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The blade is a familiar, steady threat, gleaming at her daughter’s throat.
“Ah, you’re home.” The voice is a shock of history, plucking at something inside her that longs to harmonise, but Celine can’t look away from the point of that weapon, the whitened pressure of the skin underneath it, the unhidden pattern curling underneath it, bared to view.
“Cel—” the blade bites deeper as Rumi’s voice starts, as Celine takes a step forward in helpless response.
“Rumi,” Celine says, her voice wavering. There are only five weapons in this world that can harm Rumi. One of them is readying violence against her skin, but Celine can’t fail again. She can’t be helpless, she can’t get this wrong, this can’t happen again. “It’s okay. She won’t hurt you.”
Platitudes are all she’s given Rumi for years, but she has to believe this one. Celine’s eyes flick up, once, to the cold, twisted hatred in a face she once loved, to the glittering determination there, and an icy feeling of certainty that she has just lied to her daughter trickles over her, something she’d long since promised to avoid. She tilts her head in a greeting that feels at once too soon, and long overdue. “Ha-Eun.”
“Does she know what she is?” Ha-Eun hisses. She had always been so certain in her convictions, so sure of her rightness, never wavering from the path mapped in front of them, from what they were told they needed to do and to be. But as Celine's eyes flick down to her hands, she can see the trembling of Ha-Eun’s fingers against the hilt of her blade.
Her gaze settles on the blue cats on Rumi’s shoulder, the ones that reminded her of Derpy when she saw them in the store. She’s wearing a loungewear set that Celine gave her late last year, one of several failed attempts to get her to rest after everything that happened, until finally her body forced the issue and gave her pneumonia. Rumi never gives up before her body does; it’s all too common, so it wasn’t a surprise when earlier this week, it happened again. This time, thankfully, it’s nothing more than a minor cold, but Rumi always wants comfort when ill. Their schedule was too full for Mira and Zoey to be able to stay in their apartment with her, so Celine had leapt at the opportunity to be able to take care of her, to be able to do this for her, again, to tentatively add one more attempt at fixing everything that had gone so wrong between them.
But this, too, is just one more wrong in Celine’s litany of wrongs. If Celine hadn't been so insistent that Rumi come here, where the ingredients for samgyetang were close at hand, Ha-Eun’s return would have been no more than an explosive argument; perhaps a physical fight, but not one that would have made Rumi unsafe.
Every decision she ever makes for the people she loves is wrong.
The right side of Rumi’s face is swollen, the dark of her eye a pleading question. Her breath is rapid, and she’s wincing with every laboured intake; the rough way she’s tied to the chair is likely not helping with her lung capacity.
“She’s your niece,” Celine says carefully. “Or she would be, had you stayed.”
“Do you know what you are?” Ha-Eun asks, and Rumi gasps and tips her head back, tears gathering at the corner of her eyes as the point sinks in enough that a dark red wells around it.
Rumi croaks, and all Celine can think about is the decision she made, so long ago, to tell her, to be as honest as she could be, to let her know what she was, to always try to give her the information she needed to be able to—
“Demon, I’m a demon.” Rumi’s voice is a sure certainty, now, nothing like the first tentative time Rumi said it, but Celine can still hear the echo of her question.
“I’m… a demon?” Rumi was no more than six, growing too fast for her coordination to have caught up; already over-serious, a furrowed brow that was too heavy, too adult, when every word she spoke was lisped through the gap from where her first baby tooth had fallen. Celine didn’t know if she’d have preferred for it to take longer for Rumi to put two and two together, but she was pressing into the pattern on her shoulder like she suddenly knew it was something to hide.
“Yes, Rumi. And a hunter,” Celine said firmly, because that was more important, they had to both believe that. “This marks you,” she said, touching just below the pattern on her shoulder, then raising the towel so it was covered once more. “But no more than your ability to feel the Honmoon marks you as a Hunter.”
“It’s bad,” Rumi whispered, shivering and dripping onto bathroom tiles, “I don’t want to be a demon. They’re bad.”
“They’re not…” Celine stopped, because what else was she supposed to say to that? That they aren’t bad? She didn’t want to lie to the biggest piece of her heart, the only piece of it that was still left. “You’re not bad,” she amended. “You’re my good girl.”
“But I’m…” Rumi trembled, and then she was crying, and Celine gathered her up into a bath-soggy hug, the wet of her hair pressing below her chin. “I don’t want to eat people.”
“You won’t,” Celine promised her, kissed her hair, her temple, held her and pushed down the bitter deja vu, “You don’t have to, I won’t let you.”
“I want to be a hero like you and eomma,” Rumi said, her voice near tantrum-y high.
“You will be, Rumi-ya,” Celine said, rocking her, soothing the big feelings away before they could escalate. “Oh, you will. You’ll be big and strong, and you’ll hunt just like your eomma, and you’ll make the world safe for everyone. You’ll protect them all, just like your eomma did.”
“Do you need to hunt me?” Rumi asked, her body still so little in Celine’s arms, her voice silver and strong despite the tears in it as she looked up at her, as if Celine said yes she’d accept it as necessary (and, oh, god, later, that same look in her eyes when she knelt before her and — she can’t breathe past the sharp, sudden hatred of that moment and every choice she’d made that led up to it).
“Of course not,” Celine said, then (but it’s not enough, she knows; she knows this thought stays with Rumi, no matter how sharply and quickly Celine tried to quash it). “No one needs to know. No one can know. No one will hunt you, aegiya, no one will know. Just you, and me, and I would never hurt you, my little hunter. You’ll keep it hidden, and you’ll stay safe.”
At the time, she didn’t think it was a lie. The silvery Honmoon blade now marking pain into Rumi’s neck says otherwise.
“So you do know what you are. I’ve been following you, Huntr/x, the golden children of Korea. The greatest lie you’ve ever told.” The words are spat at Celine, and Celine shudders, trying to catch Rumi’s eye to give her some kind of reassurance. Her hand twitches for her own blade, and Ha-Eun sneers at her, feeling it before the thought is even concrete. “Try it, and she dies. How much have you told her, Celine? Have you told her that it was you who murdered our maknae?”
The words wash through her, the pain as old and familiar a friend as Ha-Eun. Rumi’s eyes flutter closed, and when she opens them, she’s looking at Celine with something close to sympathy, something Celine can never deserve, and she breathes and breathes and tries to think, tries to remember the years of sparring and Ha-Eun’s weaknesses and how she might be able to—
But all she can think of is the impossibility of her blade bursting through Mi-Yeong’s skin, rupturing it open, her body laid bare before her, bloody and violated, skin and viscera and fatty tissue parting as easily as butter (it couldn’t be real, it shouldn’t have been possible, her blade couldn’t hurt anyone but a demon, how could—)
“It was an accident,” Rumi says, and her voice is as steady as the weapon in front of her.
“She told me the same thing. Have you never wondered how it was possible, demon? She knows her weapon, she was always the most skilled of all of us. How, Celine. Was it jealousy? Was that it?”
“You weren’t there,” Celine tells her, bites it out, trying to keep her words measured, trying not to push her too far, but the memories are tightening all of her feelings until they’re burning their way past her throat, past her eyes, past her face and into the open. “If you’d been there, it might not have, she might not have…” There’s a sob that’s trying to claw its way out of her, and she breathes it down. Her decisions have always proven to be the worst of the options, but she cannot make the wrong one now. She cannot see their Rumi slain before her by the last third of her soul. “It was an accident.”
“Liar. You think I don’t know what you look like when you lie to me? You’ve been lying to me since we were fourteen, Celine, since the first time I caught you and Mi-Yeong kissing.”
Rumi jolts, eyes widening, and, oh, god, she might not have lied to Rumi more than once, but she certainly hadn’t told her everything. That had been hers and Mi-Yeong’s alone. She’d never wanted Mi-Yeong to be anything but Rumi’s hero. She’d never wanted Mi-Yeong to be anything but everyone’s hero. Celine swallows hard, and she doesn’t look at Rumi, but Ha-Eun does, and the laugh that Celine had once loved is now bitter and mean. “Oh, you didn’t mention that part to her? Sneaking around, you pair of dirty queers.”
Rumi makes a soft sound, but Celine can’t look at her, everything inside her burning to hear Mi-Yeong called that, even now, years past the first time Ha-Eun had flung that word at them, long after she’d left, long after their careers had been cut short by it. Their retirement was sudden, but the murmurs of the reason for their split had been expertly managed into retirement by their production company.
Mi-Yeong had been so hurt by it, but she’d looked at Celine like Celine was the one who needed comforting, holding her in rumpled covers, pressing her head into her chest so that she could feel the thump-thump of her heart under her tears. Held her so close, so that she could know that she was still here, hear her breathing and the soothing murmur of her voice and try to use that to drown out the venom in Ha-Eun’s when she’d left them, when she’d said, “You want to do this in secret, fine, I have lived with that, for us, for the Honmoon. But now you want to do something that sacrilegious? You want to live together, you want to pretend to be a family? It’s disgusting.”
“You drove her to that demon. To this demon’s father.” There’s more than just one bead of blood now, a small trail of red trickling down Rumi’s throat, and Celine’s body seizes. She can’t make the wrong decision now.
“What do you want, Ha-Eun. I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t hurt her.” There’s a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, like she’s careening towards something she can’t stop, like history is repeating itself and nothing Celine tries can ever be good enough to stop this from happening again.
“I want the truth.”
“Okay,” Celine says. She’s so tired, and Rumi is looking at her like she’s trying to tell her that it’ll be okay, like Celine is the one who needs protecting in this moment, and it’s so much like the look Mi-Yeong used to give her that it clenches her heart with a pain so heavy she can’t breathe past it. She doesn’t want Mi-Yeong to be anything other than Rumi’s hero, anything other than her hero. But she can’t make the wrong decision, here, not again. She needs that blade far away from Rumi’s skin, she’s seen what a hunter’s weapon can do to a demon hunter’s body, and she can’t — Rumi can’t. “I’ll tell you. Let Rumi go, and I’ll tell you everything.”
“Oh, no,” Ha-Eun says. “You’ll tell Mi-Yeong’s daughter, too. You’ll tell her what you did to her mother.”
“I killed her,” Celine says, and though the words aren’t easy, they’re at least steady, because this Rumi already knows. She’d told her when Rumi — no more than ten — was practising with her sword, used it as a lesson to make certain Rumi was always careful with her weapon, to know what one moment of carelessness could mean, to know the severity of the responsibility on her (small) shoulders. Rumi had looked at her just like this, then, like Celine was the one that needed comforting, like the story was no more than a story to her, about someone Rumi didn’t know, but knew was important to Celine, and Celine had thought, oh, I’ve gone wrong somewhere here, somehow I’ve said the wrong thing, and Rumi doesn’t know how important her mother was. Rumi doesn’t know how much I deserve to be hated for this. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She’s saying it to both of them, to herself, to Mi-Yeong, and there are tears in Rumi’s eyes, and god, Celine has never been able to get any of this right.
“Tell her something she doesn’t know,” Ha-Eun says, and because the blade at Rumi’s throat feels like it’s pressed just as firmly against Celine’s, Celine gasps out, “Your father wasn’t a demon.”
“What?” Rumi asks, her voice hoarse and slow, her arms twitching under their bindings.
“You left,” Celine tells Ha-Eun. “You left, and there were only two of us, and we weren’t— the Honmoon wasn’t strong enough. It was Mi-Yeong. She made— she made a deal. I didn’t want you to know,” Celine says, desperately, because Rumi is blinking like the world has suddenly changed colours. “I wanted you to think of her as the woman and hunter she was, I wanted you to love her like I do, like I did. It was one mistake, she made one wrong choice, but she was the best person I’ve ever met.” If there is one thing Celine needs Rumi to know, it’s this. “Until you.”
If only Celine hadn’t been so selfish, if only she hadn’t thought she could say yes to Mi-Yeong, that she’d get to keep her, that they deserved to have the happiness of others, that it was fair for them to want this, to get this, that she was strong enough to protect all three of them, that they didn’t need Ha-Eun.
“Oh. You killed her accidentally,” Rumi says, as if she’s uncovering something that only now makes sense. “She was a demon, and you killed her accidentally.” It sounds like logic, like she’s just putting pieces of a puzzle together, and not talking about the most horrific moment of Celine’s life — the blade sinking in when it shouldn’t have been possible. Like the moment means nothing more to her than an answer she’d never quite been content with.
“I didn’t know,” Celine says, talking to Rumi, not even looking at Ha-Eun. “I didn’t know she’d made the deal until it was too late. And you weren’t there. If you’d been there, we could have taken the tear easily, we wouldn’t have been so overwhelmed.”
“What deal?” Ha-Eun asks, and the blade against Rumi’s neck is visibly shaking now. “She made a deal?”
“I—” Celine says, and chokes on the rest of it, remembering the demons crawling out of the tear, the first time she’d truly felt overwhelmed by their number, Mi-Yeong’s quiet ‘oh shit’ from her left, and the aching emptiness at her right.
If only they hadn’t chosen themselves over Ha-Eun.
If only she had been faster.
“It clipped me,” she says, through numb lips. “It clipped me, and it didn’t hurt. Just felt — wrong. I could see—” the wrongness of her insides hitting the air, how all she felt was cold. How it felt like she was steaming from the inside. She remembered Mi-Yeong’s face, the terror in it, the broken Don’t look, my love, don’t look and It will be okay and I won’t let this happen, and then she’d awoken, days later, so surprised to still be alive, but so so thankful that the first thing she saw was Mi-Yeong’s face, lit with tears and relief. The first thing she heard was Mi-Yeong’s voice saying I love you, and I will never let anything happen to you.
She should have known, then.
“She saved my life. It was my fault.”
“She made the deal to save you? Celine,” Rumi says, and her eyes are wet. “It was her choice. Not yours. She loved you.”
“She made the deal, and she was pregnant with you. If she hadn’t, you wouldn’t — it’s my fault,” Celine says. This guilt has clawed at her since she first saw the pattern on Rumi’s small shoulder, since the paramedics had arrived and cut Mi-Yeong open further, and Rumi’s tiny little life had been saved. Since Rumi’s tiny little life had been doomed by Celine’s bad decisions.
“I didn’t know,” Celine repeats, because now that it’s out, she needs Rumi to understand this. “Mi-Yeong was perfect, your mother never did anything except try to save me. It was an accident, I didn’t know my weapon could hurt her, it’s a miracle it didn’t kill you. I almost killed you. Now please let her go.”
“Such a perfect little family,” Ha-Eun says, and Rumi moves her head irritably, like the weapon at her throat is a distraction and not a promise of death. “You went through with it, didn’t you? It’s sick—”
“Hold on,” Rumi interrupts, and Celine’s face pales because Ha-Eun’s eyes are flashing with anger, and now is not the time for Rumi to do this, to be this haughty version of herself that Celine hates, because it reminds her far too much of— “If he’s not a demon, then who was my father?”
It’s not the first time she’s answered this question, but the demon had been Celine’s one lie, and she doesn’t know how to untangle the decision that had been made so long ago, flicking through old Hunter tomes with Mi-Yeong’s laughter sweet in her ear, her bare legs kicking on the bed as she turned over and said, with happy naivety, “Celine, we could actually have this.”
“She doesn’t even know? The disgusting thing the two of you did to make her?”
“Don’t, Ha-Eun,” Celine says. “Please. I’ll — whatever you want. You can take me, you can take your revenge or whatever it is that you’re here for. But leave her be.”
“You took the Honmoon, and you twisted it with your ugliness into something obscene. You shouldn’t exist, demon. You—”
“You — are you? Am I?” Rumi asks, her eyes wide with shock and a spark of something that Celine can’t define.
“That’s all of the truth, now, Ha-Eun,” Celine says, shaking so hard she has to hold on to the doorframe that has Rumi’s heights scratched into the wood. “You’ve won. Now please—”
“You twisted the Honmoon into something blasphemous, you ruined it with your—” it’s the venom she remembers, from the first time she caught them, from the last time she saw her, and Celine aches with the memory of when that voice had merged so seamlessly and sweetly with theirs.
“If you call her one more homophobic slur,” Rumi says, her back straightening.
“Rumi,” Celine says, and then the Honmoon — Rumi’s Honmoon, Huntr/x’s Honmoon, the golden thread that sounds like the three of their voices — sings, Rumi’s saingeom is in her hand, and Celine jumps forward, screaming, as Ha-Eun’s blade sinks in, and there’s a blur of red, so much red, the mist of it folding around Rumi’s body until it’s shifted out from the ropes and behind Ha-Eun, and the butt of Rumi’s sword is smacking hard into Ha-Eun’s skull.
“I didn’t want to hurt you, Auntie,” Rumi tells her, as she groans on the floor, and Celine’s legs are trembling so hard she can only stare. “I thought it was fair that my patterns scared you, I thought we could talk about it when Celine got home. But you’re not very nice, actually.”
“Rumi,” Celine says, and the name feels like it’s the only thing holding her up. “I forgot you could teleport. I forgot you could teleport.”
And Rumi turns, and there’s that look on her face again, like despite the black eye and the still red nose — she has a cold, she should be resting, Zoey and Mira are going to be very upset — despite all of it, she wants to look after Celine, in this moment, the flicker of familiar love that Celine has never deserved, but there’s also— the arrogant kind of smirk on her face that Celine knows was never Mi-Yeong’s, that she’s only ever seen in mirrors or in photographs of herself, and Rumi ignores Ha-Eun to come towards her and take her into a hug. “You taught me far better than that,” Rumi says, soft, and her shoulders no longer feel so small when Celine’s head drops down to rest against them, to feel her warmth, to feel that she’s alive, and she chokes down a wet kind of laugh.
And then Rumi’s holding her face, both hands on either side of wet cheeks, and she’s laughing, bright and golden, and she’s saying with delight, “I knew I was yours,” and Celine’s world feels like it’s being reshaped by the seismic shifting of Rumi’s happiness at knowing the truth. And though Celine doesn’t deserve it, Rumi — their bright, brilliant Rumi — she knows, at least, that Rumi does.