Archive of Our Own ^beta

When the song is over, Mira and Zoey are still holding Rumi’s hands. 

When they climb into their company car, a luxury sprinter with rear seats converted into sofas and enough room for a group triple the size of HUNTR/X to lounge comfortably, they’re still holding her hands. 

It shouldn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary. Any other night after any other show, the three of them giddy and giggly with something like runner’s high and dreaming out loud about hot showers and sleeping in until ten, Mira would swing her legs over Rumi’s lap, and Zoey would go boneless and flop her weight against Rumi’s side. 

They’d be talking over each other, Mira complaining about her heels as she kicked them off right there in the car, Zoey whining that Rumi ought to carry her to the elevator when they got home.  

And it never mattered how exhausted Rumi was—how sore her muscles were post-workout, how sweaty and frizzy and sticking to the back of her neck her hair was—she adored those crowded car rides. They made her feel normal, like any other stubborn woman who used to be a stubborn little girl, who knew intimately what it felt like to stay up late on school nights with friends that kept all your secrets like they were their own. 

In those moments, crushed under the weight of her favorite people in the world, Rumi’s secrets always felt small. 

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Mira and Zoey are sticking close to her but it is. She keeps bracing for them to let go of her and they keep not letting go. 

“Everyone accounted for?” the driver asks from up front. “I stocked some juice in the mini fridge. Yes, it’s the gross salty kind. Electrolytes are important. You girls did a good job tonight.”

Do-Yoon has been their regular chauffeur since Bobby hired him five years ago. Like most of their team, he’s familiar enough with the singers that he doesn’t walk on eggshells around them the way starstruck new hires tend to, and they tease him by being overly-formal toward him instead.  

An hour ago, Rumi had convinced herself that she would never be loved again, let alone spoken to kindly. And now here Do-Yoon is, saying the same thing he always says, whether he’s bringing them home from a concert or a variety show or a meet-and-greet. No matter how big or small the stakes, he tells them they did well. 

His friendly, familiar tone is a comfort that completely sideswipes Rumi’s composure. Something in her chest wobbles a little. She prods it in the back and tells it to stand up straight. 

“Thank you, Mr. Do-Yoon,” Rumi says when she’s certain her voice won’t break. 

They pull away from the venue, the thunder of thousands of voices calling after the van resolving into a dull roar. The soft wash of lights that make it through the tinted windows darts over their joined hands as they turn onto the highway and pick up speed. 

Rumi’s right hand is lifted and turned over, palm-up. At this angle the patterns crawling down her arm are more obvious.

They aren’t the bruise-purple ones Rumi spent her whole life hiding, but every glimpse of them from the corner of her eye makes her stomach burn with learned shame in exactly the same way the old ones did. 

She’s trying not to hate them—she wants these patterns to mean something different. So far she isn’t doing a very good job.

Mira adjusts her grip so she’s able to brush her thumb over the inside of Rumi’s wrist, where an iridescent mark gleams like so many pearls. She does it over and over, an unthinking tenderness. 

It would surprise people to know how capable she is of being gentle. The polearm of their group, distant and proud, with sharp edges that put even her beautiful woldo to shame. Her father’s unwanted daughter and her mother’s disappointment and the sibling her older brother never told his friends about. At a glance, she looks about as sweet as a coiled snake. 

But Mira isn’t what her family made her to be—she’s what grew around them, stubbornly and spitefully reaching past their shadows for the light, the way trees grow around obstacles and flowers grow through concrete. 

She isn’t a soft person, but she’s good. No one ever managed to starve the goodness out of her. No one ever could.

“Sorry,” Mira says abruptly. She says it again without lifting her eyes, “Sorry.” It’s no less surprising the second time.

“Sorry for what?” Rumi says, not following. 

“Oh?” Zoey pipes up. She’s been uncharacteristically quiet since they climbed into the car, and with a swoop of alarm, Rumi realizes why. Her voice is thick and wet and instantly gives away that she’s been crying. “It’s time? We’re saying it now? ‘Cause I’m sorry, too, Ru, I’m so sorry.”

“What do you—” Rumi tries to look at her, but Zoey has her cheek pressed to Rumi’s bare shoulder and she’s not budging. It’s impossible to see her face through her fringe so Rumi turns to Mira instead, uncomprehending. “What are you talking about? You don’t have anything to apologize for. I should apologize to you.”

“No,” Mira says shortly. Her mouth is a firm line, turned down at the edges, distinctly unhappy. 

Okay, well, Rumi thinks hysterically, get in line!

“Yes,” she argues. “I lied to you. I lied to you for years. I let you think—”

The shame grows and multiplies, that bone-deep certainty from earlier in the evening that she had lost everything she had ever loved making an unwanted reappearance. Her hands tighten involuntarily around Zoey’s and Mira’s, and the only thing stopping her heart from racing away without her is the way their hands squeeze back immediately. 

They are still, impossibly, remarkably, holding onto her. 

Rumi’s voice loses all strength, going out at the knees. 

“I let you think I was someone else,” she says, sounding pathetic to her own ears. “Someone good. I let you love a fake.”

Guilt shudders through her, echoed in the rainbow sheen that ripples like displaced water along the marks on her body. Reactive, uncontainable, ugly. 

Now Zoey is crying in earnest, and Mira’s grip on Rumi’s wrist tightens enough that the patterns there blanch until they almost disappear completely. 

“I keep thinking of the way you looked at us backstage after Takedown,” Zoey sobs, “how scared you looked, and we—and I—oh, Rumi. I wish I could go back, I’d throw my knives away and hug you and tell you I was on your side, like I should have done the first time. I’d protect you from every single bad thing that was going to happen. I’d never hurt you, never. I love you so much, I love you.”

Zoey’s pain has always wrenched it out of Rumi as easy as breathing, leaving her feeling every second of it as keenly as if it was her own. Zoey makes an upset sound when Rumi works her left arm free, but it’s only so she can wrap it around the younger woman and haul her even closer than she’s been this whole time. Zoey, historically, has never needed to be invited into her best friends’ personal space and climbs right into Rumi’s lap to put her arms around Rumi’s neck and cry noisily in her ear.

“I love you, too. Both of you. Don’t be sorry,” Rumi says, wishing fervently that she could absorb all of Zoey’s misery like a sponge and free her from it forever. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” 

“How can you say that?” Mira bites out. “I pointed a weapon at you. Like you were suddenly a stranger just because you had some marks.” She finally looks up, her eyes sharper than any moon blade, and says, “You’ve never been a stranger to me. Since the day we met, you’ve been—perfect.”

Rumi feels the word pierce her like an arrow. “I’m not. ”

“You are,” Zoey mumbles, “‘cause you’re our Rumi.”

“Patterns and all,” Mira goes on loudly. “Bossy, stubborn, impatient, perfectionist and all. Even at your worst, I’d go to war for you any day of the week. Are you hearing me yet?” 

Unfortunately, Rumi hears every word. And it makes her want to shrivel up like some manner of creature small enough to live inside a shell, and at the same time, she wants to bask in it for hours like in one of the countless videos Zoey has saved on her phone of turtles floating in sunny ponds and napping under heat lamps. Since neither is an immediate option, she settles for sitting very still and breathing through it. 

They’re still holding her. Zoey has her tear-tacky face shoved into Rumi’s neck, and Mira is back to tracing a faint blue-green-pink line on Rumi’s wrist with the pad of her thumb. They’re still not letting go. 

“You just did what you thought was right,” Rumi says firmly. She draws strength from the truth of it, the core belief that Zoey and Mira are the best things in her life and have never done wrong by her. Even when they hurt her, it was only because they had all managed to hurt each other. “What you were taught was right. And I can imagine what it must have looked like—I was spiraling and putting distance between us, I was talking about working with demons, I was scaring you—I understand. I don’t want you to think I don’t understand. And you didn’t attack me, you weren’t cruel. You let me go.”

“Don’t get used to it, I’m never letting you go again,” Zoey says, charmingly mulish. She winds her limbs tighter around Rumi, to make it very clear that it is going to be a task and a half getting rid of her now. “Next time you have to go through something difficult or scary, we’re gonna be right there with you. Start to finish.”

“Top to bottom,” Mira adds, the hint of a smile finally entering her tone. “Stuck to you like velcro.”

“Oh,” Zoey says with some of her usual brightness, “write that down, text it to me.”

“You’re not writing a song based on a vulnerable conversation happening in the back of a van, I forbid it.”

From the driver’s seat, Do-Yoon politely chimes in to remind them of the electrolyte drinks in the mini fridge and makes a pointed comment about the importance of replenishing fluids after both exercise and crying. 

Zoey shrieks in surprise because she managed to forget that there was an entire fourth person in the car, and Mira dissolves into the raucous barking laughter that is beautiful to hear entirely because it’s hers. 

“We were all just doing what we were taught,” Mira says. She threads her fingers through Rumi’s and lets their joined hands rest together on her own thigh, since Rumi’s lap is occupied indefinitely. “Let’s learn something else together. Figure out a new way to live.” 

“But first carry me upstairs when we get home,” Zoey adds, entirely predictably. 

“You are such a brat,” Mira says, also predictably, her tone one of pure affection that hides behind a scoff. 

Rumi closes her eyes and listens to their voices rising and filling the car and sealing all the little cracks in her heart the way artisans repair broken pottery with gold. 

Beneath their hands, her worries feel small. She should have trusted their hands from the very beginning. 

She doesn’t say it out loud, because it would only enable their clingy youngest, but Rumi knows she would carry both of them anywhere. She rests her cheek against the top of Zoey’s head and squeezes Mira’s hand and imagines her arms never getting tired. She dreams of never having a reason to let them go.