, unwanted, collapsing around her.
And then –
Them.
Her vision cut sharp, brutal in its sudden clarity. Zoey and Mira, impossibly there, in the corridor ahead. Not the snarling shadows she had fled, not the twisted puppets who had shredded her on stage – but her girls, her real girls. Real. Familiar. The sight split her in half with relief so severe it bordered on more pain.
“What?” Her voice cracked raw. “How… how are you here? You were just on stage… that wasn’t you?”
Their faces – beautiful, beloved, so pale and stricken now. Eyes wide with something she couldn’t name, couldn’t bear to name. There was nothing monstrous in them except the reflection of her.
Her body lurched forward before thought could catch. She reached out, arms aching with how horribly empty they were. “Oh—oh, thank goodness.”
But they didn’t move toward her. They flinched back. Recoiled. Rumi’s heart staggered.
Their eyes – her favourite eyes in all the world – wouldn’t hold hers. They slid, horrified, to the glow carving jagged rivers up her arms, across her chest. Her patterns, gleaming in the darkness.
“No – no, no,” Rumi’s voice came strangled. She stared at her own hands as if they belonged to someone else, some beast wearing her skin. As if maybe, if she looked hard enough, they would stop being hers.
Zoey’s voice was hoarse, soft in its disbelief. “How… how do you have patterns?”
“These – ” Her tongue tangled in panic. “These were supposed to be gone. You weren’t supposed to see them. You weren’t – ”
Mira’s voice cut through, gutted, trembling with betrayal. “You’ve been hiding this from us? This whole time?”
The words struck squarely into her chest, panic blooming outwards. She staggered closer anyway, frantic with need.
How could she make them see? She hadn’t been hiding from them. She’d been hiding for them! She didn’t want them to have this burden – it was hers. All hers. She’d carried it her whole life, heavy enough to break her spine.
She thought that if she kept it buried, if she carried it alone, it wouldn’t touch them. She thought she could fix it before it touched them. Didn’t that count for something?
“I had a plan!” The words shot out too fast, her desperation flaying her open. “I was going to erase them.” The panic clogged the explanation in her throat, “—Jinu, he—”
Zoey’s body snapped taut, eyes flashing, confusion narrowing into anger. “Jinu? You’re working with him?”
“No, no, I was using him!” Her voice strained, pitched too high. Her hands shook in the air between them, caught in the shame of pleading. “To fix it. To fix me. So we could do our duty. So we could be strong. Be together.”
Her throat burned. The words poured freely now, like a dam broken, flooding and unstoppable. And still there was so much more she wanted to scream. So I could be enough for you! So I wouldn’t shame you! So I could be whole, not half-thing, not rot to be resented! So I could stand at your side and deserve you!
But she couldn’t say it, not here, not like this. Not when she had dreamed of this moment differently – dreamed of it luminous, victorious, with her patterns erased and the Honmoon sealed and Zoey and Mira warm in her arms. That was when she would tell them. That she was in love with them. Both. Desperately. Enough to tear herself open, enough to split her own soul and hope they could fill the hollow that she never could.
But here? Now? With her ruin bared and her humiliation leaking from every crack? The confession festered in her mouth, rancid and thorn-threaded, impossible to force free. Every word she meant as salvation seemed to split into a wound she could not close.
Zoey’s face twisted. “How can we be together when we can’t tell your lies from your truths, Rumi?”
Her name. Rumi. Said like that. Said like Zoey had never heard it before — not really. Not said like a song, like it so often was, or like a secret, or with the pulse of affection they carried between them. But spat like a verdict. Cold, final. A blade slipping soundly between her ribs.
And the thought almost cleaved her open: if Rumi told them now, if she screamed it, raw and wretched — I love you, I love you, I’ve always loved you — would they even believe her? Or would it decay in their ears, soured and written off as deceit before it even reached their hearts.
It felt unbearable. To hold love this big, this consuming, and know it was unworthy of them. To know it would be poison in their ears, tainted by what she was. Her contamination was irredeemable.
She hadn’t wanted this. Not the hiding, nor the very patterns blistering up her arms like wildfire claiming her. Couldn’t they see that? But whenever she had tried to tell them, the fear had been heavier than her voice could hold. Fear of disgust, fear of rejection, fear that if they saw her truly, she would no longer exist so softly, so lovingly in their light. And now she was right. She was right. Celine had been right.
Mira’s voice broke her all over again, quieter, but worse than rage: “I knew it. I knew it was too good to be true.”
Mira looked away from her then. Looked down. The absence of her gaze was agony. A limb torn clean. Silence that rang louder than screams. Rumi’s whole body throbbed with it, ears filled with a loss so sharp she could barely hear her own thoughts.
“No—Mira, no!” Rumi’s voice snapped, a bird hitting glass. “Didn’t you see it? The gold? We were so close!”
She tried to smile, but her face betrayed her, warped and trembling, grotesque with tears. The golden haze still clung to her vision — to them — as if it could rewrite reality. “The Honmoon—look, it’s turning—gold—” A sob choked out of her on the final word, unbidden.
But they only backed away further. The shine in their eyes was not awe. Not wonder. It was terror.
“No, no, don’t leave!” The words erupted from her mouth like blood or bile, all dignity gone, begging raw and ugly.
She couldn’t – she couldn’t be abandoned. Not by them. Not when they were her tether, her breath, the only barrier between her and the dark abyss screaming open beneath her.
“Don’t leave!” She could feel it already, the panic surging up into her throat – if they left her now, if they turned away, there’d be nothing left. Everything would collapse. The world, her body. It would all just end.
She shut her eyes against the sight of their faces – she couldn’t bear their horror, couldn’t breathe it. Her voice split the silence, desperate:
“I can still FIX IT—”
But the words broke wrong. Doubled. Her cry tore itself in two. Something guttural, cavernous, bled thick and slow as tar through her throat, coating her mouth. The demon-shadow of herself spoke with her tongue, each syllable clattering in her skull.
Above them, the Honmoon convulsed. The light tremored, stuttering into a furious red. Its glow dripped down the corridor walls like wounds splitting open, oozing as though it too was displeased by her.
Rumi opened her eyes just as Zoey and Mira tilted their faces back to hers. Slack. Ashen. As if her girls – her heart – no longer recognized her at all.
And then, through the blur, Rumi’s wild gaze fixed on the motion: Mira’s hand trembling as she lifted her gokdo into the space between them.
It gutted her, worse than if Mira had simply swung it clean.
Rumi staggered back, choking on the sight – on the recognition. Because hesitation meant choice, meant Mira had measured her, weighed her, found her broken and desperate and begging – and still raised the blade. Mira was going to hurt her. Mira, who leaned into her shoulder on sleepless nights, Mira who steadied her when panic stole her lungs, Mira who pressed laughter into her ribs until the world seemed survivable. Mira, whose hand now levelled a weapon into Rumi’s chest.
And then there was only Zoey – sweet, steady Zoey – her eyes brimming with tears that shone sharper than any blade. Rumi shifted toward her, desperate for that pity. Even if Mira abandoned her, surely Zoey could not. Not Zoey. Not the girl who brushed the hair from her face with infinite gentleness, who pressed quick kisses to her cheek in the dark.
Rumi reached for her, drowning, gasping toward that warmth like she was her last anchor, her last hope for salvation.
“Zoey – please – ”
But Zoey’s arm rose too, reluctant, though unwavering nevertheless, her eyes glazed not with love but with grief. The pity Rumi prayed for was nowhere in that gaze. Only a terror too intimate, a terror that said: I thought I knew you. I thought you were mine. And you are not.
The world slowed. Split and shattered under the soundless weight of it.
Here she stood, heart unravelling thread by thread, mind collapsing in on itself, her patterns a confession she had never meant them to see. Flayed open. Soul skinned raw. And the girls she loved with every mangled atom of her being pointing their weapons at her.
Not at the demon. At her.
Rumi felt the verdict land like a stone: she was the monster they all feared, the thing they were trained to kill. She had always been the monster.
And something ruptured inside that silence. She knew they felt it too – the snap, the sickening collapse of everything Rumi had wanted to be. It echoed against the walls, not sound but absence, the loss of what they could have been. Broken into pieces.
Shame roared, searing her blind. She could not hold their eyes. Could not hold herself together. She wanted to crawl out of her body, to vanish, to undo the birth that had made her possible.
She stepped back. Her legs buckled. Her body shuddered as if her bones were trying to shake themselves out of her awful skin. A whimper clawed out of her chest – thin, animal, pathetic. She sounded like a stray at a locked door, rain-soaked and starved, begging for a mercy that would never come. A half-dead thing, waiting for the final kindness of a swift blow from those she loved most.
Because still, still, she loved them. With their weapons pointed at her heart, Rumi loved them.
And that is why she would not let them do this.
Not because she didn’t want them to, for what was the point of fighting onwards if they were not on her side?
She loved them, and that is why she would not let them live forever with her blood staining their hands. That was her last act of devotion: she could not give them truth, or give them her wholeness, but she would give them the absolution of her absence. If death was inevitable, she would take it on her own terms. She would not let them wake every night with the memory of her collapsing, the sound of her body hitting stone, the warmth of her blood cooling against their palms. She could at least spare them that.
So she turned – she ran. She fled headlong into the dark. Their breath still burned against her back, louder than pursuit, louder than the demon whispering inside her skull. She ran and ran and ran, though she knew: there was nothing left to run toward. Nothing but the abyss, patient and waiting.
***
The moon had risen high, pearled and pitiless, stars piercing through the black fabric of the sky like pins through skin. Above them all, the Honmoon writhed – its isobars shivering, bruised violet; the pulse of it hammering against her ribs as though it shared her body, her guilt. It remembered. It accused. Every twitch of its light was proof that she had sickened it, and no one else.
The grove was deathly still.
The air beneath the old tree was so chilled it seemed solidified in ice, every leaf and branch brittle enough to shatter in one over-cast breath.
And there was Rumi, kneeling in the cold, hard dirt that bit and scraped at her knees. Her head bent low, her sain-geom steady and unwavering in her hands as she held it out to Celine.
She had walked a long way to get here. A long, mindless way, her body dragging itself forward while all thought drained to a single vision: this moment. This soil. This end.
Each footstep had not been chosen but compelled, drawn by a force more powerful than herself; step after step, carrying her to this inevitable ground. And now, kneeling, she felt the strangest calm settle inside her. Not relief. Not courage. The numb tenderness of an animal lain on the altar.
She had walked the quiet with only one certainty: she truly was a mistake. She should not have been here at all. And now the whole world knew it too.
Maybe her whole life had never been meant to stretch forward but to narrow here, to this one purpose, this singular offering. She was born to kill demons, after all, and the greatest one had always worn her skin. She would not falter now her debt was due.
To die would not be loss, but restoration. She told herself this. A kindness – Mira and Zoey would go on, lighter, relieved of the shame of her. They would be free to shine unshaded; their full lives no longer tangled with her half. She had stained them enough. She could make it right by disappearing.
“Do what you should have done,” her voice husked, a void, “a long time ago. Before I destroy what I swore to protect.”
The blade tilted; the Honmoon’s violet pulse scattered across its surface and bled into Celine’s wide eyes.
Rumi forced her breath to slow – deep, in, deliberate, out.
In and out.
She wanted Celine to see it, to know her certainty, to recognize how clean and righteous this was. But inside, her mind was not slow at all. It was splintering, shards of careening memory whirring loose, cutting through her veins.
Flash after flash:
Celine’s shadow in the doorway, when Rumi was still so small she could barely hold herself upright.
Celine’s silhouette spilling across the bed, stretching long, dark.
Celine’s arm half-raised, blade in her grip, gleaming cold.
Rumi’s back locked tight, a child rigid, waiting for the strike that would end her.
Celine’s hand faltering. Every time.
The blade lowering. Every time.
The silence after. Still alive.
Celine thought she did not remember. That time blurred such things. But she did. Rumi had carried each almost-death like a brand. Like her patterns.
And what did those moments teach her? Not mercy. No. They were proof. Proof that she was too dangerous to keep, too aberrant to love, too shameful to name entirely. A creature tolerated, hidden, endured. A daughter you locked in the back room, kept in the dark in the hope she’d disappear. A life withheld, suspended, always waiting for the moment the blade wouldn’t falter.
The memories festered. They had been festering for years. Each phantom swing of Celine’s blade had carved her thinner, hollower, until she was nothing but a wound wearing skin, an infection crawling through the Hunters’ legacy.
And wasn’t that proof enough? That this ending was not despair, but order restored? She had been marked for disaster from her first breath – a living death. Even Celine had seen it. Hadn’t she, blade raised over and over? If only she’d been brave enough to finish it.
And now here Rumi was. Offering it. Begging for it.
“Do it!” The command was bark and beg at once, a child’s plea braided with a monster’s roar.
The other voice had peeled loose with it. The shadow-voice. The parasite. It slid up her throat like claws scraping stone, guttural, foul. She hated it. Hated the way it strangled what was once hers. Her voice had been soothing, consoling and warm, something Mira said could cut silk, Zoey said it could persuade the stars to fall. Now it was tainted, wreckage made noise she did not recognise.
And still the Honmoon flashed violently. Its light spread like a gash across the bark, across her body, demanding blood. Demanding hers.
But when Celine’s hand moved – it was not to strike, but to knock the blade from Rumi’s grasp. The steel clattered against the roots of the tree, useless.
Rumi choked on a sob. The refusal cut deeper than the weapon ever could. Celine could not kill her. Would never kill her.
Death would have been mercy. This – this rejection – was torment.
“I can’t,” Celine whispered. But her voice was not kind to Rumi’s ears. It was weary, jagged, just another betrayal.
Wasn’t that worse? Its own rotten weakness? For Celine to keep her alive, but never whole. To chain her to secrecy, to shame, to nights of silence, but deny her even the mercy of release. Wasn’t that cruelty? To say she loved her, but not enough to bear the truth of her. To keep her half-safe, half-loved, half-monster, half-child.
“When we lost your mother, I swore I would protect what was left of her. But I never thought—” Her jaw clenched, her eyes shimmered with grief. “—I never thought it would be a child like you.”
The final word was said like an unfairness, a punishment, like Rumi’s very existence was a cruel trick of fate.
And the worst part: Rumi agreed. Of course she agreed. Hadn’t she known all along she was wrong? That she had been the gag, the glitch, the child that never should have been? Only Celine could afford the luxury of disappointment now, her resentment pronounced at last. But Rumi had known it every day of her life, carried it in her marrow like a poison she never chose.
Because Rumi had to wear it, not Celine. To keep breathing as the embodiment of an error. She was the consequence of something she had not done. Penalised not by death, but by the demand to continue.
The tears burned up but refused to fall, as though even her grief was too impure to be granted release. A storm banked behind glass. The world bent around her: the tree yawed, stars bled, the ground slid.
Celine leaned closer – so close Rumi could feel the heat of her breath, the draft of her trembling hand hovering over her cheek. Over her patterns. But it never touched. Never quite closed the distance.
Her love – always hovering, never landing true.
“Everything I was taught told me you were wrong,” Celine said, her hand quivering between reach and recoil. “But I made a promise. To accept you. To help you.”
The words scalded. Rumi lifted her head, brows knotted tight. She could feel herself kindling, her skin writhing where the patterns seared with fury.
“Accept me?” Her breath heaved, “you told me to cover up. To hide.”
Celine’s jaw ticked. “Yes. Until we could fix everything. And we still can. We’ll cover those marks, bury them, make it right again. I’ll tell Mira and Zoey it was all a lie, that it was Gwi-ma’s trick to divide us – ”
But the names – the memories, they hammered straight into her. Split her like lightning striking a tree, leaving nothing but an ashen stump shocked-still in the earth.
Her Mira. Her Zoey.
Their eyes, wide and horrified, fixed on her body.
Their faces, twisted in disgust at her patterns.
Their hands, steadying their weapons against her.
Her stomach lurched at the memory, acid crawling up her throat. And the thought – no, the truth – that they had looked at her and seen not Rumi, but a demon, her demon, was unbearable.
A child’s memory slammed against the present:
“Do Hunters kill all demons?” She had asked Celine once, small and sad.
Now she knew the answer. It was their duty. Always. Even if that demon wore the face you loved. Or your own. Perhaps especially then.
The images of Zoey and Mira thudded one by one behind her eyes, and all that hammering only made her resolve harder.
“No!” She erupted, too loud for the grove. Celine flinched, eyes cast down, darting, terrified, but Rumi did not stop. Her words were tumbling out, catching fire as they went. “No more lies.”
“Rumi—” Celine tried to soothe, tried to rein her back in.
“Don’t you get it?” Rumi shook with rage and grief, every syllable saturated in her shame. “This is what I am. Look at me!”
But Celine would not. Her hands floated up, a barrier, as if her body could still shield itself from the reality of Rumi. As if she could still pretend.
“Why can’t you look at me?” The plea cracked, broke into sob. “Why couldn’t you love me?”
“I do!”
“All of me!”
The cry split the air like a faultline. It carried every ounce of her humiliation, her desperate longing, her soul bared and soiled in the same instant. Her voice had been her true beauty, her gift. Now it betrayed her too, dragging her filth out into the air, making her monstrous even as she begged to be loved.
Rumi thought then that she would sooner cut it out herself, rip her own tongue from her mouth, than have to hear it again.
Veins of purple and gold were crawling up her neck like they would choke her. Rumi suddenly wished to tear them off with her nails, carve and dig until she was raw, blood-slick, emptied out – until she was something whole and clean.
So how could she condemn Celine for resenting her, when Rumi now loathed this part of herself with every breath? It had taken away everyone she loved. She hated it so entirely she suddenly felt that her entire body was nothing but a festering heap masquerading as flesh.
The Honmoon recoiled, violet ripples washing across Celine’s outstretched hands like smeared blood. “This… this is why we have to hide it.” She staggered as though struck, her voice surging into the rhythm of a creed learned long ago “Our faults and fears must never be seen! It’s the only way to protect the Honmoon.”
The words landed like shackles. Protect the Honmoon. Always the Honmoon. Always that fragile lantern in the sky, more sacred than flesh, more deserving than her own life. Surely such a fragile thing should not command her entire existence.
Her whole childhood had been bound to its will. Don’t run, don’t climb, don’t laugh, don’t speak too loudly, don’t play where others might see. We cannot risk the Honmoon. She remembered pressing her nose to the glass, watching the other children tumble through the fields, splash in the pool, live without fear. The ache of wanting so little – only to join them, only to be like everyone else – and the humiliation of being told no, again and again, for something she had not chosen, something she could not even understand, already written into her skin.
She had learned long ago to accept the scraps. To lick the emptied bowl for some remnant of affection, to hoard whatever warmth she was tossed and pretend it was enough. Pretend she had understood what love was. But she hadn’t. All she had really learnt was hunger. A hunger that gnawed deeper with every passing year, hunger so wild she feared what she might do once she could no longer sate it.
Her tears came then, hot and merciless, refusing to be swallowed back. The truth pressed down on her chest with its brutal weight: she would never be equal to them. Not anymore. Not ever. She had always been less in Celine’s eyes, and now she would be in Zoey and Mira’s too.
Celine’s hands moved, sudden and decisive. She swept her coat around Rumi’s shoulders, shrouding the evidence as though that could still pass as protection.
“I’ll fix this,” Celine whispered, her voice whetted in a way that brooked no opposition. “I’ll find Zoey and Mira. I’ll tell them it was false. That it was all lies. I’ll tell them where to find you.”
And then – she pulled away.
She always pulled away.
She left Rumi kneeling in the dirt, swaddled in suffocating shame; as if she were a child again, her face upturned to the Honmoon blinking down at her. Nothing had changed. She had been hidden then, and she was hidden now.
She might have howled right there – howled and howled until her lungs split and her chest stopped burning with the weight of being covered, concealed, buried alive.
But instead, she sat beneath the sky. Silent. Watching the Honmoon swelling and convulsing, uttering its decree in perfect time with her ragged heartbeat. Celine’s scent still clung to the coat, faint and ghostly, wrapping its fingers around Rumi’s throat. The smell of her childhood. The promise of a loving protection that never arrived. It choked her as surely as hands, dizzying her to darkness.
But Rumi could not look away. And the Honmoon looked right back. Unlike Celine, unlike Zoey, unlike Mira – the Honmoon would not flinch. It would watch this. It would stay.
She had begged them. All of them. Begged with her whole body, every plea scraped raw with her love, flayed open before them – and still, still they had left her. Her girls with their weapons, Celine with her cowardice. All her prayers had met only rejection. And in that cold silence, the truth spoke itself into her: there was no one left in the whole world who could bear her.
Rumi slipped out of the coat, her hands crawling toward her sain-geom where it lay among the roots, trembling as though even the steel might refuse her. But it did not. She touched it, cool and certain, and it seemed to hum in her hand, almost grateful to be remembered. And old friend, and old judge.
She had begged Celine to end her. Begged to be put down like a maimed animal, to be freed from herself. And still she had not. She would never. Rumi’s pain had always been too inconvenient, too untimely, too much. What she wanted was never the thing that mattered.
A dog waits for the hand to strike. That is the pact. The chain may chafe, the belly may hollow, but the dog waits, no matter the want. Because that is what love means. To wait for pain and call it devotion. To wait for death and call it mercy.
But Celine had refused her even that. No blow to end her suffering. No tender hand willing to guide her to stillness. Rumi did not have Zoey, or Mira, or even Celine with her now. She had nothing. The leash had been untied, but not in love. In revulsion. In fear. The dog set loose not to run free but to be forgotten. Abandoned.
And now she sat here with the bowl empty, the chain broken, nothing left to worship but the blade at her feet.
Her chest convulsed, clenched around memories she wished she could scrape out and clutch in her palms, as if holding them could warm her one last time. She thought of Mira’s fierce protectiveness, those endless nights of whispered fears and failures and promises until morning broke softer. Zoey’s laughter that bent shadows back into light, the warmth of a hand brushing hers in the dark, sweet and kind as salvation. Rumi bent inward with the ache of it, with love so furious it pulsed stubbornly on even if the arteries were torn. A few stray tears squeezed their way out, fleeing her tired eyes.
That lingering love was the only comfort she had left in this bitter chill, and it was useless, useless, useless. She could cradle it forever and it would never bring them back.
But it was precisely that – a love that refused to die, even as her heart resolved to still itself for their sake. If she left now, if she carved herself out of their lives, then Zoey and Mira would not have to bear the stench of her failure any longer. They would remember her in fragments, perhaps – even fondly, if they were generous. But they would not have to look upon her tainted body, her shame, her ruin.
Yes. Yes. That would be the purest shape her love could take. The best she could offer. The last.
Her mother had died beneath this very tree, her body buried not too far. Rumi remembered that, though the memory blurred like a bruise pressed too often. The adults had whispered afterwards about honour, sacrifice, necessity. But they had never once whispered about choice. That was the inheritance she carried: not strength, not love, but the inevitability of blood spilled for the Honmoon’s frail skin. Passed down like sickness.
And wasn’t it strange, the way Celine had prepared her for it all along? Clipping her laughter, her running, her voice, until she fit the shape required. As if her whole childhood had been an apprenticeship for death. A grooming into sacrifice.
She had been told she was precious, like some rare stone. One Celine had been sharpening for years, sanding down with shame and duty and calling it love, calling it her mother’s greatest wish.
How many times had Rumi thought of that, long into the night? Lying between Mira and Zoey, their warmth pressed to her on either side, swearing a promise: I will not die as my mother did, with people who still loved her. I will not leave as she did, with people who still needed her.
But what did any of that matter now? The script never altered, and the little family Rumi had was gone. Revoked.
Now she realised her naivety – how hopeful, how laughable. She was no miracle. No chosen thing. She belonged to fate. She was her mother’s daughter and her father’s demon, and her legacy had written its ending across her skin long before she even learned to speak.
Shame boiled up in her throat, thick and scalding as bile. She had thought herself capable of bending destiny through love, through greatness, through the sheer ferocity of wanting to be better than what she was. But the truth was simple as stone: she had only been prolonging the inevitable.
She was born for this.
Her sain-geom waited, unblinking, patient. She lifted it slowly, turned it until the Honmoon’s glow caught the edge. The light spilled down the blade like milk, like a blessing. She angled it closer, and for one unbearable instant she saw herself reflected there, unfamiliar: the fractal patterns had taken over her face, and one, blood-shot golden eye gleamed cruelly back at her. It stared at her with a void she could no longer name. She looked away before it devoured her whole.
She almost couldn't bear it - for that to be the last face she'd see. Almost.
She wondered how it felt in her mother’s arms then, their weapon. Tried to picture her hands wrapped around this same hilt – but she had no memory, no image, only the stories Celine had fed her like medicine. Heroic stories. Sanitised stories. Stories with no mess, no screaming, no body left rotting in the ground.
Would her mother call this heroic? Or would she weep at what Rumi had become? She suddenly ached for that answer, ached for an approval she would never have. But perhaps this, too, was inheritance – this hunger to cut herself from the world before she could do any more harm.
The Honmoon pulsed a deep red once more. Maybe this was the only way to finally please it – finally please them all. She would not delay it any longer.
Her chest rose. Fell. The resolve spread through her limbs with an eerie calm. The violet light swam into her eyes. She told herself this was peace. She told herself this was perfection, at last.
Her hand closed around the hilt.
She lifted the blade. Lifted her head. Thought of her girls.
And opened herself.
Skin, muscle, sinew parted, granting her at last. Not quickly, but like a mouth dragged wide against its will.
She had imagined it clean, imagined herself vanishing as demons do – one swift strike, a puff of smoke, nothing left but silence and mercy. She had wanted that neat obliteration for herself. She had wanted to leave nothing behind, nothing to remember but absence.
But she was not granted that grace. She was not permitted to disappear.
The blade tore and tore and split her agape, and the world did not blink away; it sharpened.
Horrific pain flooded her like light through a crack – radiant, unbearable, everywhere at once.
Heat ripped and spurted through her veins, bright fountains of herself bursting down her chest, painting her knees, the dirt, the tree roots that had once cradled her as a child. Her blood ran in rivulets across the ground until it reached Celine’s discarded coat, seeping into the fabric, staining it to black.
Air ripped through her in ragged stutters. Breath met blood and foamed in her mouth, iron and salt, leaking down her chin in threads. The taste was overwhelming – she coughed, retched, gagged; her voice, her wonderful voice, the one they all adored, now broken into gargles, every syllable drowned in dark red. She loathed that even her death came out monstrous.
She had not expected the body to cling so hard to its own ruin, to convulse and fight as though it wanted to live. How dare it, she thought, choking. When I am finally doing something right.
Her hands quivered but she did not let go. She drove the blade deeper, blinded white-hot in torment, widening the promise she had made. Flesh resisted, then gave way with a slickness that sickened her.
The warmth poured and poured.
The Honmoon above blurred, rippled, bled into a hundred bursting suns – watching, watching, watching as she offered up all her goodness at last.
And still, in its stunning light, it made her think of Zoey. Her eyes. That brightness. Her beautiful Zoey, her voice silver as a fountain down its rocks. How would those eyes look if they saw this? Would they dim, shutter closed like before? Would they turn away once more? Rumi was grateful she’d never know. She wanted to remember only their shine.
The red trickling into the earth caught the light in a way that almost made it beautiful. It reminded her of Mira’s hair – they way it caught fire beneath the sun, strands alive, burning, limning her passion for the world to see. Mira, whose hand had always been the first to reach for her. Rumi felt her throat constrict.
Fitting, wasn’t it – that her insides would spill into the dirt in their likeness. That they had always been inside her, shaping her, filling her hollow places. It made perfect sense then, to end it. Without them she was nothing but the empty vessel left behind.
Rumi’s lungs rattled, rasping, wheezing, and the sound dragged her backward into memory: the three of them collapsed in laughter, barely breathing, their limbs tangled across the studio floor, snack wrappers crinkling under their weight. She could almost taste sugar on her tongue, almost smell sweat and salt, almost feel Zoey’s hair tickling her arm, Mira’s shoulder pressed into hers. Their warmth surrounding her once more.
She blinked, and the warmth was only blood. Hot, insistent streams crawling down her collarbone, soaking her shirt until fabric clung like second skin. At least it felt like being held.
Every nerve shrieked, but beneath the sound there was something quieter, heavier, so distorted it felt divine. This must be love, she told herself. This pain, this undoing. The kind of love that stripped you to the bone.
For if guilt was all she had ever known – guilt and hunger for approval, the endless echo of never being enough – then finally, this would be her absolution. Maybe if she endured long enough, if she let the anguish consume her whole, she could pay off her sin of simply existing.
She endured and endured, and still her body clung, stubborn. The wound refused to finish her. She remained – bleeding, writhing, shackled to herself.
She suspected it was her human side, her pitiful side, that kept her anchored here. The part that had wanted, so desperately, to be loved. To be praised. Forgiven. That was what forced her to stay, to feel every lacerating second, as if even in dying she had to wait for permission. As if release could only be granted once someone else declared she had earned it.
Her vision flickered with agony, thoughts blurred into sensation—fire and shame, resolve and terror, all indistinguishable. It hurts, it hurts, of course it hurts. It should hurt. Wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t she born for this, bred for it, raised for it? They made a Hunter of a demon; she was only consigning to her fate.
And Rumi, choking on her own devotion, bled into the dirt that had always been waiting for her.
Weakly, she managed to drag the blade free. It peeled out of her with a sucking wetness, soaked and clattering against the floor, a silver fang red to the root. But the release was worse than the cut.
The air rushed in, raw and serrated, the wound gaping wider without its keeper. Blood spilled faster now, a doubled tide, pumping from her vessels in frantic arcs, spraying the dirt in frantic signatures of her undoing.
The ground drank her in greedily. She followed, folding down, palms pressed to the soil as if begging it to take her quicker. But the body would not hurry. It made her stay, made her listen to the torture of her own flood. Each heartbeat was a hammer strike against her ribs, another surge of maroon at her hands, another second she had not asked for.
She tilted her head weakly. She wanted to see the sky.
The Honmoon still pulsed – not violet now, but a thin, translucent blue, faint as sea glass. The rhythm was steady, impossibly gentle, almost sad, a heartbeat no longer against her but with her. In her haze she thought, for a moment, that it had never been angry at all. That maybe every red flare, every ripple, had only been her own heart, her own fury and shame thrown skyward. It had never been her enemy. It had been her. The pulse of it. Its fragile miracle. The one that needed protection.
Her body convulsed, heaving on that thought. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want to believe she had ever been worth that much. It only made this more difficult. Blood sprayed her lips when she tried to cry, bubbling into coughs that tore her throat rawer. The Honmoon pulsed again – turquoise, then dimmer, then weaker, as though following her down.
Somewhere – distant, muffled – she thought heard something. Shapes of sound, words carried through water. But she could not hold onto them, they receded further and further away each time she tried. So she closed her eyes instead, let the pain take her, let the blur of red and blue smear her out.
But then –
“RUMI!”
The voices hit her ears thin, distorted, but real. Zoey’s. And Mira’s. Their voices braided together, desperate, frantic, rising out of the blood in her ears. She forced her head up, every muscle rebelling, and saw them: Mira’s hair flying wild, Zoey’s arms reaching forward, Celine not far behind.
They hadn’t taken long. Only minutes, really.
It took seconds to kill a demon. Rumi had been dying for what felt like hours.
Her hands slipped in the wet earth, smearing red mud, trying to lever herself upright. But her body refused her. She pitched forward, coughed—thick scarlet fountained up her face at the angle, splattering her own eyes. Their screams tunnelled into her, closer, louder, but she could not tell if they came from their throats or from the rafters splintering inside her own skull.
And then – contact.
A hand. Zoey’s first. Shaking, fever-hot where it pressed against her shoulder. Then another on her cheek, trying to wipe the blood but only smearing it wider. Mira a breath behind, falling to her knees, both of them panicked, their voices shredding themselves in terror.
“Rumi – Rumi, no –”
Rumi reached for them. She could not stop herself. Her trembling hand, bloody to the wrist, rose blindly, desperate to anchor herself, to make certain they were real. Her fingers brushed Zoey’s cheekbone and skidded weakly down, painting her with streaks of red. Zoey seized the hand, crushed it between both of hers, pressed it against her chest. The heat, the beat beneath her ribs – Rumi felt it and knew. They were here. They had come.
And yet—she could not beg anymore. She could not sing her relief. She could not say I love you, I love you, please forgive me.
Because Rumi’s sain-geom had struck straight through her throat. For that was the core she had aimed for.
The wound gaped beneath Mira’s desperate, clasping palms. Every time Rumi tried to force a word, only bubbles rose – wet, gargled bursts of blood in place of sound.
Zoey sobbed, cradling her face, “Shhh. No, don’t try, don’t try, please—” staining her hands red with Rumi’s blood.
Her voice. Her essence. The thing that had once filled whole stadiums and bound souls, that had tethered Zoey and Mira to her in song – now shredded. Cut out of her neck by her own hand. Better to be silenced forever than to let them hear that other sound again, the demon threaded through her human chords. Better to unmake the one gift she had, if it had turned into a curse.
Rumi tried to cry, she wanted to cry, but her throat could only choke, spit red ribbons onto their clothes. Zoey wailed louder, her body folding over Rumi’s as if to shield her from the air itself. Mira pressed both hands to the wound, iron-clad, her words breaking, spilling out in shocked, shattered syllables Rumi could not follow – only the pitch of them, only the grief.
Then the convulsions took her.
Her chest seized, lungs spasming under the trauma. A flood of crimson surged upward, flooding her airway, drowning her from the inside. She gagged, eyes blown wide, body thrashing weakly in their grip. The blood came hot and fast, spraying across Zoey’s cheek, running down Mira’s forearms. They didn’t recoil. They clung tighter, sobbing her name, her name, her name.
Her voice was gone. Theirs were all she had left.
“God, she’s choking – she’s choking, Mira –” Zoey’s words tumbled, breaking against her sobs.
“I know, I know, hold her, hold her – Rumi, please, look at me, please –” Mira’s voice cracked, fingers slick and slipping as she pressed harder. “There’s – Zo, there’s so much of it. So much.”
Her body was swallowed between theirs. Zoey slid beneath her, onto her lap, lifting, cradling Rumi’s heavy head against her chest, hushing her gently. Mira leaned over both of them from behind Rumi, long arms sweeping around, encompassing, pulling them both into a fortress of trembling limbs. Rumi was held entirely. Wrapped, shielded, their heat pressed against every inch of her. And for all the blood, they would not let her go.
“Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe – you’re safe now, keep warm.” Zoey whispered, wrapping her costume-jacket tight around Rumi’s shoulders. She hadn’t realised she was shivering.
And Rumi – God, Rumi felt them. Their warmth. Their love. No spaces left between. No gaps, no secrets. She was swallowed whole into them, pressed into the shape of their bodies, and there was nothing left to hide. Not her patterns, not her voice, not her shame. This was exactly how she had always wanted it.
Her heavy-lidded gaze slid sideways, catching on another figure, then. Blurred at the edges and dissolving into the black spots chewing at the edges of her vision. Rumi saw Celine, a little distance away, standing rigid, as if her feet had rooted. Her face was pale, horror hollowing her features to marble, her hands twitching uselessly at her sides. She was there, but not close, never close enough. Still just a figure watching from the doorway of Rumi’s life.
But Zoey and Mira were not watching. They were with her. They were part of her, their tears falling hot onto her skin, mixing with the blood, smearing her face with salt. They clung as if their own bones might split apart if they let her slip an inch.
Zoey’s cries tore the night open. They were not words, not even a name – just the raw rupture of her throat, an animal wail carrying Rumi’s pain where her own voice could no longer reach. Zoey’s hands were everywhere, clinging, sliding – clutching at her slick chest, sweeping clotted strands of hair from Rumi’s eyes, her mouth. Her sobs rained hot into Rumi’s skin, forehead pressed hard to her temple like she could pour her own life across the seam, stitch them back into one.
“Stay – Rumi, stay with me – please – I can’t –” Her words were catching on her stuttering breath, eyes shining with tears. “We can’t do this without you – please – ”
Mira’s sobs were somehow even more devastating, wetter, quieter – half-choked by the sheer mechanics of trying to keep her alive. She pressed down hard onto Rumi’s neck, again and again, crimson gushing as if mocking the effort, hissing up through every seam.
“No, no, no – ” Mira muttered, almost a chant, breath ragged. “Not like this – don’t you dare – not like this – stay with us, Rumi –”
Rumi would try, she thought weakly, absurdly: if Mira forbid her to die, she would try her best to obey.
But her mind was already unspooling, threads breaking loose into places she had never dared to go.
Where did the demons go, when they were cut down? She had killed so many. Watched them flare, unravel into smoke, vanish as though they’d never existed at all. She had never once wondered what they saw after her blade. She had never wanted to.
Did they have souls? Or was that why they stole them – because they needed one to feel anything at all?
If so, what was she? What waited for a thing like her? Half-formed, half-corrupt. Did she have a soul?
Another rush of blood slipped between Mira’s cupped hands, and Zoey caught Rumi’s drooping head between both palms, shaking her gently, crying her name over and over, each repetition pitched higher, more fractured, as if the recognition itself were the only thing keeping her here.
Rumi tried to hold onto that sound, but her body was splitting, her mind too. She was being halved, she was sure of it – cracked like a vessel.
Would she ever see them again?
If all souls went somewhere, would hers be torn apart too? Would half of her fall into whatever darkness swallowed demons, while the other half drifted upward, toward rest, toward the light where Zoey and Mira might one day arrive?
Would only her good half greet them there, finally scrubbed clean, rinsed of everything monstrous? Finally perfect, if only in death?
God, she wished for that. She hoped that if she was divided at death, they would never have to meet this part again – her bleeding, ruined, ashamed self dying in their arms now.
She prayed they would only know the other Rumi – the part of her that was worthy. The version that could keep up with them in song, in light, in laughter. The one she had never managed to give them fully while alive.
Mira’s palms pressed so deep against the ruin of her neck it felt like she was trying to replace the throat Rumi had cut away, trying to sculpt new chords with her bare hands. It sawed and sawed at Rumi’s fragile flesh, but she couldn’t bring herself to push those hands away.
“Don’t leave us, Rumi – don’t leave – ” Mira gasped, voice collapsing into pleas.
And it stirred something in her, some fragment of memory – though only faint in her mind now, like bubbles of noise rising to the surface and popping on the edge of her consciousness:
“No, don’t leave. Don’t leave!”
And it was her voice Rumi heard, ricocheting in her mind as if all around her.
But then Zoey was rocking her body as if it were already weightless, whispering cracked promises against her skin, “You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, I swear—” her breath was hot and shuddering against Rumi’s ear. “I’m so sorry, Rumi. So sorry. I take it all back, we can still fix it—”
Another bubble burst.
“I can still FIX IT!”
Their desperation blurred into her. They wanted her here, now, finally, when there was nothing left of her to give.
Relief and grief tangled through the nerves sparking under her skin. Relief – they had come. They still cared for her, they had not left her after all. And grief, cruel and fast: for how could she have known? Only hours ago, their weapons had pointed at her chest, their eyes hard with suspicion. And now they wept, and clung, and pleaded. How was she to believe she had ever been worth this?
But not anger, never that. Rumi had never been able to find it in herself to be angry with them for very long. And it wouldn’t do her much good to start now.
Rumi’s gaze fluttered weakly, heavy and tired. Her vision was clouding at the edges, but their faces stayed luminous, painfully close. The curve of Zoey’s jaw streaked with red. Mira’s hair falling like a veil around them both. So close she could see the raw cracks in their lips, could almost count the tears.
Their voices layered together, not a harmony anymore but a keening, discordant sob – their duet of despair. She thought of when they sang together, all three, voices braided into one radiant body, indistinguishable. Now she could only pray that someday, in whatever world souls returned to, their voices would find hers again. That she might still answer them with one unsevered, unchoked note.
The Honmoon blinked faintly above, dimming in tandem with her heart. Each flicker weaker. Each beat more fragile. Its glow washed them all in pale blue, as if the sky itself bled out its soul alongside her.
Rumi sagged at last into their arms. Her chest shuddered, stalled, failed. But she was held. Entirely. They had finally seen all of her, without the lies. Zoey and Mira clutched every inch of her now, frantic, terrified, trying to seal a soul already spilling beyond repair.
They clung harder. They begged harder. As if they believed Rumi could still be worth saving.
Her head lolled against Zoey’s collarbone, skin hot against skin already cooling. Blood glazed her teeth, congealing at the corner of her lips. She tried – God, she tried – to shape her mouth into something resembling a smile. To tell them it was all right, that they had come, and that was what mattered. But what slipped free was only a wet hiss, a whistle through torn flesh, and it was the sound of her voice dying forever.
More blood welled up. Too much. It filled her mouth until every breath was like drowning, until every exhale frothed dark and helpless through her lips. She hadn’t even known she could hold this much blood. She definitely hadn’t known her body would insist on pouring it all into their waiting hands, like some sort of compensation.
A final weak flare broke across the Honmoon, blue and tremulous. Her fading eyes latched onto it.
“I’m here, we’re here,” Zoey wept, still rocking her like a child, like she could rock blood back into her veins. “Stay right here.”
“You’re going to be okay, Ru, I promise. Don’t be scared.” Mira insisted, but her voice broke mid-sentence, every word already a mourning. Rumi knew she had said it for their sake more than her own, a comfort to see her and Zoey through. And oh, how that broke her, half-alive as she was. Mira, so fiercely protective, even when she could do no more to save her.
She blinked slowly, lids too heavy to keep apart any longer. But she felt them, their heat pressed to her chilling skin. Their voices became water, washing in and out, lapping at the edges of her ebbing mind. She wished she could tell them not to cry. That they had made her warm again. That she was not alone anymore. They had freed her more than they knew, just by being here.
But the words jammed behind the ragged strips of her throat. And her mind forgot them soon after.
One regret clawed its way up through the suffocating silence, bitter and final: she had never told them. Not Mira with her steady arms, not Zoey with her unshakable care. Rumi had never spoken the fire that flared in her chest each time their eyes found hers.
The words had lived on her tongue for months, swelling against her teeth, begging release: I love you. I loved you both.
But love without a sound is only ache, and her voice had been severed for good.
It would never reach them.
That was the last and deepest cruelty – to leave them with her heart the only thing still hidden, her truest confession swallowed forever, while she lay between the arms that had once been her whole world, and had left her all the same.
The night collapsed inward. The Honmoon stuttered, sputtered, dimmed.
But they had come back. And that was enough.
Rumi’s gaze locked – once, last, desperate – onto Zoey’s, rimmed raw, glistening with tears that never seemed to stop. Onto Mira’s, blown wide, pupils dark with terror, disbelief carving them open. She thought she saw something of love there, but maybe it was only the dream of her dying mind, inventing comfort.
Either way, she let it be her last burning image, her last sanctuary. The two of them, above her, it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The final home her soul would enter.
Warmth wrapped all around her, their arms pinning her broken body together. Pain shrieked at her edges, her heart was raking itself bloody against the cage of her ribs in a desperate bid to finally be free – but their heat chased away the fear, the sorrow, all traces of it thinning into the distance like voices carried across water.
Her body slackened, surrendering at last, and she let them take her weight. It felt as though she had been fighting gravity her whole life and finally, finally, she could rest. The blood kept coming, but her chest no longer tried to rise against it.
Zoey and Mira were here. Both arms around her at once – the cradle she had dreamed of, her truest wish – made real. They would not let her fall. They would not let her go.
And that was all she needed to know as the shadows closed in.
They would hold her close. They would keep her safe.
Rumi would sleep in their embrace, at last.
And still – the last flicker of thought in the pit of her dissolving mind: she prayed, somewhere, somehow, their souls would find each other again, and sing.