Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She remembers being small, too small to really reach the sink to wash her hands in a public restroom. She remembers another girl just as small not even trying to do it by herself, because her mom, what must have been that girl’s Celine, lifted her up, clearing the rim of the basin easily and helping those tiny hands get clean, the little girl beaming in arms that didn’t hesitate to wrap around, touched by hands that weren’t rushed in a haphazard way to break off contact.

When Rumi had looked away, up and into the mirror, she had seen Celine’s face staring at the back of her head with that look.

The hope she didn’t realize had blossomed caught fire and burned to ash. She didn’t ask what had wrapped her mind in a cold vice. It felt heavy. She remembers tearing her eyes away and not knowing what to call that expression, that distant, removed glimmer in Celine’s eyes. How could she?

But as she slumped down from her tippy toes, weighed by something that felt an awful lot like a hundred pounds of tears and the unrecognized ache for a hug, she could sense what it meant.

Don’t touch me.

She pretended that Celine was proud of her for being able to do it by herself. She was different. That little girl being lowered gently back to the ground had no idea the role Rumi was meant to play, so unlike her Rumi had to learn to do things by herself. She had to be strong. Celine had to step back. Had to let her be a big girl.

How else was Rumi supposed to get rid of her patterns? Love wasn’t going to stop the demons.

(That thought was just another crack, another fault line stenciled across her skin. She could claim whatever she wanted, but it didn’t change the rot in her blood spreading from the inside out.)

She sees that look now though, through the hurt and devastation on Mira and Zoey’s faces, that distant comet of revulsion catching the dim backstage lights. She feels it in her spine, the way they edge back. The threads of the Honmoon tying them together fray, quick, so quick she can’t even think to grasp them. She’s been cut off—removed like a limb they just realized was rotten.

She isn’t wanted. She isn’t one of them.

She’s a demon.

It is instinct, or maybe habit, to make herself small, so she can’t touch, even with the yawning space between them. She learned well.

But she begs, still, greedy and selfish and terrible, so maybe not well enough.

“Please, please—please,” a mantra more desperate than any Celine had pressed into her escapes from her mouth like the hopes flickering out like candles between her fingers, weak and sputtering. Her marks are burning and glowing and doing everything but what Rumi trained her whole life to ensure—staying hidden, unobtrusive, unseen. “Don’t leave. Don’t—”

She remembers being little, too small to not fall behind Celine’s brisk stride. It was hard, keeping up. She remembers the tree, the Honmoon, and its talismans, caught by the wind that seemed to usher her closer. She remembers the first time the Honmoon reached back, out, and settled in the form of her blade, too big but lighter than air. Her hands struggled to wrap around the hilt and her eyes could not contain the glow of starlight that bloomed, gentle and singing, in her tiny hands and in her heart.

Hello, it hummed. You are special. You are mine. I will keep you safe.

It had felt like a hug.

The way the starlight comes into existence now, crying, crying, crying, digs into her like a stab.

A phantom butcher’s knife not unlike the blade of Mira’s gok-do catches the breath in Rumi’s lungs and cleaves it apart; her voice can’t come out in anything but a whimper. She takes a staggering step forward. “No, please, we can still—I can still fix it. Please.”

“Rumi, just… stop,” Mira exhales, not firm, not steady, but more like she can’t bear to even waste the words on her anymore.

Zoey’s eyes flicker, distraught, between the starlight and the patterns, not to Rumi. “How can we trust you? You admitted to working with him, and your patterns—Rumi, were you ever going to tell us? That you’re—that you—this whole time, we’ve been training to—"

“The Honmoon can fix it! Me! Zoey, please!”

Zoey’s hands rise in unison with Rumi’s heart falling. The two shin-kal that shimmer quietly, with a painful finality, in betwixt the rapper’s fingers, drive it home.

She’s…

Never going to be good.

Never going to be wanted.

(You thought they could still love you?)

Rumi’s gaze flutters, going distant, lax as she tries to shield herself from the (scorndisgusthate) betrayal on their faces. Her chest aches, burns hot, deep, unyielding with the agony of her grief.

She’s lost them. She’s lost everything.

Because—

“You’re a demon,” Mira reasserts, almost as if to herself. Still, her grip is… wrong. The way the gok-do is held out, less like a swing ready to be set in motion and more like—

Don’t touch me.

(You are a stain.)

Zoey shudders with a breath and the pain on her face only makes Rumi hate herself more.

(A corruption that your precious mentor should have excised from the beginning.)

She thought they would hate her.

She was right.

But she has never once thought that she’d hurt them.

Did they love her, then? Once?

For a moment?

(You are a wretched, unlovable thing. You broke their hearts along with their trust.)

Rumi stumbles.

Their stances tighten minutely across from her.

“You’re a demon, Rumi. And…”

Zoey breaks a little saying it. “We’re hunters.”

Don’t touch me!

(You are alone.)

Rumi stands still, for just a moment. Shuts her eyes to their words. If she opens them, will she see their blades descend?

That low voice she had always loved to hear crack with sleep in the morning echoes in her ears. “And it’s our job to kill… demons.”

(Unwanted. Unloved. Do you see? Do you hear? They hate you.)

Rumi sucks in a short, aborted breath, adrift, panicking but not, her mind racing and her body struggling to catch up. Then it’s her body that’s too quick, in motion before her mind can catch the reins. She’s moving through water, through space—she’s falling into nothing. She is heavy like a stone and as weightless, inconsequential as a dead leaf plucked by the breeze. Nothing makes sense. She’s—

(But I will love you.)

“He can hear me. That’s why I can never be free. His voice can reach me, even here, through your precious Honmoon.”

She knows the story. Knows the appeal of having what you so desperately want crooned in your ears alongside all your insecurities…

Hasn’t Jinu been doing that all along?

She’s not in control.

Not completely.

But she can stall. She can stop it.

She can fix it, the one thing.

She can fix the mistake Celine made.

She won’t—she won’t be what he wants her to be. Even if she is what they know her to be, now. She is weak, but she can be strong, just this once.

Just this one, last time.

Celine will be proud, Rumi thinks, distant, hopeful. Please let her be proud.

“Rumi, take a step back. Now.”

Mira.

She said such awful things to Mira. She truly is the worst of the worst; does Rumi have any right to plead with her, to tell her she never meant it? That she hopes Mira will still dance in the morning like they did together, turning in spirals in the living room, twirling whoever is unlucky (lucky, so lucky) to be caught in her orbit into dizzying spins, laughing when it’s one spin too many and inevitably they stumble? That the only thing that matches the way she smiles unrestrained and confident is the way Zoey laughs freely, loud and with her whole body? The way Zoey curls her fingers into theirs and hooks them along to whatever fascinating or mundane thing that steals her eye? The way she rambles and how—how happy she is, just to exist at the same time as them.

How many times did she crowd close to them on the couch, stealing their warmth as her patterns burned beneath layers that were never thick enough to warm her without their touch? How many times did she linger in doorways to listen to their voices? How many times did she sit at the same table as them, pretending nothing was wrong, that she deserved the same simple pleasures they did, and gorge herself on their presence?

All these beautiful moments Rumi had thieved right from under their noses, and she can’t bring herself to apologize for doing it, only to be sorry that she ever had the chance.

She deserves to be alone.

(But you don’t have to be.)

Rumi shakes her head, of the memories, of a voice she never wanted to hear. Pushes against the marks trying to shackle her in place, hot chains of harsh violet that sear in their effort to dissuade her forward march.

“I know we’re hunters, but I don’t—I don’t think I can—god, Rumi—don’t—don’t make us do this.”

“We can’t ever go back to the way we were.”

“I know that, Mira! But this is Rumi! You feel it too, don’t you? Look at you, you’re not even holding your gok-do right!”

Rumi can’t speak. She looks through them. The starlight is so bright.

(Why race to the end? Why flee the arms that would embrace you?)

And the darkness so close.

Why?

Because this is how it was always going to play out. She was silly to think otherwise.

(Come to me. Come. To. Me.)

But she won’t turn to the comforting dark.

Mira moves, edging away, tilting her head the barest bit, her eyes leaving Rumi to meet Zoey’s. “Fuck, Zoey, I know, I—"

It is so bright.

She chooses to burn in the starlight.

The screams tear through the veil that falls over her, but they are just a breeze that barely stirs her consciousness, her chest speared on the end of Mira’s gok-do. She is the choking flame at the end of a burnt-out candle wick. She is a natural disaster finally coming to a close, and in her absence everything she touched can finally heal.

Yes, this is it.

This is how she fixes it.

She burns it out of her.

“What the fuck, what the fuck, what—no, nonono, you weren’t supposed to—"

“RUMI!”

And she did it so they didn’t have to. Used all her force. It’s straight through. Through the chest. She’s choking around it, lungs struggling.

She’s standing, then she’s sitting, then she’s laying. The world is full of color, bright but blurred, watercolor shapes surrounding her.

This warm feeling around her… is it the Honmoon?

Is it crying?

Is it—they’re holding her.

“Please, no, Rumi,” hands brush her face, stroke the untidy mess of her hair that strays from her braid, sweep across her jaw. “Don’t, don’t,” the words splinter, cracked and fragile and desperate.

Their arms are around her. The gok-do is gone. It had burned and now it does not. She’s floating with it, this sensation. Surely, she cannot burden them when she is no longer heavy.

“This is insane, it’s not real,” something pushes against the emptiness of her chest. It doesn’t hurt. It only feels like pressure, like an anchor. “You’re crazy, you’re so—why would you do this? Why did—I wouldn’t have, I couldn’t, if you had just—”

They are touching her. They aren’t flinching. They aren’t letting go, or shoving her away.

Are the marks gone?

“Rumi, I don’t give a shit about your patterns,” Zoey barks, wetly. “I just want you to stay! Can you stay? Please, just stay. We can fix this, we can do better, all of us. Just give us the chance!”

Why?

A sob.

A choked gasp.

Neither of them hers.

“Rumi—"

Did I… do it wrong?

I tried, I really did, I promise.

Why aren’t you happy?

I fixed it.

I fixed me.

A shuddered breath. This one is hers. She doesn’t feel it, only knows in the way someone looks out the window and sees the trees blow that it is there.

“Mira, she’s not—"

“Move!”

Another one doesn’t come.

Everything is still.

Everything is quiet.

(Oh. Child. Did you think this would save you?

You bear my mark.)

She opens her eyes, and she is standing, and the flames are hot and violet, and—

She screams.

Chapter Text

Her voice shatters. She goes silent. She goes down, onto her knees, bracing herself with her arms. Her gaze wavers on the unmoved ashen stone beneath her, on her hands burning with marks and covered in the soot that powders the ground. All around her, golden eyes leer, but unlike the horror beholden to humans, these are demons, and even they are disgusted by her. She feels the scorn within their eyes brand her skin.

“Look at you,” the fire crackles, solemn and mocking all at once. “How did you ever think you could oppose me when you belong here, at my heels?”

Rumi’s looking. She hasn’t stopped looking. Her hands aren’t hands but claws, her skin isn’t flesh but pale ash given shape, burning with Gwi-ma’s hateful patterns. Her fangs sit large and blatant behind her lips. There is a heaviness on the crown of her head. Something juts there, and she won’t touch them, she doesn’t want to know. She must finally look the part.

Her body has truly turned on her, completely and irreversibly—or is it her soul that’s twisted into this ugly caricature of sin?

That can’t be. She doesn’t have one, not anymore. Instead there’s a gaping pit where a gok-do sat, though the mockery of demonic flesh stitched itself back over the wound, leaving only a harsh, twisting ripple of a scar. It would have been the only mark she’s proud of, if she wasn’t here.

But she is. She shouldn’t be. Demons die on their starlight blades: permanently, irrevocably, no exceptions. Except, much as she began to think otherwise, she wasn’t wholly demon.

Did the human half of her betray her? Did her blood churn and deceive the hunters (Mira, Zoey, their names hurt to think, hurt to grasp) into believing she had been exorcised? It wouldn’t surprise her. She’s always been deceitful. She lies the same way people breathe, instinctually, a survival reflex.

“Get up. I would take a closer look at the little girl that thought herself worthy of standing against me.”

She doesn’t get an option — she understands now, what Jinu meant about the lack of control, of how wholly Gwi-ma’s voice seeps in. He is choking smoke, he is suffocation; you cannot argue against him when he pulls the air you would use to do it with from your lungs. Her feet lift from the ground, and she’s yanked by some unseen force, made to drop to her knees in unwilling subservience before the hungry pyre. Unwilling, but unresisting. She thought her struggle over, foolishly, stupidly, and she hasn’t yet figured out if she can muster the will to renew it. If she even has it in her.

Gwi-ma recognizes the defeat hanging over her like a shroud; he savors it, growing brighter as she dims.

There is a long draw of silence before he sighs.

“It’s hard to believe,” he says, then breaks into a laugh, hard enough that a chorus of nervous titters from the demons at the bottom of his altar echo up. “That an ugly little thing like you thought she could be loved by those wretched canaries when you bear my marks. Mine. The gall! What were you thinking?”

She doesn’t answer.

It was rhetorical, anyway. “I know what you were thinking: that your Honmoon could save you, that its light could purify you, that your friends could look past my patterns and see you, once you scoured me from your flesh.”

Rumi’s unseeing eyes remain fixed on the dull stone of Gwi-ma’s altar. The flames roar higher. It’s not warm here in front of him. One might think it but the violet haze illuminating her only seems to draw whatever remnants of heat, the lingering memory of arms around her, into itself, leaving her chilled and lifeless. It would hurt. It does hurt. It’s a distant thing that doesn’t matter.

She is a wound. It’s in her blood to ache.

“You should have listened to Jinu. Isn’t that right?”

A flinch of a reaction. Luminous eyes lift slightly and a set of dark shoes settle in front of her vision. The hem of a black hanbok almost brushes her knees. The killer edges of claws prick at the periphery of her senses, and her legs are beading with blood from ten points.

… Bleeding?

Demons don’t bleed.

But he stops her from lingering on that fact.

“Yes. You can’t erase your nature.”

Jinu. The traitor, the liar, the one who saw a fool and made her dance and juggle and stumble for entertainment. Could she blame him for spurring the show on? She made it so easy, falling for his lies. Trusting him. Thinking he had a shred of goodness in him. Her desperate need to have someone like her, someone who could understand, someone who couldn’t help what they were but still chose to be different (as if that ever matters) left her vulnerable to his games.

“But,” His snake tongue is at play again, coiling to strangle the wisps of resistance from her. “You might erase the memories,” he says.

Gwi-ma grins behind him.

Rumi shakes her head, immediate, but weak, so weak. That ache digs deeper, spreads farther. She is a bone-deep bruise being pressed. She can’t be tempted, she’s not. How could she bear to give up those memories? Her entire being, her whole life spent fighting against the origin of her cursed blood? More than that, how could she surrender Zoey and Mira, even in memories? She is in the dark and they are the only thing she can see flickering in the smog of her mind, warm and golden.

The memories are too precious, she can’t—

(You don’t deserve them.)

“Shut up,” she whispers.

Jinu lowers himself to one knee, crooking her chin with a finger.

She thinks about biting him. Tearing into the hands that only wanted to use her instead of hold her, and god, she had just wanted to be held, by anyone, even if it was him (because she couldn’t have them, she can’t, not ever).

He must see that feral urge on her face because he draws back, smiling in that self-deprecating way of his. “If you just accept what you are, serve as you’re meant to, you don’t have to be haunted anymore.”

(Why suffer more than you must? Let me ease your burden.)

“After all,” Jinu continues, empty and defeated with that false smile on his face. “We can’t escape this existence.”

We can’t escape Gwi-ma, is what goes unsaid between them.

She used to feel sorry for him. Now she wishes that it had been true, that he had never crawled his way through the Honmoon, and instead remained trapped on the other side of it with that monster leering behind him. Would she still have ended up here, if not for him and his lies?

(Your lies.)

“Just look at what happened, when you… tried.”

He saw, then. He watched.

“I trusted you,” she says, for lack of anything else.

“I know.” He dips his head, dropping his gaze. He’s trying to lower her guard. “But now there’s truly no more secrets between us. There’s no need to fight anymore, either. After all, we’re on the same side.”

He holds out his hand again, slower this time, and leaves it suspended in the gap that separates them from touching. It’s almost a mockery of the first time they met, where she had been toppled by the force of his uncaring stride, and left to pick herself back up. He hadn’t needed anything but her defeat then—but now, he wants her obedience.

His eyes lift, and then do not waver.

She doesn’t dare to think there’s a touch of pleading to them.

(You were never one of them.)

A chuckle emanates from the flames while Rumi stares at Jinu blankly. “Well, halfbreed?” Gwi-ma calls. “Shall I take it all away? Remove that leash from your throat?”

Her chest burns.

Rumi is on the couch. There’s an arm thrown over her shoulder and Mira’s leg is pressed against hers. Zoey is splayed out across their laps with her earbuds in, fixated on building a beat that had been developing throughout the day in her head. A K-drama that Mira loves to mock is playing. Rumi isn’t paying attention, soaking in the contact, the ghostly brushes of Mira’s hand along her braid, the soft tug of her playing with the end, and Zoey wiggling to that rhythm she’s already said she can’t wait to show them.

Rumi is at the table. There’s an attempt at something—something that was meant to be edible, but Mira had lost track of time, enlisted against her will into a search party for Zoey’s phone. When the steam darkens into smoke, they share joint expressions of “oh shit” and run to find the pot overflowing and the pork slices curling in on themselves like shrimp to escape the heat. The three of them solemnly try it anyways, the edges of the meat crisped, the noodles falling apart, and they all make a face, Mira and Zoey letting their first bite slip off their tongue. It’s not good. Rumi eats it anyways with a very tight smile, so Mira lunges across the table to take her bowl from her with an embarrassed flush as Zoey says, “Babe, Mira—I can’t, I’m sorry, oh my god Rumi I don’t know how you swallowed that I’mgoingtopuke” and rushes to spit what’s left in her mouth away, thrown by the conflicting textures of charcoal pork and soggy noodles.

She’s with them on the streets, three goofballs in disguise sampling the stands. She is with them on the stage, dripping with the sweat and beaming with satisfaction—then on the floor after a hard cry fest— and on the kitchen counters at 3 AM with a snack and a melancholic story from one of them that leads to them holding hands and cuddling together in someone’s bed to make up for the lack of it in the past.

“Rumi?”

“Yeah?”

Zoey knocked her head against Rumi’s shoulder, slumping after a long day of doomscrolling and snacks. “Where would we be, you think, if demons didn’t exist?”

I wouldn’t exist, Rumi thought. “Well, you’d be… hm. A marine biologist that educates people through rap,” Rumi jested. “Famous, adorable; there’ll be shirts with your face on ‘em.”

Zoey rolled her eyes. “As if there aren’t already.”

“True, but you’d have turtles on these. And Mira…”

“What about Mira?” Mira settled down beside them, loose from a yoga session that Rumi and Zoey studiously did not watch, did not sit spellbound as Mira stretched like a feline in front of the floor-to-ceiling bay windows and contort into shapes that had their mouths go dry.

There’s a lot they don’t talk about. Just girly things.

“Dancer, maybe an instructor.” Zoey answered before Rumi, tugging her eyes away from Mira. Her ears are red. “Or a cover girl model. Makeup brands slapped with your name, and you’ll be slapped on every billboard, the whole shebang.”

“So basically, nothing changes,” Mira said with a dry smirk, bracing her back on the arm of the couch and throwing her long, well-defined legs over the two of them. Rumi nervously sets her hands on the fabric of her leggings. Mira didn’t seem to notice. “Well, what about you?”

“Me?” Rumi’s face showed a tinge of embarrassment. The other two share a curious glance. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Come on Rumi, you gotta give us more than thaaat,” Zoey nudges her. “We’ve got our demon-free alternate reality future planned out, now tell us yours!”

Rumi shrugged, a helpless smile and half-hearted laugh tugging from her at her maknae’s insistence. “Well, I don’t know that I’d still be singing, not if you guys aren’t. I might like to try something else.” There was so much out of her reach when the first thing she had been taught to grasp was a weapon. Hard to think of a future past the “can she/will she” be free to ever enjoy one. “But honestly… I think I’d just want to be wherever you guys are. Even without the Honmoon, I’d like to think we were meant to meet.”

Zoey squeed, tearing up. “Awww, are you calling us your soulmates? Our fearless leader is such a softie! I don’t know what I’d do without you guysss…”

“Nooo,” Mira groaned. “Stop that, Zoey, it’s too early for us to be—” she sniffed, her attempt at an impassive expression cracking as her lips quiver, “to be crying!”

Rumi slapped her own cheeks but tears already streaking down her face. “No! No crying!”

Of course, they bawl their eyes out.

Even now, on the other side of the Honmoon, Rumi is with them. She wants to stay with them, hold onto them, even if they could never want the same.

She’s just greedy like that.

“Go fuck yourself, Jinu. You might be a coward unable to face your past,” she barks out, harsh and jagged. “But I’m done hiding from the truth. It’s all that’s left of me.”

Jinu blinks, his hand stinging from the harsh slap that levied it away from her. “That’s your choice?” he queries, quietly, like he’s surprised, uncomprehending that she would choose to keep her pain and her regret alongside the joy that was buried deep within them.

Neither of them gets a chance to say anything else. “Enough! You’ve had your opportunity Jinu,” Gwi-ma flares. “It’s time to bring those hunters to ruin, and you, girl, will be instrumental in their downfall, whether you accept it or not.”

Before Rumi can spit back, she’s lifted off her feet again, brought high above Jinu and made level with the facsimile of Gwi-ma’s eyes. She grows colder in the proximity, but the scar on her chest burns yet, empowering her to fight.

“I won’t betray them!” she screams, straining in that phantom grip. The Honmoon ripples with her dual-layered voice, a cascade of light along an unrelenting night, and it draws a hush over the dark realm.

Gwi-ma doesn’t respond right away—his gaze lifting to the fading threads of the Honmoon, something thoughtful, terrifying in his silence. The songbird voice of a hunter has never been heard here before, even when caged in a beastly shape like it is now. Eventually the last thread of the Honmoon fades back into transparency, and Gwi-ma looks at her.

Rumi’s marks catch alight, glowing as bright as his flames, and she’s screaming for a different reason as his attention settles back onto her.

“You never had a choice,” he says, final and unmoved by her pain.

And—

It starts when she is small. She remembers Celine—

And she had to be strong.

She remembers a little girl.

Smiling in arms that weren’t afraid to hold her close.

She remembers Celine, and—

She couldn’t keep up, Celine too afraid to risk her hands catching hers.

She remembers the tree and a blade—

Shimmering with the warmth of a hug, too big too hold.

She remembers a dancer, angry and at first indifferent to the duty she felt forced on her—

Holding her heart to keep it from leaking out, “Nonono, why did you—"

She remembers a rapper, nervous and fumbling, with words that cut to the bone—

Stroking her face, unwilling to let go, “Don’t go, give us a chance, we can do it better this time, Ru—"

Rumi remembers—

Her chest aches.

She—

She remembers that it hurts. She writhes, the light of her memories draining out, and a demon is looking up at her. There is regret plain on his face, shadowed beneath the brim of his hat. “Sorry,” he apologizes, and she doesn’t know why. “Me asking was really just a formality.”

Ask? What had he asked—

There’s another flare from her king’s fire, scorching her from the inside out, and her skin blazes back.

All that once shone turns to rust.

Chapter Text

She killed her.

“Mira…”

She killed her. Rumi cried and begged and broke in front of them and Mira killed her for it. Rumi cracked into a thousand fault lines and the tip of Mira’s gok-do was the pressure point that shattered her into too many shards for them to pick up, and she killed her.

“Mira.”

She’s shaking. She’s more unsteady than she’s ever been—no tireless, overworked sets of choreography had ever destabilized her like this, left her floundering in her own skin. She’s—she’s trying to hold Rumi together. Mira ran her through with her gok-do (no, she didn’t, she didn’t, she swears she didn’t mean to, never wanted to, but Rumi threw herself on it and Mira let her, she didn’t stop her, she gave her the means, she is murderer and accomplice and so goddamn sorry) and now she’s trying to cover the hole before everything she cares about seeps out of it and throughout it all her hands won’t stop fucking shaking.

“Mira!”

Mira wrenches her head up to see Zoey holding her own hands up. There is horror on her face and ash is falling from between her fingers. Zoey is crying harder than ever, barely able to breathe through the heaving sobs that are quiet in how much they take out of her, snot and spit and a mental breakdown given a body because she can’t hold Rumi.

Mira inhales sharp, looks back down, past her own hands, past the hands that had held the thing that killed Rumi, past the hands that had opened her best friend up and were now pitifully trying to stem the tide, and—

“No, no. No. This isn’t happening, it’s too much. Rumi, please, please, come on,” her voice comes out pitiful, warping with hysteria. The edges of her vision are fuzzing and Rumi is bleeding through her fingers and drifting into ash around them. She looks at Rumi’s face and—

She wishes she didn’t.

She’s empty—she’s broken—she’s the monument of their happiness crumbling to dust, to nothing—she had smiled on the blade the same way she beamed at them when they came out in their costumes, like she was looking at something beautiful, but now her mouth is agape and the eye that’s left, golden, is wide and glassy and she does not look at peace, no—she looks terrified.

“I can’t—Mira, I don’t know what to do! We can’t let her go, not like this, she’s not—she deserves—"

Rumi slips away, bit by bit. It is not in the way of the demons they’ve slain before. She goes slowly, terribly, and there is blood seeping onto the ground as the cinders rise. There are tears cutting through the ash that spirals and catches on their faces. They are doing everything they can to delay the inevitable, to hold on to her, but turns out Mira is as useless at keeping Rumi from drifting into nothing as she was at trying to keep her from growing distant, from leaving them behind in the shadow of her lies.

And true to form, Mira ends up with nothing.

Zoey is still sobbing and Mira is staring numbly at the—at—on her fingers, on her arms, her clothes. The two of them look like they fell into a bonfire gone cold, unwilling witnesses to the cremation of a girl who once sat alive between them in the middle of the night, snorting over awful movies and choking at the dirty jokes they whispered innocently to each other like they had no idea of the connotations.

And now there will be a space where she sat.

There will be a hole where she lived.

There will be silence where she used to laugh.

“M-Mira—”

Mira’s not breathing. She can’t. But then she does, and the fact that she can and Rumi can’t twists stomach. She leans over, scrambles away as the sick crawls out of her throat.

She can—she tastes it. The ash on her lips.

Rumi.

She and Zoey talked about it before. Talked about it often, after learning Rumi had never kissed another. A fantasy where Rumi let them in, lowered the shoulders that always hiked up in defense at sudden touches, where their overworked leader would soften in their arms instead of stiffen. They confessed that want, that desire, that hunger to taste a shy mouth, that soft and consuming and aching love to pull Rumi close in the same way she pulled the two of them into her orbit, planets circling a distant star. What would their lives have been like without her? they wondered. They knew. They would have floated aimlessly in the dark, always missing something. Something in them was always meant for the other, and for her. They whispered this truth to each other on the couch long after Rumi had gone to bed and held onto a hope that burned with a fervency parallel to Rumi’s building enthusiasm for that golden glow.

This is not how Mira wanted Rumi’s first kiss.

Her stomach aches and she’s weak from exertion when she finishes. She can barely hold herself up. Her hair is out of her face, held back, and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” is bouncing in the air and in her skull around them and it’s only after a minute that Mira realizes it’s her voice killing the terrible quiet. Zoey pulls her close and they are still crying, trying to keep what’s left of them together. “I didn’t mean it, Zoey, I didn’t, I never wanted this, I want her back, let this be a dream, please, I can’t—”

Zoey can’t even speak, only shakes her head above Mira’s as she tugs Mira to her chest. Their hearts are thundering with pain, loud and wailing.

But their grief is not sacred, and a moment is all they get to tend to the ashes of their future.

The Honmoon undulates, a whimper.

Zoey lurches. “Mira,” she gasps wetly, and reaches down to yank Mira’s face up. Grief twists her features, though what fills her gaze now is chilling, turning her eyes to pitch, twin dark ponds whose depths wait for those who can’t swim. “It was them. She said—him, Jinu! The Saja Boys. This, all of this, leads back to them.”

Mira clenches Zoey’s waist hard enough to hurt but Zoey doesn’t wince, going distant with the same realization. Her mind races, putting it together quickly, precisely. “The demons pretending to be Bobby.”

Demons that had pretended to be their manager, their caretaker.

“Takedown,” Zoey follows, the word whispered like something dirty, cursed. It might be, now, for all the hell it brought down on them.  “They used our faces, didn’t they?”

They must have, because Rumi had been surprised to see them, terrified that her flight from the stadium had been cut off. She had been stripped of her protection, the jacket she wore like her hoodies left behind on the stage, a shield against touch, and oh, that meant she had been touched, and outed, and then betrayed twice, once through illusion and the second time in truth.

Demons led them to this, but they played their own part, and Mira would never forgive herself for it. Rumi had been in a desperate struggle to outpace the Honmoon tearing this whole time, to outrun being condemned as something she clearly never wanted to be, and the monsters masquerading as boys had capitalized on it. Found out her secret and flayed her for it. Used the people who should have always been on her side to do it, letting their insecurities fester between them and pull them apart.

Because they wouldn’t have reacted this way, they couldn’t have, not in any other situation but this one when they were so close to victory but their doubts closer—and Jinu, closer to Rumi than anyone.

Jinu.

“You’re right. All this shit,” Mira’s bones vibrate. She totters to her feet, yanking Zoey up along with her. She lets the pain stay, but she doesn’t let it lay quiet and still—she wouldn’t know what to do with it. Instead, she spurns it, lets it boil into something familiar, something violent. The way her temperature rises, the way her skin goes hot and her eyes burn and her jaw clenches, this is what she knows. “Jinu. The Saja Boys. If it weren’t for them… Rumi would still be…”

Alive. Hiding. Afraid.

It rings hollow, even in its truth.

Because at the root of it, this happened because Rumi didn’t trust them, and they proved her right not to. Jinu was just a symptom of their separation. There was a distance, a gulf flooding between them and Rumi, and they didn’t think to grab oars and cross over to her. There were missed cues, overlooked signs, and uncertainty—in herself, in them. Her eyes always drifting to him, Mira noticed, like he was a lighthouse.

Except he led her close, then let the lights go out as the storm rolled in.

Mira should have known better. Should have dug deeper. Seen the signs. She was the walking, talking definition of abandonment issues, and somehow she missed seeing her reflection in Rumi because Rumi didn’t get angry—she got scared.

Now there is ash on her fingers and there is the hilt of a murder weapon filling the space between them.

Mira shakes her head, hard enough to make her head pound worse than any bass. She can’t sit and nurse her bruises; she’s learned a long time ago that it only opens up the opportunity to hurt her worse. She’s built to takes hits and get back up and throw one harder.

And the truth is, she thinks if she sits this time, if she lets herself rest with the grief, she will lay down with it and she will never get back up again.

Her gok-do, the awful, ugly thing that she once thought beautiful and trustworthy, sits in her grip, its edge starving for more.

Zoey shifts on her heels and her shin-kal fan out like talons; she smiles hollowly down at them. “There’s no going back,” Zoey says. “There’s no way we can save the Honmoon with just a duet.”

“Yeah,” Mira replies quietly, taking a step forward that Zoey matches. Her spear is held out, away.

“We can’t stop them.”

Their stride picks up.

“Not a fucking chance,” hisses out bitterly from Mira’s mouth, focused ahead.

“We’ll make it hurt, though,” Zoey hums, that sad, sad quirk to her lips. “Yeah? That’s the least we can do.”

Mira breathes, lets it sit in her chest, and feels the ache of it. She reaches for Zoey's hand and pauses for a second to just—look at her. The half of her heart she has left. Zoey looks back just the same, a mirror of pain and love and fury.

Winning is a child’s fantasy. Survival is not in the cards. The Honmoon chooses three, and they are now only two. It is a matter of course, then, a primal drive to right the balance, that pushes them onwards now. The only way to fill this pit in their souls is to chase after their third in any way they can, and it is as much their choice as it is a law of causality: they were three, and they will be three again.

“So long as I carve up that smug bastard’s face, I’ll be satisfied.”

They leave the stadium. They follow the thunder of feet on the streets. Thousands of souls, meandering to their doom, to the devils that flicker on the LED displays lining the buildings above them. HUNTR/X merch litters the ground, symbols of hope and joy now little more than garbage. There’s a strange tension filling the crowd, a refrain of anxiety dogging their haggard steps. Mira and Zoey fall in line, forms tense and predatory, anticipating this last hunt with all that’s left of them.

Overhead, overlaid with the symbol of the Saja Boys, Namsan Tower looms. No one else but them knows the double-meaning of their moniker—that it is not a pride of lions that await, but reapers eager for a fresh harvest.

There is a finality to their every step. There is ash trailing in their wake. There is a broken heart cracking with every beat in their chests. There are whispers in their ears that try and fail to speak over the vengeance pulsing in their veins. Hand in hand, they are what was made of them and they wish they had a chance to be something else, something softer, something that could have held Rumi’s hand in their other in spite of the lies, spare her the pain they and the world put her through.

The tunnels of the tower’s stadium close in on them. Wary of the light giving them away in the dark, they let their weapons return to stardust, packed in like cattle with the fans.

Like a tide, they are pushing into the stadium.

The roar of the crowd, of the pride, bellows out around them.

The lights kick off.

Five haunting figures hover over a backdrop of hot magenta.

Chanting reverberates within the shell of the tower.

Pray for me now.

They’re pushing through, and the Saja Boys' voices tick up.

The remnants of the demon hunters are trained on Jinu, not straying from their path even when jostled by the victims intoxicated by their insidious death track. They are stalking the sides, closing the gap, ensuring their advantage as the Saja Boys lose themselves to their own sound.

And then—

Jinu leans down, a cold cut across his face in the mockery of a smile as those magenta flames twist into a gaping maw behind him.

“I’ll make you free, when you’re all a part of me!”

They lunge in unison.

Mira’s gok-do cuts through the dark like a shark in the water, a wave of Zoey’s shin-kal torpedoing towards vital points—the head, the heart, and, pettily, perfectly, the groin.

The demon recoils, gat falling from his head, and the fear that strikes clear across his snake-like gaze fills them with feral satisfaction.

But nothing strikes home.

A black saingeom flies, diverting Mira’s path and sending her stumbling away all the while deflecting Zoey's shin-kal and sending them ricocheting into stardust. Mira grunts, snarls, and turns to renew her assault. Across from her, she sees Zoey skid to a stop, taking her stance, the two of them facing off someone new, someone—

Someone who wears a hanbok with a feminine cut, a plunging neckline showing the marks lancing across collarbones and hinting at more below, the ripple of something painful peeking out.

Someone whose violet hair is loose and flowing to the floor in careless waves.

Whose patterns glow with the same vibrancy as the flame cackling on the stage.

Whose saingeom is the silhouette of the sister that danced beside their blades, clenched in a dark, taloned hand.

Whose face they cradled not long ago, though asymmetrical horns of lavender crown it and both eyes bear a molten gold gleam.

Jinu has slunk away, and the stadium is silent, the Saja Boys poised but still, threatening but restrained by something beyond them.

This is a spectacle for their king.

Mira can’t comprehend the vison before her. Her gok-do trembles, growing heavy, her hands unable to stop shaking until she returns it to the veil. “Rumi?”

“Rumi,” Zoey echoes, covering her mouth, tears trailing like comets down her ashen face, swaying with the force of her disbelief.

But that unreal gaze flickers between them—

“And here I thought hunters were supposed to come in threes,” muses a voice they had resigned themselves to never hearing again, never deserving to hear again, and it is layered with something that they had yet to come to know.

A vile terror grips Mira’s spine.

There is no recognition in those eyes.

“Where are you hiding the other one?”

Chapter Text

A ghost stands before them.

Apart from them.

Against them.

The blackened saingeom sucks in light, a void juxtaposing the stars flickering out in Zoey and Mira’s hands.

Rumi stares at them, clinical, detached, and so, so far away.

Zoey can’t blame her.

“What… do you mean? Rumi, you're—” Zoey is transfixed on the piece of them they thought lost. Her shin-kal twinkle out—how could she ever raise them against Rumi in the first place? again?—and her stance falters. She’s leaning forward, on the verge of a sprint, a leap; she can’t help it, she never can when it comes to the ones who tether her, who keep her from going adrift, but something beyond that weighty guilt sticks her feet to the ground, makes her heart sink.

That something is a black saingeom, leveled at them.

Which, fair, Zoey can’t help but think a little hysterically. They deserve to be on the other end of it.

“Where is your third?” bites out Rumi, like it isn’t her, like she isn’t one of them. She looks at them like one does a stranger, or an intruder. An unknown threat.

“Rumi, I’m sorry, please. Don’t do this, don’t act like—we never meant to—” Zoey is drowning in her own words. “You can’t be serious. After everything. Tell me this isn’t—that you’re—”

If it’s not real, then Rumi’s dead. And if it is, if Rumi is on Gwi-ma’s side, then she truly lied in every way.

Both will break her anew.

“… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rumi replies, bored.

And why, why does she sound like she’s telling the truth?

“It’s not her, Zoey,” Mira chokes out. She sounds overwhelmed, like she hates herself, like she’s breaking saying it, denying herself the hope that has already stolen Zoey. “She’s dead. So quit wearing her face, demon!”

A slow, assessing blink is the closest thing they get to a reply, and Mira snarls. But the way Mira’s gok-do shatters into nothing gives her away. Mira seems surprised, but Zoey isn’t. It is against every warning Celine imparted them about dropping their guard around demons, but in front of them is the image of Rumi, and Rumi is still on their skin and fingers, fingers that clench around nothing.

Zoey itches to reach out, to reel in, to dig into fabric and skin and hair and never let go. The time between watching her crumble to ash to now seems like both an eon and a mere second. It’s difficult, wrapping her head around it, hard to understand how they are where they are now when only yesterday they were readying for Golden, thinking that the worst that could happen was…

Well, anything but this.

Everything seems so unreal, but it’s clear neither of them can bear to wield a weapon before that face ever again.

“Rumi,” Zoey starts, slow, a step forward. She is crumpling, a wet tissue losing its shape as tears spill and her lip quivers. She is at risk of tearing apart but she won’t mind if it’s Rumi—she’d deserve it for failing her so utterly, for ever making Rumi think she wasn’t worth it, wasn’t enough for them to keep, that her patterns made her other when she would always be one of them.

That blackened blade swivels.

They can’t deny it, not when the saingeom is a dead giveaway. Something in the Honmoon curdles around the edges of it, screaming at the wrongness corroding it, perceiving a part of itself that had withered and decayed beyond recognition, but a part of itself nonetheless.

Something is wrong, wrong, wrong, and Zoey is starting to get an idea of what it is, beyond the obvious.

Mira shudders.

“Rumi,” Zoey calls again. There’s a disinterested glance in her direction, and the tip of that black blade is raised to her. She’s throwing out a line, a guess, a wish. “Do you remember?”

Rumi’s nose flares.

“You talk too much.”

That is the only warning she gets.

Zoey yelps, leans, lets her momentum take her out of range of the saingeom that shoots out of the red cloud bursting in front of her.

Through the haze, across from her, golden eyes narrow. Confusion blankets that marked face. “I missed?”

“Zoey!”

Mira is there the next second, gok-do catching the follow-up though she shakes with it. Rumi is bearing down on Mira in turn, frowning still. Those eyes, though, are still locked on Zoey, fangs bared in a rictus of fury.

She shouldn’t have been able to escape. Rumi is faster than that.

They both know it.

Zoey breathes. Hope is such an insidious thing.

“It’s her, Mira,” Zoey says with certainty, bouncing back in to relieve Mira of the pressure. Her shin-kal are tossed at Rumi’s feet, not with intent to harm, but to startle.

Rumi disengages, sneering at them.

“Zoey, look at her!”

“I am looking,” and she is, she is. It’s Rumi, and it was Rumi before, and it’s still Rumi now, patterns or no patterns, horns or no, and they were idiots to ever doubt it. Zoey won’t do it again, and she knows Mira, who despite her hangups hasn’t pressed forward with her gok-do, won't either. It’s not even a matter of will: it’s against their natures. The only thing keeping Zoey going, and Mira, after what they did, was that ravenous thing called vengeance. Ensuring Jinu didn’t live long enough for an encore seemed secondary now to the fact that Rumi is standing in front of them.

“And it’s her. She just doesn’t remember us,” Zoey says, firm and unyielding with this truth.

Mira grits her teeth, parrying a swing and swiping halfheartedly at Rumi—trying to keep her out of her dead zone and little else. “You can’t be serious, Zoey. Rumi’s dead, and this… this is a demon.”

“It’s still Rumi—you know it too! So what if she’s a demon? I can’t do it again Mira, I can’t go through that again. Don’t ask me to.”

Zoey hadn’t mean to say it like that. She hadn’t meant a lot of things, today. Her sense of balance is skewed, and she’s toppling over the edge. She has too little control and too much hurt spilling out of her typically careful words.

Mira shatters from them; her gok-do slackens. “I wouldn’t. Zoey, how could you think—shit!”

A roar emits from those magenta flames, and Rumi is snarling in Mira’s face with renewed fervor, driving her back, marks burning bright and angry. Not in rage, though.

In pain.

“Deal with them, pet.”

He’s hurting her.

The hunters whisper something: a name, or a prayer.

It means nothing to a demon.

“Where are you hiding the other one?”

The demon traces her gaze throughout the tower turned hell pit, piercing through the crowd. She knows as all demons do that hunters come in threes, so that is why her blade remains level with them while she searches for another soul threaded with their precious Honmoon.

But it is just the two of them. They stare, stricken, while she takes careful steps to situate them in front of her instead of at her sides, calculating the cleanest way to take them both out. Her saingeom, a blackhole almost as hungry as the pit of her king’s belly, quivers. There’s a shiver building at the base of her spine, crawling up her neck, and she calls it anticipation. Her core twists with nerves, and it must be excitement.

Here is the thrill of the hunt, prey at her fingertips.

She can’t remember the last time she hunted. How long has it been since she was free? Since the collar around her throat slipped and she could shed the trappings of restraint?

The smaller one inches forward, eyes wide, mouth moving, pleading. For what? Mercy? She is not a thing that knows it, only the crackle of a pyre filling her ears.

“You talk too much.”

It hurt to say. Hurts, in her chest. Is Gwi-ma punishing her for her voice again? It’s never hurt there before. Some new torment. She would adapt.

A step shrouded in the mist that carries demons between realms, through space, has the demon and the hunter face to face in an instant, but that black saingeom does not taste mortal flesh when it falls.

“I missed?”

The girl stumbles away—escaping her blade—why? How?

The demon had the advantage.

The demon doesn’t miss.

She was slow.

She’s never slow.

The demon stares, momentarily stunned, and then a gok-do catches her saingeom before she can follow to rectify the humiliating failure. It trembles more than the demon thinks it should against her, but the demon cannot overcome it when the way it glows against the pitch blade has her chest erupt with agony. The pain shows in a grimace that bears her fangs.

These hunters’ weapons were deadlier than the demon thought, causing pain with proximity alone.

It’s hard to hear, the roar of agony flooding her ears. The hunters are speaking, she knows, but it’s hard to think, hard to parse what they’re saying. It’s nothing important to a demon, anyways.

Shin-kal racing towards her feet, thokking into the stage in a neat row, has her back off the taller hunter.

Sloppy work, for being so-called demon slayers. Those should have been aimed at my head, the demon muses, before stiffening.

Her marks catch, smolder, and turn to shackles.

She is disappointing him.

“Deal with them, pet,” the King demands flatly. The fire coursing through her, inciting a strangled hiss that alarms her opponents, says, Or else.

What can she do but obey?

Rumi snarls like a dog with a shock collar, patterns flaring and eyes blazing. Mira and Zoey don’t get a chance to prepare—Rumi’s next swing sweeps out, sharper, more forceful, to the point of being wasteful, even.

Years of acrobatics, of predicting the next line and feeling the next step to another beat, is the only thing that spares Zoey from that saingeom whipping out. She backpedals, pivots, and recalls her shin-kal to her hands despite the overwhelming sense of wrongness that spawns with them. “Rumi—please, don’t do this—we’re sorry, we never meant to—”

“Zoey, focus!” Mira tenses when she catches the saingeom again, rocking with the force of it. She uses the momentum to hook it with her gok-do and twist Rumi around but then a foot catches Mira in the ribs, throwing her off. Rumi is quick, but like clockwork, Zoey is already there to give Mira time to recover.

Rumi heaves her blade at Zoey, who spins away in a leap and throws her shin-kal at Rumi’s legs, trying to ward her off again.

Except this time, Rumi doesn’t dodge. The shin-kal connect, sink into her, and her eyes glint but she doesn’t stop, even as Zoey lands wrong from shock, from dismay, from hurting Rumi again.

The black saingeom screams towards her head. Zoey can only watch.

And then Mira is staggering away, desperately trying to catch her footing, clutching Zoey close and dripping with red.

“Mira!”

Gwi-ma laughs.

They don’t get room to breathe. A wordless explosion of pain billows out from Rumi’s throat and her blade catches air, again and again, as she darts after them. Mira lashes out after a stumble, pulling at a thread of the already frayed Honmoon with her gok-do to blow Rumi back.

Rumi lands on her feet, and her marks flare brighter. She buckles under them.

“Mira! Your arm… why did you—"

Mira’s face is tightly drawn and she’s glaring down at her elbow like it’s betrayed her. Her forearm to her wrist is painted with red. The gash is a gape in the skin, and there is a color more than red peeking from it. She shakes it off, refixing her attention on Rumi. “Why did I what, Zoey? You want me to stand by and let you get hacked at?! I can’t—I can’t do that, even if it’s her.”

Rumi leans back up, but her posture is hunched, animalistic. Behind her, Gwi-ma croons.

“You look tired, hunters. Having trouble fending off my pet? Why don’t you take a rest…”

It tears at Zoey and Mira, the way Gwi-ma calls Rumi.

“Why don’t you shut the hell up,” Mira mutters, not having the strength to yell.

The Saja Boys are watching. The fans, the fans who were once theirs watch also, engrossed, spellbound by the violence.

And Gwi-ma burns, whetting his appetite with the show.

Yesterday feels so far away.

Rumi looks at them like a beast, driven by instinct, survival. To her, it must be a choice between them or her.

And she has already died once.

“She doesn’t remember us. You took her memories, didn’t you?” Zoey murmurs.

Gwi-ma hears. His maw curves into a scornful crescent.

“She begged me for it.”

Zoey shakes her head, slowly. “No, she wouldn’t.”

Rumi doesn’t beg.

But she did.

“She begged to forget your betrayal.”

Mira shifted her weight, pale in the face. Her gok-do flickers.

“She wanted so desperately to forget the way your words and weapons carved into her heart. Poor girl, the human side of her only ever held her back. Sentiment, attachment, love,” Gwi-ma taunts. “But now…”

Rumi surges towards them.

“She is perfect.”

Mira’s gok-do kisses its corrupted kin, the sanctified metal crying not in song but in a lamentation as the blades meet. Mira is faltering, and it’s not only from exertion and pain but from her own fears, her own hesitation facing Rumi that has her losing ground near instantly to Rumi’s sword. She has to kick her away. “Rumi—please, stop!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t hate me, I won’t blame you if you do—” Zoey breaks in, a bee sting to Rumi’s legs—she hates it, hates it so fucking much, and hates herself even more, but if she can just stop Rumi—keep her from coming at them—

The Honmoon tears, its threads draping around the demon wearing Rumi’s face like a funeral shroud, grieving. She doesn’t stop, even with black oozing from her knees to her feet, shin-kal gleaming innocently against the wet fabric and ichor of demon blood, buried in uncaring flesh.

The hunters are stuck on the retreat, and they are tiring.

Gwi-ma rumbles with a laugh at their futile efforts. “The irony. She tried so hard to deny this part of her, went as far as to take her own life with your help—only to end up mine. And she is happier for it. Have you ever seen her so free?”

Free?

Zoey is knocked to the ground. Zoey looks into Rumi’s eyes just as the demon lands on her; they are like wet glass, reflecting only her face and nothing else. The patterns on that grayed skin twist like barbwire, glowing bright and angry. Pain contorts her face, but it is empty.

It hurts.

It hurts so much to see her so trapped.

A black saingeom is lifted by two taloned hands.

Zoey lifts her own hand, touching Rumi’s face. “I’m sorry, Rumi. Sorry you couldn’t trust us, and sorry we couldn’t save you.” Zoey closes her eyes, and the bone-deep exhaustion has her surrender. Is this what Rumi felt? The shame, the weariness like rocks around her ankles, the… the impending relief of not having to keep going? “I love you, and I forgive you. For this, for everything. Don’t blame yourself, okay?”

And the blade—

Doesn’t fall.

Gwi-ma blazes.

When she opens her eyes, Rumi is panting in her face, eyes wide and—searching, patterns flaring, but she’s looking—she’s not taking the shot, she’s mouthing—

“Zoey?”

But then Rumi’s choking, the shaft of Mira’s gok-do coming flush with her throat, Mira reeling her off of Zoey. Terror and desperation are plain on Mira’s face, two things Mira hates to show above all. “Zoey, what the hell are you doing?!”

“Mira, stop! Stop! She remembers!”

Rumi’s claws flail, clipping on the gok-do that abruptly stills.

And then Rumi is burning—not through her markings, but literally, smoke curling, violet flames bursting to life on her skin and catching on her hanbok.

Gwi-ma is setting her alight.

The scream that tears from her throat is soul-shattering.

“You dare?” Gwi-ma utters.

Mira recoils, letting her gok-do dissipate into nothing. “Rumi!”

“I tire of this.”

Gwi-ma begins to inhale. A sea of blue, a sea of souls, begins to roll towards him, and the Saja Boys stand back to let the feast begin.

Jinu’s eyes are on Rumi.

Mira hits her knees. Zoey can’t get up. Their own souls are being wisped from out of their chests.

Zoey can feel it, this indescribable sense of loss, of emptiness building inside of her. Zoey doesn’t even have the strength to stand, but she crawls—towards Mira, who despite the flames grabs onto Rumi and shivers from them, falling back and curling around her, shaking from the pain with growing cries. Towards Rumi, who said her name.

To the two halves of her heart, to the two souls that match her own.

“I can’t—” Mira whimpers, flames licking at her too, now. “Rumi, it hurts. Zoey. Zoey, it hurts.”

Yet she doesn’t let go.

Not until Rumi pushes her.

Not until Rumi throws herself away, taking the fire with her, away from them.

Mira’s arms reach for her weakly, enervated by Gwi-ma’s hunger.

Rumi doesn’t look, doesn't let her, either of them, touch the flames consuming her entirely.

“Not like this,” croaks a hoarse voice. Rumi’s voice. “You can have me, but not them.”

The rush of souls pause.

Gwi-ma looks down. “You think you can dictate what I do? You, a halfbreed mutt?”

The pyre that is Rumi climbs to her feet, sways like a flame about to putter out. “I’m not talking to you.”

“What?”

Rumi tilts her head up.

Screams.

In the echo of her cry, the Honmoon tears, worse than ever before, a spiderweb in a hurricane.

Zoey and Mira give an anguished cry when they feel their bonds sever.

Gwi-ma barks out a stunned laugh. “You are only doing as I wish! Your Honmoon is shattered!” Gwi-ma jeers, though there is an undercurrent of something wary.

“I am righting a wrong,” Rumi corrects. “The Honmoon was reinforced through fear. This one…”

Rumi’s patterns go dark.

The flame devouring her goes out.

“This one will be built from sacrifice.”

And then the light is blinding.

Chapter Text

The days bleed into night, the nights burn into pointless days, and it’s quiet.

The Honmoon is an exposed bone, gleaming beneath the lonely tower they exist in. It’s silent, they find. Its song is unheard, if it sings at all, and it mists in and out of view like a phantom, like something fleeting, untouchable. There is not a trace of gold to it.

They don’t sing.

The TV stays off. Their phones remain silent, or maybe they’ve just run out of battery. They don’t check. Bobby gave them space after countless one-word texts, after stilted phone calls with too much silence on the other end. They had spoken to authorities and then little else—the Honmoon had done the rest.

The Saja Boys disappeared, their concert claimed as a cult gathering, hallucinations blamed on the fumes in the air from a gas leak that never existed, further exacerbated by tainted water that never got passed out. They attacked HUNTR/X and kidnapped their leader, and everyone is urged to be on the lookout.

Their fans are anxious, distraught.

They are mourning.

It’s a performance in drawing a mask over their pain, on pushing falsehoods through raw throats and letting the infant Honmoon weave their tale—the Honmoon that caressed them only the once as they stumbled to their feet and to each other, wailing for a love they couldn’t reach, for a girl that blew away like dust with the rest of the demons, like a hand slipping out of theirs. It is too easy, the way it lets them escape scrutiny. Too gentle, untangling them from their culpability, of their part in allowing Rumi to break and use her pieces to save them.

Now, they sit in her room. They leave the mess—it is sacred, a reminder that she was there. There are notebooks scattered with forcefully gouged out lyrics, snippets from that awful song Zoey tore out of her own notebook and set fire to in her bathtub, triggering the fire alarm (and Mira silently took out the batteries and said nothing of Zoey’s red eyes, shaking shoulders—she only offered her own to bear the weight of Zoey’s grief). There’s an overturned trash can full of crumpled paper, and even that they don’t pick up. Rumi’s bed is unmade, and it still smells like her.

It’s the only way they get even the idea of sleep, pretending she’s beside them, breathing between them.

When they wake, if they truly ever slept at all, they are tangled and broken like two puzzle pieces from different boards shoved together. When they open their eyes, they drown in the memories carefully placed like art in a museum: a bookmarked page in a novel Mira remembered loving there, a silly, not so great doodle from Zoey here; vacation charms dangling from hooks, photos of them beaming from her vanity that sat half-covered by a sheet there, like Rumi had been uncertain of her reflection but could stand to look at it if they were in it; Mira’s hoodie, bundled up in the blankets and tucked halfway under one of her pillows, and a purple jellyfish plush Zoey had won and bestowed upon Rumi with all the preening of a peacock.

There is fanart and photos of them hung up on every wall, in motion, in harmony, glowing in the painted lights, lost in the moment and in each other when nothing had interrupted their melody, and Rumi—

She is only in some of them.

Signs, signs everywhere.

Signs Rumi quietly, fearfully, loved them.

How did we ever doubt her?

—

Awards lines the walls. Sunlight seeps through the windows, its indifferent permanence leaving those within the room cold despite the warmth it should have gifted.

Celine stares at them blankly. The lines on her face are deeper, the exhaustion in her thin frame more plain (though it could never equal theirs).

Has she always looked so small? She’d been larger than life, training them. Her reputation legendary, her authority undeniable. Her shadow has always hung over Rumi even when she wasn’t in the room. Yet now it’s hard to believe she had as big a stake as she did in Rumi’s life, now when she hadn’t so much as reached out to them past asking what happened, frazzled by a Honmoon that was not golden, but white.

When they told her about Rumi over the phone, she went silent.

Why hadn’t they noticed?

Why hadn’t Mira picked up on the way Rumi bent, stretched, and rolled over at a word from Celine, but never received praise?

Why didn’t Zoey see her shrink under Celine’s gaze like she was trying to fit into an outline of someone else, like she was afraid of blurring the edges?

It gnaws at them in the quiet, subjects of Celine’s disappointment now.

“Do you understand what you’re asking me? It goes against everything I taught you—"

“Bullshit. You taught us wrong,” Mira bites out, a tired snap of anger drawn more from reflex than anything else. She doesn’t have the energy for more.

“… Maybe so. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible.”

Zoey shifts forward in her chair, sleepless nights presenting themselves in bruises beneath her ringed eyes, gaze piercing Celine like an insect to a corkboard. Her face was flat in a way neither of them had ever seen before, an expression distinctly un-Zoey. “Do you really believe that or are you just trying to stop us? Because I’ll tell you now, you can’t. We won’t give up on her. Not like you did.”

Celine processes her words like a slap to the face. “I loved her too,” she said, fumbling with the words that showed her inexperience with them.

To Mira’s ears, it sounds like a lie pushed through clenched teeth. “Did you? Did you really? Because looking back, it actually looks like you hated her,” Mira says cooly, her crossed arms going tight around her, trying to restrain herself. She ignores Celine’s blustering, pushing out the heat that’s burning her tongue. “Did you see her? How she was breaking because of your stupid fucking insistence on lying to us? How she repeated your mantra to herself like a punishment? You loved her with conditions!”

“I did the best I could!”

“Your best?” Zoey laughs sharply, and then stands from her chair—not suddenly, not quickly, but in a way that shows she would not be denied or ignored. She presses her hands into Celine’s desk and leans in low. “It wasn’t enough.”

Celine recoils—slight, barely there, but there nonetheless. A shudder of a breath comes out of her when Zoey pushes off the desk, sitting back down rigidly. Zoey doesn’t apologize, just waits.

Celine closes her eyes, trying to fight a wave of—guilt? Good. Shame? Even better. Self-loathing? Well deserved, Mira would say.

After a long stretch of silence that Celine spent composing herself and Mira endured by bouncing her leg while Zoey sat unnervingly still, the older woman sighs. “Regardless, I… don’t know what to tell you. It’s never been done before. Why would it have been? Not even the demons want to stay on that side.”

Mira taps her fingers against her arms, or perhaps it would be better to say jabs, her nails leaving indents. “If there’s a door, it makes sense for it to work both ways. If demons can get through, so can we.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Celine balks. “It’s madness, and that’s assuming she’s even—”

“Don’t. Say. It.” Zoey hisses.

Celine backs down, carefully, and something enters her eyes as she appraises them. Something like pity.

Mira stiffens, blood running hot.

“Girls… she couldn’t help how she was born. We tried. I tried,” and they bristle at that, but Celine doesn’t let their fury stop her. “But what you said happened at the Awards? The only way she could have been taken to the other side is if she’s dead, and—”

Mira kicks the desk, startling Celine. “What is there about ‘don’t say it’ that you don’t get?”

Celine shakes her head again. She looks between the two of them, and Mira can see the shutters coming down over her expression. “We will get nowhere with this. I do not have the answers you’re looking for, and you won’t accept the truth.”

“You’re right. Hard to get anywhere with a liar,” Mira intones, and stands, grabbing Zoey’s and helping her up. “We’re wasting our time here. Since you won’t help us, just stay out of our way.”

Celine drops her eyes to her desk, steepling her fingers together. “You risk everything by trying,” she says, simply. She is old, tired, and made up of twenty-three years of mistakes and loneliness. She is only one of three, and she cannot stop them.

“To bring her home?” Zoey wonders. “Don’t you know? That’s worth everything.”

—

“We’re really doing this,” Mira muses, almost stunned by their own insanity. She feels heavy in the way weeks of poor sleep will do to a person, and light in a way that could stem from a variety of things—poor eating, dehydration, anxiety. Hard to say—every minute is too long, each day a blink.

She knows Zoey is in the same boat when she only hums back, looking at her shin-kal like she doesn’t recognize them.

In front of them is a tree and in front of that tree is a grave.

In front of them is a tree and beneath that tree there are two headstones, but they only acknowledge the one, because the other shouldn’t exist. Fuck Celine for wanting it to, Mira thinks.

They stand in front of a tree, and the tree pulses like a heartbeat, slow and steady.

Zoey peeks at her from her side. “Ready? We don’t know what’s going to happen, if this will even do anything… but are you ready to find out?”

Mira affixes her gaze on the tree. “To piss off Celine? Always.”

Trepidation has their hands sweat, the anxious feeling of taking another step and feeling nothing but air threatening to dissuade them, but they need a door, and so they press their weapons to the Honmoon like they are the key. They need an opening, a space to squeeze through, so they pull at its netting with the edges until the spiderweb threads go taut.

They don’t want to hurt it—but if they can’t make themselves whole, they will tear themselves apart trying.

The Honmoon chose three, and they are two.

The Honmoon chose another to match them, but it behaves as if she doesn’t exist, as if she’s not needed.

They can’t abide it.

Underneath the blades of their resolve, after what seems like an eternity of fruitless prodding, there is a stirring on the other side of the Honmoon, encouraging their efforts.

“Oh,” Zoey breathes. “Mira, did you feel—"

The Honmoon suddenly lurches.

They do, too. Their souls shiver as something stretches from the veil—not where they push or tug, but from its core this sensation rouses, and reaches towards them—to hold them still, to keep Zoey and Mira from crossing the boundaries. It is nothing they have ever felt before; it is a thing as hungry as it is afraid, pushing against them even as it fights to hold them close.

“What the hell?” Mira strains from the effort, voice tightening beneath the pressure repelling her. Her gok-do is flaring, and the Honmoon is flaring back just as heatedly. “All of a sudden it’s like—"

“It’s fighting us,” Zoey finishes, though instead of being astounded, she is bitterly frustrated. “I didn’t expect it to be easy, but—” the Honmoon pulses, and Zoey wobbles. She is bracing against the threads of the Honmoon, spitting curses and insults under her breath, as though she hadn't spent years of her life trying to keep them from coming apart. “Stupid… ass… thing! You won’t stop me! I’m coming through whether you like it or not!”

She squares her feet, flipping one of her shin-kal into a reverse grip, and rears back—

But a voice stops her.

Tired, lost, confused—

“What… are you doing?”

And unmistakably Rumi's.

Zoey freezes midswing. Mira jolts like she'd stuck her gok-do into a light socket. As one, they look to each other, and they know.

Zoey is quick to turn back, reaching, hands out, shin-kal gone, like she can touch that immaterial thing that filled the air, the song of their heart. “…Rumi?”

Mira straightens. It was bodiless, but it echoed from within the Honmoon, and the physical manifestation of the Honmoon was the tree before them, still and unmoved by the ghostly wind that followed the voice. “Rumi, can you hear us?”

They wait.

There is no reply.

Without pressure, without a trigger, they feel the Honmoon ease out of sight, and that hungry, starved thing within it retreats, slipping back into slumber.

And when they frantically try to poke at the Honmoon again, nothing happens.

But they heard her. And they won’t stop until their voice reaches hers, until she hears what they have to say, until they draw out her own words, pull out her insecurities and regrets until they are all bare in their truths.

And they will love her.