Chapter Text
The door closed behind them with a sound too soft to mark the end of anything. The apartment still smelled faintly of perfume and their clothes of stage smoke, synthetic sweetness clinging to the air like it didn’t know the night was over. It was dark, save for the ambient glow of the city leaking in through the windows—neon halos and blinking reds, light stripped of warmth. The silence felt staged, artificial after the roar of the awards hall. Hours ago there had been music, applause, their names chanted with devotion that bordered on worship. Now there was only the hum of the building settling into itself, pipes ticking, air moving where no one spoke.
Awards were set down on the counter—too carefully. Zoey placed them as if they were fragile, as if they might shatter if handled with anything less than reverence. Rumi moved forward, silently in the space. Mira turned one absentmindedly, watching her reflection bend and distort. She stared at it longer than necessary. The glass caught the light and splintered it, fractured rainbows skittering across the wall.
Iridescent, Mira thought, and felt something twist.
I should have seen it.
Zoey slipped off her shoes and set them neatly by the door, a small, deliberate act of normalcy, then crossed the room with careful steps—as if the wrong sound might shatter something already cracked. She stopped near Rumi, close enough to be felt but not touched, a quiet presence meant to say I’m here without asking anything in return.
Zoey had always been like this. A buffer. A bridge.
She learned early that silence, when well placed, unnatural to her it may be, could be an offering, that standing between two storms sometimes kept them from colliding. She angled herself just enough to catch Mira in her peripheral vision, hoping—irrationally—that proximity alone might soften what was coming.
Rumi hadn’t moved far. She stood by the window, hands loose at her sides, shoulders squared in a way Mira recognized as deliberate. Defensive. The city reflected back at her, layered over her face like a second skin. For a moment, it was difficult to tell where the lights ended and Rumi began. Rumi pressed her thumb into her palm, grounding herself in sensation—skin, bone, warmth—proof that she was still here. That she was not, despite everything, gone.
Zoey reached out, hesitated, then let her hand rest lightly against the back of the couch instead. Close. Not presumptuous. Her fingers curled there, knuckles pale.
She had replayed this moment a hundred times on the silent ride home. Each version ended differently. Each version ended worse.
Zoey glanced at Mira then, an unspoken plea: Please. Gently.
Mira folded her arms—not for warmth, but containment. She remained near the kitchen counter, unmoving. If she didn’t hold herself together, she feared she might come apart in pieces too sharp to retrieve.
“You don’t have to stand like that,” she said at last, voice even. Too even. “This isn’t an interrogation.”
“I know,” Rumi said.
The space between them filled with everything they weren’t saying. Zoey swallowed, her chest tight. She wanted to say We’re still here. She wanted to say You’re safe. But safety felt like a lie they weren’t ready to tell.
"You lied."
The words emerged without ceremony. Not raised. Not sharpened.
Rumi didn't flinch. "Yes."
The word settled into the room like dust.
Zoey inhaled sharply, like she hadn’t expected agreement. Mira almost wished for denial—something to argue against, something to push back on. Agreement left nowhere to go.
Mira’s thoughts spiraled, precise and merciless. She remembered the moment she’d asked. The careful phrasing. The open posture. If there’s something you’re not telling us, tell me. She had offered trust like an outstretched hand.
Rumi had taken it—and kept walking.
Mira’s fingers curled against the counter. She hadn’t realized they were shaking until she forced them still. “I asked you,” she said, quieter now. “I came to you. I told you—explicitly—that if something was wrong, you could tell me.”
Mira looked up then, eyes bright with something that wasn’t quite anger. “I gave you the chance.”
That hurt more than anything else.
Zoey stepped closer without thinking, her shoulder nearly brushing Rumi’s arm. She could feel the heat of her there—alive, solid—and the memory of pointing a weapon at that same body made her stomach twist.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Zoey said suddenly. The words spilled out unevenly, as if she’d been holding them back with both hands and finally let go. “You disappeared. I didn’t know what was happening, and we couldn’t find you, and—” She broke off, breath shuddering. “You asked us to stay.”
Mira closed her eyes.
Rumi’s reflection stared back at them in the glass, eyes rimmed with exhaustion rather than triumph. She lifted one hand, fingers catching the city light. The iridescence bloomed faintly across her skin, subtle and unmistakable. A sheen that refused to fade.
Mira opened her eyes and stared at the patterns, something breaking. “We would have loved you anyway, you know that, right?” she said, a question she was afraid to answer.
Wouldn’t we?
Rumi hesitated.
That pause—that infinitesimal fracture—told Mira everything.
Zoey saw it too. Her chest tightened. Love, she realized, was not the same as safety. And safety was not the same as permission to stay.
Rumi looked down at her hands. The light shifted, iridescence flaring briefly, mockingly beautiful. Residual. A reminder that some things did not end cleanly.
“I fixed it,” Rumi went on, almost to herself. “The Honmoon isn’t what it was, but it’s standing. He’s gone. It’s over. I thought… if the work was done, maybe so was I.”
Her gaze dropped to her hands. “So I don’t understand why I’m still here.”
“That’s not how this works,” Mira said, too quickly. “You don’t just—finish and disappear.”
Rumi smiled faintly.
Zoey took a hesitant step forward. “We pointed our weapons at you,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “I did. And I don’t know how to live with that.”
Rumi finally turned.
Her face held no accusation. No anger. Just something hollowed and quiet.
“I begged you to stay,” Rumi said gently. “And then I begged to be let go. No one listened.”
Mira opened her mouth, then closed it again.
The words had landed wrong. Not loud—just wrong, like a note struck slightly off-key. Mira felt them register a beat too late, as if her mind had rejected them on instinct before allowing them in.
She begged to be let go.
The phrase echoed, ugly and insistent.
You begged because you thought that was all you were worth.
She didn’t say it.
Instead, her mind spiraled, picking at the idea like a wound she hadn’t realized was open. Begged—to disappear, to be removed from the equation. Begged while Mira stood somewhere nearby, believing she was watching closely enough. Believing she would know if something like that were happening.
I would have noticed, she told herself desperately. I would have felt it.
But the truth crept in, unwelcome and corrosive: Rumi had reached the edge without them. Without Mira. Had made peace with vanishing while Mira still believed the worst possible outcome was distance, not erasure.
A cold thought followed, quieter but sharper:
If she wanted to go that badly… What does that say about how safe she felt with us?
Mira swallowed, jaw tightening. She wanted to be angry—at the secrecy, at the choice, at the unbearable finality implied by those words—but beneath it all was something far more frightening: the realization that love, even fiercely held, could still fail to anchor someone to the world.
Rumi had begged to be let go.
And Mira had never known.
Whatever she might have said felt insufficient. It required time. And Mira didn’t know if Rumi would stay long enough for that.
Rumi seemed to come to the same conclusion.
“I need some air,” she said. “I don’t know where I’m going. I just—” She exhaled. “I can’t be here right now.”
Zoey’s instinct screamed to stop her. To follow. To fix.
She didn’t.
Rumi’s hand was already on the door when Mira spoke. Not loudly. Not urgently. Just enough to make the space shift, like someone putting a palm flat against a table to stop it from tipping.
“Hey.”
Rumi paused. She didn’t turn around.
Mira stood a few feet away, arms loose at her sides, posture steady in that way that had nothing to do with confidence and everything to do with choice. She didn’t chase. She didn’t soften herself into something fragile. She just met the moment where it was.
“You don’t have to decide everything tonight,” Mira said. Her voice was blunt, but careful—each word set down deliberately. “You’re acting like leaving is the only honest option. It’s not.”
Rumi let out a breath that might’ve been a laugh if it hadn’t sounded so tired. “Staying feels like lying.”
Mira shook her head once. Small. Certain. “No. Staying feels unfinished. That’s different.”
That made Rumi turn.
Mira held her gaze without flinching. There was no accusation there, no fear masquerading as logic. Just truth, plain and unadorned.
“This—” Mira gestured vaguely at the room, at all of them, at the night still clinging to their clothes, “—this isn’t you choosing clarity. This is you trying to control the hurt by leaving first.”
The words landed cleanly. Too cleanly.
Rumi swallowed. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“I know,” Mira said. “I’m not deciding. I’m reminding.”
Silence stretched again, but this time it wasn’t empty. It was heavy with all the things Rumi hadn’t said yet.
Zoey broke it by moving.
She crossed the room without ceremony, stopping close enough that Rumi could feel her warmth, close enough that leaving would mean stepping around her. Zoey didn’t block the door. She never blocked. She just stood where she mattered.
“We can figure this out,” Zoey said, voice soft but unsteady, like she was holding herself together with intention alone. “Not perfectly. Not fast. But together. That was always the point, wasn’t it?” Rumi looked at her then, really looked. Zoey’s eyes were bright, not with tears exactly, but with the threat of them—emotion kept on a tight leash. “I don’t want to lose us,” Zoey admitted. “And yeah, maybe that’s selfish. But it’s also honest.”
She reached out—not grabbing, not pleading—just resting her fingers lightly against Rumi’s wrist. An offer. Not a trap.
“I’m not running,” Rumi said quietly. “I just don’t know how to stay.”
Zoey felt Rumi slip from her fingers. Then she was gone.
The door closed with the same soft finality as before.
Zoey sank onto the couch, breath shaking, staring at the empty space Rumi had left behind. Mira stood where she was, surrounded by trophies that suddenly felt unbearably heavy.
Outside, the city kept singing.
Inside, three lives had shifted—one of them now walking alone, uncertain of where she belonged, carrying the residue of survival like a question with no answer.