Chapter Text
Before Zoey was one third of Huntrix, she was a nobody who wanted everything, and was too much.
As a kid, Zoey talked and talked to whoever would listen, delighting when she could make a friend laugh with a silly face or clever turn of phrase. She spent most of her childhood with friends, listening to their favorite idol groups, watching dramas, and fangirling over cute boys. Zoey floated through her elementary school years in a haze of giddy friendship and fantasies of princes coming to sweep her away.
But in middle school, Zoey discovered that despite how much she liked a boy, she couldn’t turn him into a prince. Her singular middle school boyfriend, who she had crushed on for months, picked his nose, and the one time they kissed, it was so gross that Zoey decided to swear off middle school boys for good.
So Zoey understood there were no princes in middle school. But her boy-crazy friends didn’t, so an overprotective Zoey focused her energy on them: hanging out when they had time, cheering them up, keeping them together when they fought, and doing her best to warn them away from all the booger boys in school.
One day, she had been rambling on and on to her mother about one of her friends and how she was so much better than her no-good boyfriend.
“He’s a slime, a snake, a slithering fool strangling the life out of her!” she had exclaimed.
Her mother had smiled. “It’s not funny, it’s horrible!” Zoey had said, indignant.
“No, no, it’s not,” her mother had said. “I just—my sweet, you have such a way with words. So lyrical, like those rappers you show me.”
And in that one sentence, wrapped in the love of her mother, Zoey stumbled upon the nebulous shape of a dream. Something she could reach for herself, unlike a prince she could only wait for. It felt new, exciting, and Zoey latched onto it and didn’t let go.
The summer before her freshman year, Zoey wrote like a girl possessed. She listened to her favorite rappers and the Sunlight Sisters, filled a notebook with notes and analyses and scribbled songs of her own by the start of the school year. She finally had an outlet and a language to express the joy she had always felt listening to music, and she fell soundly in love with it.
She didn’t stop after school began. She wore her headphones whenever she could, blasting music during passing period, in class when teachers weren’t watching, or when they assigned quiet work. During every study period, she wrote furiously in her notebook. When she was home, her worried parents had her sit with them at the dinner table and study. She did her homework with them, then stayed up late to write some more.
As the dark circles beneath her eyes and the pile of notebooks on her desk grew, her parents noticed, and they worried. They told her it was too much, that she was burning herself out. At first, Zoey had been able to go on, unbothered, consumed in the dream that she was on the cusp of grasping and shaping for herself.
But then she noticed the stares, the whispers when other students passed her, hunched over her notebook during study period. And she turned the volume of her headphones down, struck by deadly curiosity, and she listened.
“Dude, she’s always there. Kinda creepy.”
“How could that notebook possibly be that interesting?”
“She’s just trying to be different.”
“Isn’t it a bit too much?” came the whisper of one girl.
Too much slid down and settled heavy and cold in the pit of her stomach.
Too much. She was, wasn’t she?
Zoey had always been an extraverted girl. She loved people, and wanted them to love her in return. So maybe that was why it stung so much, why it was this that made her shut her notebook and tuck it away in her bag to go and desperately try to salvage her wrecked freshman-year reputation.
She succeeded, and for the rest of high school, Zoey only took her notebook out in the safety of her bedroom. She joined the dance team and made friends, relieving her parents greatly, and finding a new joy in life. She loved her friends and the magic of being in a big, loud group of people she liked. And despite her still feeling the need to hide her notebooks, she was confident her personality wouldn’t be too much there.
So when those friends inevitably fell victim to the drama of high school and threatened to split apart, just like her middle school friends had, she knew she couldn’t lose them. It was Zoey who soothed and smoothed the ragged edge of ego and held them all together like glue.
It was much harder than in middle school. She couldn’t count the number of breakups she had run damage control for and then salvaged the broken pieces of her friend group from. It turned out to be impossible to keep everyone together, despite how she tried. Inter-group romance was a curse, she decided. There really were no princes or princesses or happy endings. Zoey hated it, and she wore herself down more and more each time it went wrong.
“Zoey, why do you care so much?” one of her best friends, Layla, asked as Zoey dozed off at lunch one day, exhausted from dance practice, homework, test prep, and triaging yet another breakup. “Rob is going to hang out with his guys now. We don’t need him back with us, anyway.”
Oh. “I don’t care that much,” Zoey said on instinct. Her nervous laugh cut through the tension.
“Really?” asked Layla. “Because it seems like you do. You gotta relax, girl!”
Zoey didn’t know why they seemed to care so little, when together as a full group they had been magical. She was willing to suffer sleepless nights to get that back.
But she toned it down anyway. She really was the only one trying so hard, caring too much. By the beginning of senior year, she still had a friend group, and that was enough.
They were still together, she thought. They loved her for how she had thrown herself into keeping them together, and everything was okay, and she was not too much.
Friend drama aside, even after four years, Zoey still clutched her dream close to her chest. When she was truly too tired in mind to write or study, and weary of the mask she wore in the halls of Burbank High, she scoured the web for songwriting intensives or company auditions; researched programs abroad in Korea; compiled a list of songwriting competitions that she could submit work to, someday, when she was something much more than what she was then.
It was one of those nights, early into senior year, when she was too exhausted from college applications and picking herself apart to put something foreign and shiny and deserving on the desk of the admissions committee, when she saw something on Instagram that she’d never seen before.
A call for auditions for a new girl group, from the same company who had formed the Sunlight Sisters.
Maybe it was because it was the company of her favorite group ever. Maybe it was because Zoey was faced with a very real future in which her dream could not exist. Maybe it was because her beloved friend group was breaking apart and there was nothing Zoey could do to stop it. Maybe it was because, for just one second, Zoey was brave, and was someone more than she was, and there was something she desperately wanted.
Zoey threw her phone aside and lunged for her notebook on her desk. She turned to a new page and began to write, furiously, in a way she hadn’t for years, and a wild smile spread across her face.
~~~~~
She got the callback to interview with the company. She knew she’d been good—her lyrics had fallen right from her tongue; the movements she’d created natural and played well on the screen when she watched her clip back, even after the thousandth time she did so; the feeling swelling in her chest undeniable.
When she entered the Zoom call and saw her interviewer was Celine of the Sunlight Sisters, she almost fainted. She held herself together, though, and answered all the questions that came her way with a ramrod straight spine and only a bit of a nervous stutter.
“Who wrote the song you performed?” asked Celine, near the end of the thirty minutes.
“I did,” Zoey said, heart beginning to bang on the prison of her ribs.
Celine raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Y-yes,” Zoey stammered, mistaking Celine’s reaction for doubt. On an impulse, she scrambled to grab her notebook from her bed. She frantically flipped to the page where the song started and shoved it in the camera. “It’s all here, Miss Celine, I promise.”
Celine let out a kind laugh. “I already believed you, Zoey,” she said. “But that’s an amazing creative process. It’s no wonder you were able to write such polished lyrics, even at your young age.”
“Ma’am?” Zoey said, feeling like she didn’t hear her right. Her heart did an interpretive dance on the walls of her chest.
“Why did you audition, Zoey?”
If one of her friends had asked her that question and her heart hadn’t been determined to send her into cardiac arrest, Zoey might have said something much more polished, like, “I’m a huge fan of the Sunlight Sisters, and aspire to be as great of a writer and performer as you someday.”
“I’m too much,” she said instead.
Zoey realized what she’d said and heat rushed over her, her lips parting in a pre-emptive stammer. But despite her waiting for a reprimand, Celine was simply silent, waiting.
“I–I’ve always talked and felt and loved too much,” she said. “People, for most of my life. But my dream is to write and perform so I can make people feel like you, the Sunlight Sisters, made me feel. I love my dream, and my friends, and my family, and life, and I feel that love every time I listen to your music, and it reinforces it a thousand times over. There’re a lot of things that make life worth living. Music and love are mine.”
Her heart shuddered and howled. Only her notebook had seen this, the bared heart of the Zoey beneath the masks she donned for her teachers, her friends, her parents. Zoey watched Celine carefully, fearfully, and—was she blinking away a tear?
“Zoey,” she said, after a sniff. “How soon could you relocate to Korea?”
For a second, her beast of a heart went silent, stunned. Then Zoey felt a wide, stretching smile come across her face, and she laughed, and laughed, and laughed until she cried. Later, when she thought back on it, she suspected Celine did, too. Zoey felt as if she could fly.
~~~~~
And fly she could. For, once Zoey arrived in Korea, Celine told her she was chosen not only as an idol, but as a superhuman demon hunter, tasked with protecting the world from the beings that would see it destroyed.
Well, Zoey had thought. That was certainly a point towards reading the fine print.
And then Zoey met Rumi and Mira in a garden before the tree where one of the Sunlight Sisters fought her last battle, and her life began in earnest.
Rumi, with her kind eyes and a voice that could fill an arena to the rafters; her braid that moved like it was a part of her and a smile as radiant as it could be goofy. Mira, with her long limbs, equally elegant and powerful and capable of moving in ways that cast spells and her soothingly deep voice and the proud tilt of her head that Zoey didn’t, couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t love. She couldn’t help but to love them both, so quickly and naturally that it took her longer to recognize than to feel, and when she realized, she knew that she had never loved like this before.
She realized the night before their debut, after a year had passed and they had their first day off. It was also their first couch night at their old trainee apartment. Rumi had put on some horrible romcom that she loved and Mira cackled at. Zoey was warm. She wore the pink slippers and soft robe that Mira had gotten her since she’d known Zoey was still unfamiliar with Korea and had had no time to shop for herself. Zoey was acutely aware that she was sandwiched between Rumi and Mira.
“You look tense,” Rumi said. “Sorry, are we too close?”
At that, she and then Mira shifted their weight away, and Zoey blurted, “No!”
They stopped and she felt their gazes upon her. “No, you could never,” she said, and she flushed. “I just—I was never really close with my friends back home like this, and it’s so nice and makes me feel like I don’t have to worry that you hate me, but I get worried about being too much anyway.”
Rumi blinked. “Too much?” she parroted. Zoey’s neck felt hot with shame, and she looked down at her hands.
“Hey.” A finger lifted her chin. “You could never be too much,” Mira said, low voice the most gentle Zoey had heard it. “Not with us. Not with me.”
Heat splayed across her nose and cheeks. “Okay,” Zoey said, soft. She let her head fall to Mira’s shoulder, giving into the urge she’d held close the entire night. She felt Rumi’s hand in her hair, ruffling it before laying to rest across her shoulders.
“I love you guys,” Zoey said, and as she did, realized that she had felt it for a long time.
“We love you too,” Rumi said. Mira hummed. “Whatever happens tomorrow,” Rumi continued. “It’ll be okay, because I’ve already found my best friends in the entire world.”
Zoey blinked, the screen blurring in front of her, and thought of how loving and being loved felt like having the warmth of the sun on both sides.
Of course, their debut the next day was wildly successful, and the three of them together embarked on the new chapter of their career and duty.
Later, within one of the B-sides of their first album, Zoey would slip a lyric for herself speaking of the sun and its warmth, and she beamed each time she sang it.
~~~~~
As time marched on, change would come, Zoey knew. She desperately wished for things to stay as they always were, this gold, glittering life she fought and bled and had hoped for her entire life.
The first sign of change was Rumi electing to stay in her own room.
When they moved into the penthouse apartment they would call home, each of them finally had their own room. Zoey jumped atop her bed with glee, letting out a loud whoop that Mira joined in, and soon the bed’s springs were creaking under the weight of the both of them. Rumi laughed, wiping tears of mirth as she watched the two jump on the large queen bed like six year olds.
“Wait,” Zoey said. She landed on her butt in the middle of the bed. “If you guys have your own rooms, our forever sleepover is gonna end!”
Mira landed across from her, folded her limbs into a sitting position. “Well,” she said, drawing out the word. “We could just…not let it end.”
In her excitement, Zoey immediately leaned in to more closely study her friend. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” she asked, beaming.
Mira took a second to respond. “Yeah.”
Zoey sat back and cheered, clapping. But in the doorway of the room, there was silence.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to,” came her voice.
Zoey froze. “What?”
“I sleep way better alone,” Rumi said, and offered Zoey a rueful smile. “And with how things are going, we’ll be needing every bit of sleep we can get.”
Zoey felt like a punctured balloon. Mira turned to face Rumi. “Are you sure? You seemed to sleep pretty well in the old apartment.”
“I’m sure,” came Rumi’s answer, immediate. She cleared her throat. “You should probably start moving your bed soon. Seven a.m. call time tomorrow.”
Mira and Zoey both groaned. “You’re kidding,” Mira said.
“Wish I was.” Rumi waved, and then she was gone.
Mira and Zoey turned back to each other, and sighed in tandem. “I don’t know what’s up with her,” Mira said. “She just acts…off sometimes.”
“Really?” Zoey asked. “When?”
“Like, when we asked her to come to the bathhouse with us,” Mira said. “Do you remember? She was acting kinda weird about it, then was just like, ‘no.’”
“Oh,” said Zoey. She supposed that was true. She felt something sink further within her, and let out another sigh.
“Don’t—you shouldn’t worry about it,” Mira said. “Didn’t mean to make you worry.”
Zoey shook her head. “You didn’t,” she said, the lie tart on her tongue. “But,” she said to change the subject. “It’s so late and just the three of us here. Can we really move your bed in here so fast?”
Mira raised a perfect, razor thin eyebrow. “Zoey, really?” she asked. Zoey tilted her head to the side. Mira’s breath huffed out of her nose. “We have superhuman strength. I can probably carry that bed myself.”
She proceeded to do just that, wrapped in the ghostly blue threads of the Honmun, and Zoey watched her, mouth cottony. Mira set the bed down next to Zoey’s, with a little walkway left between them, turned to Zoey, and smiled. It was a smile that was very Mira, and thus a very rare thing to witness—pleased and softening her eyes at the corners.
“Let the forever sleepover never end,” Mira said, amusement crackling the rough edges of her voice.
~~~~~
The first year of their career passed, and the signs kept coming. For some reason, Rumi was getting further and further from them. More rejected invitations; secret meetings with Celine that they only learned of because Zoey had peered into Celine’s office once out of nosiness and saw Rumi, pacing and agitated; and worst of all, a shift in how Rumi interacted with them. She seemed like she had closed some part of herself off. She became addicted to their job: always talking of their next performance, how to gain more fans, pushing them forward without pause.
Whenever she thought of it, the beast within Zoey’s chest rumbled and turned in its bed. She did her best to pull Rumi back in and continue to invite her to her and Mira’s hangouts, but she could tell it wasn’t fully working.
It made her deeply uneasy. Zoey wasn’t used to not being able to fix things.
The silver lining was that she and Mira grew closer. So close, that their fans even started referring to them as a set, and Zoey couldn’t help but agree. The two of them were so dissimilar, near opposites on the surface, but Zoey thought it in a complementary way. In their bedroom, Mira’s blue slippers sat by the door, beside Zoey’s matching pink ones she had bought her so long ago. Zoey’s bed with her (perfect) turtle duvet, next to Mira’s, all skulls and chains and darkness. The two of them next to each other onstage behind Rumi—Mira’s smolder and statuesque height with Zoey’s grin and unceasing energy.
It showed when they fought, too. When Rumi was off fighting the biggest, scariest demons, Zoey and Mira took out hordes together. Mira, tall and limber, cut the demons down in large swathes, and Zoey used her stature and speed to make sure none ever got too close to her. Many a time, she herself turned to be met with the grinning, dripping maw of a demon all too close, and then in an explosion of pink, there was only Mira’s woldo and her small smirk.
In those moments, where they fought back to back, only meeting eyes when one saved the other from a nasty bite or scratch, Zoey felt invincible. Not just with the deep physical trust building between them with every close call, but with how Zoey knew if she overextended, Mira would always lunge forward, busting demons to dust, to meet her, and vice versa. Like a dance, or the push and pull of the tides, Zoey had thought once. And then she’d lit up, because she realized it would make a great lyric.
One of those moments had just passed. Their last enemy had been a small demon who’d slid under Mira’s woldo, and when Zoey heard the snarl and disjointed steps of her friend, she whipped around from the demon exploding into pink in front of her, and shot toward the lunging monster, which was much closer than Zoey usually allowed. She had been tired that night, a full day's schedule behind her.
Rage filled her, at her own lapse in concentration, at the demon for seeking to harm one of the most precious things in the world.
“Not…my…bestie!” she snarled, and hurled her knives with a flick of her wrist, under Mira’s arm and into the eyes of the demon, which widened before it poofed into pink dust.
She came to a stop. The Honmun settled around them, and she knew that had been the last one. Zoey let her knives disappear to the ether space they came from, and blew a strand of hair from her face.
“Wow.” At Mira’s voice, Zoey looked up at her, standing tall and unharmed before her, and smiled.
“Bestie?” Mira said. Zoey felt herself color. For a second, she feared. Too much, too fast.
Mira just offered her one of her smiles that Zoey only saw when it was the two of them.
“Let’s find Rumi and get your tired ass home,” Mira said. Then, after a pause: “Bestie.”
And just like that, it was like the fear had never existed. Zoey squealed and rushed her newly betitled bestie, hanging her arms around Mira’s neck in a hug that had her on her tiptoes. She felt Mira’s arms come around her waist slowly, and she let out a sigh against Mira’s collarbone.
“Love you,” Zoey murmured there, her mind happily hazy.
Mira’s arms froze, then tightened around her. Zoey wished she could stop the march of time for this, too.
“Hey!” came Rumi’s voice. “There you guys are!” Zoey let her arms fall from Mira’s neck and Mira stepped back, and the moment was over.
~~~~~
At the midpoint of the fifth year of their careers, all the signs finally aligned to reveal the change they heralded all along.
Rumi was a demon. Or rather, a half-demon. But Mira and Zoey didn’t know that when they learned; all they had seen were her patterns.
They waited backstage for Rumi. Zoey’s beast was gnashing its teeth, hurling itself at its cage of bone in her chest. Zoey’s hand found Mira’s, gripping tight. Mira’s squeezed back just as tightly.
When they heard Rumi’s footsteps, and she saw them and began rambling out her relief, more open than they’d seen her be for the past year, Zoey’s hand released Mira’s to ball into a fist. When Rumi mentioned Jinu, Zoey’s beast crashed through its prison. She had tried so hard to show Rumi she was there, and Rumi turned to Jinu instead?
It was all because of a boy, because of romance. It was always because of romance, and the illusion of fairytale.
Zoey turned loose the poison that ran sluggish in her veins in a yell, a hurling of accusations at Rumi that felt good when it shouldn’t have, because she had been holding onto her sick anxiety for so long that she didn’t know what it felt like to be free from it.
It freed her, but broke something, too. In Rumi, and in Mira, as well. And in Zoey, shortly after.
She’d been following Mira, replaying Rumi’s broken expression in her mind. At the same time, she watched Mira, her friend’s shoulders held just as high as always, and Zoey was grateful that Mira would always be there, steady and an arm’s length away.
But she was silent, and Zoey knew they had to take action if they had any chance. “Gwi-Ma, he’s coming,” Zoey said. In front of her, Mira stopped. “What are we going to do without Rumi?” Zoey asked. “Our songs are three part harmonies.”
Mira had just stood there. What came next was Zoey’s mistake. She had gotten too comfortable, too relaxed, put too much of her heart into the treasured thing stretching between her and Mira.
Zoey had reached out, grabbed Mira’s shoulder, desperately wanting to see the expression on her face, to meet her eyes and know she was not alone. When Mira did turn, the whites of her eyes about to swallow up her pupils, Zoey knew she had done something wrong.
“There is no ‘we,’ Zoey.” Zoey looked into her wide eyes, stretched and horrible with disgust, and felt as if something had just been ripped away from her, torn out of her body. “I don’t get to have a family.”
She turned and walked away and with her, took the music that had been drowning out the reality Zoey had refused to see. She was suddenly, terribly curled up in the halls of Burbank High, listening to the students pass her by and brand her as something hideous with their whispers.
That was what finally allowed Gwi-Ma’s voice into her head. Zoey retreated within herself, let him lead her. If they couldn’t beat Gwi-Ma together, all Zoey could do was join him alone.
The Saja Boys’ song was good. Zoey found herself entranced—if they hadn’t been demons, and she had never become a Hunter, it might not have been so bad to be their fan, to let herself dream of princes once more. But they were demons, and Zoey knew all was lost. At least it would be an end of the world that was pleasant to the ear.
But then, at the yawning mouth of the arena’s tunnel, there was Rumi. Beautiful, beautiful Rumi, even more gorgeous for the way her patterns crossed her skin and lit the night. And when her voice filled the arena for possibly the last time, Zoey felt tears spring to her eyes. First at the raw beauty of the sound—broken and mended from Rumi’s sheer force of will, something more than what it had been before—then at the words that Rumi sang directly to her and Mira. And after listening to Rumi’s heart finally speak, Zoey’s own bared itself, and she had no choice but to join in her song, Mira following close behind.
When it was all over, and Zoey came back down to earth with the two people she loved most in the world, she knew they could never be separated again. Not when their love for each other had woven something so beautiful, shimmering iridescent across thousands of their cheering fans.
She looked at Rumi, and then Mira, and her heart was full. She had everything she had ever wanted, right there in the two of them. Her two suns, together and shining and whole once more—Zoey's constellation of forever.