Chapter Text
"Don't think you can escape what you are."
For a horrifying moment, Jinu realizes he really had thought he could.
The stagnant air that presses down upon him says otherwise. Neon flame has already encircled him where he stands, guillotining any chance of his escape. Beyond the stretch of steps that leads to Jinu and his master, the braver demons murmur in a frenzy while most turn submissive and silent at the tone of their master's voice — but Jinu hears none of that. Sees none of it. Blinded by memories, he crumples to his knees upon an altar made of uneven stone, blindly pawing the earth for his sister's hand.
But there is no hand to take.
There is no weeping little girl waiting for him when his vision returns, no devastated mother. Only Gwi-Ma's tendrils of powerful influence, scraping like fingernails against bone as he pries apart the demon’s mind once more; the rumbling laughter behind Jinu speaks to the fire's pleasure at causing him to fumble so helplessly once again — all for a family that died long ago.
Punishment, the word blares in Jinu's thoughts. Punishment for being careless.
He had known that Gwi-Ma could look in on him in the human realm. He wasn’t always so attentive, but often enough. It was hundreds of years ago that Jinu learned he couldn't afford being caught doing anything other than what Gwi-Ma expected of him, so he'd crafted a delicate system of how to be — who to be — above ground, and with great care. No more suffering for a misstep on the mortal plane, for following any sense of longing for life beyond the oppressive carpet of the Honmoon. Or, worse: longing for freedom beyond Gwi-Ma.
It had made Jinu a good actor. Quick to provide what was needed of him on the first take.
And with that confidence, the explanations had felt like enough in the moment.
'I'm just leading her on,' he'd say. 'I just need to find her shame, so we can use it. I'm using her. I'm manipulating her — haven't I learned from the best? You don't trust your own teachings?' And each time, Gwi-Ma would hum. Consider. Process. It was an old dance they'd performed together so often over the centuries that Jinu had been confident he could slip by with his bleeding, aching heart unnoticed. Some part of him lied to himself, of course. Some part of him had been such a good actor, he'd even been his own captivated audience.
It was too obvious, though.
The fondness, the burst of love that had lit up his chest when he'd looked into her eyes. The lilting honesty in his voice as it had embraced hers and carried up and over the beautiful lines of light that blanketed Korea... Now, he stares at his trembling fingertips and recalls with pathetic clarity how Rumi's hand had slotted so effortlessly into his own. It felt like something he'd been stripped of for four-hundred years. It felt like what living was supposed to be like.
She'd offered him a fleeting moment of hope, of a freedom that overlooked a vast and beautiful horizon.
The promise of a world beyond the suffering, the guilt, the misery.
"I understand," Jinu finally says, trying in vain to numb himself. "Please, allow me to prove myself. As... you've taught me."
Another song and dance they perform together, when Jinu is caught being insincere in his devotion to his master: grovel in words and actions and hope that he's not picked up and burnt into ash before a horrified audience. Their relationship has always been a wound sewn shut with flimsy thread; one wrong pull of muscle and the whole thing will unfurl. He forces himself to breathe evenly and turn back toward Gwi-Ma, legs wobbling under the weight of everything in his head. As he does Gwi-Ma's flames crackle around him, building sweat on his brow.
"Take off the mask," the fire says.
Jinu ducks his chin, but he obeys. Warm healthy skin turns blue and dead as purple lines creep over his face — an infection in a once human spirit, a symbol of his lies and misdeeds against those who deserved better. Glowing golden eyes cast their miserable gaze at the floor. A suffocating silence constricts the very air before his patterns glow and he's unceremoniously forced onto his knees.
"Kneel," Gwi-Ma growls as he falls. Jinu's hands catch him, but the weight of pressure on his back leaves him bent like a straining bow string. The earth is close enough to his face that it cloys his smell, claws scraping on rock rendered the color of flesh by Gwi-Ma's light. His flame dances in staccato rhythm with faint laughter as he tells him, "Ahhh... Stop pouting, Jinu. It's not becoming of a demon so capable as you. Have I not spared you from burning tonight?"
Jinu's downcast mouth twitches.
Gwi-Ma doesn't care for an answer. "This song you've been working on — it's almost done, isn't it?"
It is a question Gwi-Ma offers that he can latch onto, Jinu thinks. Something he can use to reorient himself, or else he'll never be able to pull himself out of the burning whirlpool that threatens the humanity left inside him. With focus, his voice becomes disciplined and systematic and cool.
"We haven't completed the ending. It's close, though."
"Look at me," the monster whispers, and Jinu tilts his chin up to obey. "Listen and remember well."
The knot in his throat narrowly goes down as he swallows. "I'm listening."
"And remembering well, my nobi?"
"... I wouldn't dare do otherwise."
Disgust coils in his insides. He's groveling and Gwi-Ma knows it. He can tell by the soft, almost sweet laugh that dislodges from the fiery mass. Lingering outrage at Jinu's flickered hope still paints Gwi-Ma's tone with disdain though, stray embers raining like spittle.
"Living in your mind now — too late, because you're mine now."
Jinu's lips part as a mixture of voices clamor over each other in his head, overlapping with ferocity like a belt lashing on wet skin. He bites back a whimpered breath as his temples throb and ache at the pressure of too much too fast for a meager human mind. Lyrics. Lines are being fed to him with gleeful intent. An unwanted duet, to wipe away all promise of liberation.
Jinu echoes words that were whispered to him four-hundred years ago: "I will make you free when you're all a part of me."
(Jinu watches Rumi's lips move, a smile around every optimistic word... Just them and their song, building effortlessly from each other. It's as natural as breathing. "We could be free," she sings for him, to him, so kindly, "Free...")
Gwi-Ma chisels away the memory of Rumi with each striking word and slots himself there with malice.
"Give me your desire," he mockingly sings to the huddled form on his altar, "Watch me set your world on fire."
("We can't fix it if we never face it." Her hands are warm in his, and for a blissful moment, they're all that exists. Just a swell of promise for a better tomorrow against a secretive night sky. For the first time in four-hundred years, someone looks at him like there's really a chance for someone like him-)
"내 황홀의 취해, you can't look away," Jinu sings back more forcefully now, heat burning his cheeks, sweat running down stark purple patterns along his jawline.
("Let the past be the past 'til it's weightless," she and he sing. Their voices melt together. He wants to — if he could just tell her...)
"No one is coming to save you," Gwi-Ma hisses.
Far down below the altar steps, the Saja Boys watch, expressions blank.
(He wants to press his lips against hers, thank her for the warmth in his chest. But Gwi-Ma will see, will know. It's too dangerous. But what if it — what if he did let go of it all? His shame, his guilt, that feeling that he'll never be whole again... What if... "Rumi, wait," Jinu calls out. She looks back at him before she can leave, the stars in her eyes. Oh, to believe so deeply-)
Jinu's throat feels tight, and he can't summon the words. The duet with Gwi-Ma feels like sandpaper across his skin.
"You're down on your knees," Gwi-Ma sings. Sings, in a voice that Jinu had once so desperately entrusted with his survival.
(Jinu's smile is slight. "I can't wait to see you on that stage tomorrow."
The moment the words leave his lips, he is ruined.)
Finally allowed to rise to his feet, the final line falls from his lips.
"I'll be your idol."
The other boys seem conflicted about the end of their era.
While it's certainly true that the 'Saja Boys' were a means to an end and the work was more grueling than they'd anticipated (interviews, variety shows, fan meet-ups, on and on and on in so short a time-), their work had been a reprieve from all of the wretchedness that often waited down below. This had been the closest thing to freedom that any of them had received in centuries — and why not relish in it? Why not enjoy the purest act of performing, of being adored for voices they had once used to sing to their parents, their aunts and uncles, their siblings?
It was an easy sell when Jinu had approached them. Contrary to popular belief among the other demons, where was no audition to be had. There was no search for the best, brightest performers.
Handsomeness was a requisite, admittedly.
But one doesn't live in the same barren hell for four-hundred years without noticing the distant allure of someone else's voice enveloped in song, and Jinu had noted such sound in the past. Had never approached them, naturally. He had been skittish at the thought of caring about another breakable thing ever again to consider friends or lovers.
Even the tiger and bird had to fight for his affections when they first floated into his life.
But he did listen, any time a demon opened their mouth to sing.
He listened very, very closely to voices when they would carry over the craggy rock that jutted up all over that wasteland. Their songs were so often distant melodies, with lyrics lost to the passages of time, thick with homesickness that Jinu had on occasion escaped into fleetingly. Bolstered by confidence in his plan, he'd approached each demon one by one: Abby Saja had agreed before Jinu could get his pitch out in full. Romance Saja had to consider it for an entire fortnight. Mystery gave no answer, and yet appeared the day he was due. And Baby? Baby had shrugged and eventually conceded that he'd had nothing better to do.
And so it went. Five leashed souls who had very few attachments, if any, and certainly none when it came to one another. But that's how demons are forced to exist. They find joys in the simple things, perhaps even share amused or devious smiles or a mutual understanding. Then they prepare themselves for the inevitable moment those small pleasures and budding relationships are burned to cinder in front of them.
They partook in something dangerously close to mortal life, and they pleased their master as they danced on that dangerous precipice between success and failure, between reward and torture. And soon they would win. They were almost elated by the thought of so many souls being culled tonight.
If you had asked any of them, it was never truly malicious or personal. Jinu had known that feeling himself, after all. None of them had sought to harm until harm sought them, and once a person's been beaten into the dirt and trained to loathe so many parts of themselves, it's easy to find comfort in the intoxicating flavor of a soul as it runs down one's throat.
A momentary high. A reprieve. A chance to be commended by the devil that had distorted them, even if such pride in their efforts would surely rot into disdain for their tarnished souls..
Evil. Irredeemable. Monsters.
For tonight, they could all be desirable to demon and human alike. They could be revered for those fleeting moments in front of a backing track, and then think of all of the mercy that their master would bestow upon them like medals of honor. The voices in their heads would lessen. The realm would never be hungry again. And then... maybe there would be a moment permitted to rest.
Or at least, that's what the plan is supposed to be.
In their small, bright changing room and dressed in shades of black, Jinu peers back at himself in the mirror of his vanity. The memory of Rumi's hopeful smile clutches one wrist, while Gwi-Ma's smoldering heat shackles the other. They tug his mind back and forth relentlessly, all while he sits so very still and studies the shadows across the plains of his face. He's tired, but the glamour of his human mask hides it all behind smooth, perfect skin.
What now?
Here, in one hand: Rumi's peaceful gaze, telling him everything would be okay.
Here, in the other cold, clawed hand: Gwi-Ma's promise of pain if he dared help them.
He can hear them, melting together.
A beautiful voice raising in song for him.
A young voice begging for her brother to come back.
He buries his face in his hands and sits in the silence as the clock ticks down the seconds. It's not until he feels the press of a cold, wet nose and soft fur into his arm that he sucks in a surprised breath, turns his attention to his tiger. Unnamed but not unloved, the beast usually seems to smile with those crooked, odd teeth. Perhaps it's just a trick of his plagued mind, but it doesn't seem to be the case now. Is that concern in his feline eyes?
Sliding his hand over the crown of his large fuzzy head, the corners of Jinu's lips turn up weakly.
"What do you think, old friend?" he asks wearily, claws summoned to scratch beneath the tiger's chin. "Would the Honmoon save a guy like me?"
Rumi's voice soars with confidence.
Light bounces off every angle of her. Rhinestones on her cuffs twinkle like the stars that have returned to her eyes. Gold tassels bounce as she raises her arms, saintly, glowing warm with adoration for her fans, for her friends who prepare to join the stage with her. There is no fear. Just jubilation. Just the auditorium and the taste of a Golden Honmoon on their lips.
"I'm done hiding, now I'm shining, like I'm born to be..." she sings; her fans joins in with her, harmonizing effortlessly as their souls glow blue and beautiful with inherent power — a sea of happiness and undivided connection. Jinu nudges through the crowd until he's pressed up against the barrier, clutching his aching side beneath his jacket. There would be no demons to steal Zoey and Mira's face. No Takedown to bare Rumi's shame to the world. He can already imagine the looks of anger and betrayal on the Saja Boys' faces, when they realize they'd been led too far astray by his lies to prevent what happens next.
It doesn't matter. Not anymore.
The fans scream and giggle in ecstasy around him. It's so palpable, he's not even sure they'd notice him without his raised hood. If he's honest, he also can't take his eyes off of Rumi as she belts out their hunter's mantra with pride. "... and I know I believe!"
The other two girls appear beside her as the backing track swells exuberantly, and soon their three-part harmony carries through the speakers, through the very air itself. Huntrix moves with fluidity, moons around a sun, three parts of a whole: a perfect, cohesive performance, carefully practiced to delight the very energy that safeguards the planet.
The golden threads of the Honmoon flutter in anticipation at the promise of finality.
They're so close. Freedom, just at the tips of their fingers. It fills Jinu's chest with something warm, so much so that his mouth falls open as he croons the words back. "Up, up, up, with our voices, 영원히 깨질 수 없는..."
As if a lantern through thick fog, Rumi sees the glow of his blue soul before she sees Jinu's face among the crowd. His soft brown eyes look back in fluttering relief. Relief and — something more, something both had felt as they'd floated in their own delight together, hand in hand, yearning for freedoms neither had been allowed for so long. No more fighting, no more pain, no more secrets.
Her eyes lift into happy crescents as she sings at him — for him. "You know that it's our time, no fears, no lies..."
— and even with the distance between them, he couldn't help but reach his hand out to her with longing to feel the warmth of it again.
Rumi reaches back.
Their golden Honmoon rolls across the earth in a beautiful, intricate wave.
"That's who we're born to be...!"
The last thing Jinu sees before the blanket of gold light violently pushes him back down into the earth is Rumi's horrified expression, just beyond her outstretched, empty hand.
Ah... Well, his downhearted thoughts whisper, just before his body makes impact with an unyielding stone altar. It was nice to dream, anyway.
Chapter 2
Summary:
Hope was a mistake. Hope was a weakness. Hope destroyed him.
Hope had such beautiful eyes.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The moment Jinu's body meets the demon realm's unforgiving earth, he can feel angry claws descend upon him.
His thoughts are so scrambled by the freefall and subsequent hard knock to the head that he doesn't quite parse what's happening at first; his vision is filled with blue and purple and red, patterns flashing in blurs as limbs swipe at him relentlessly. His fingers immediately become talons as he slashes back — feels his blood and the blood of other demons strike his face in wet gushes. His hooded jacket is shredded into patches across his torso and is immediately stained; one demon's hand strikes him across the face and carves a messy set of gouges from ear to nose. He sinks his fingers into the assailant's throat and squeezes.
A hunter's blade would be a kindness in comparison, for either of them. At least those sharpened tools are quick to turn them into lifeless cinders.
Almost humane, if you're desperate enough to look for it.
"Fall back!" Gwi-Ma's voice booms, and the attackers all scamper away down the stairs, some even tumbling off the high edges of the altar in their panic. No amount of outrage could keep them from obeying, and it's only in this moment that Jinu's senses return to him enough to grasp the severity of the situation. They're all furious. And who could blame them? He'd taken everything he'd promised them and not only threw it away, but did so knowing it would be the end of everything for them. They would slowly starve to death — slowly perish under Gwi-Ma's especially indelicate temper.
And it was his fault.
He weakly pushes the limp body of a dying demon off him and rolls onto his knees, quaking with the effort. The sting of their onslaught makes his breath catch in his throat. Human clothes hang off him in ribbons and blood, dark like ink stains, saturates parts of him. He's half-bared, vulnerable, shivering as the fight finally begins to leave him and replace itself with pain.
In front of him, Gwi-Ma's fire is ever vivid with colors that haunted their dreams if they had dared sleep.
He fell, he thinks. He fell, he fell, he fell.
Unworthy, disgusting creature that he is. The Honmoon crushed him like a bug. And he fell.
Did she know? Did she know that he'd — no. No, she wouldn't have done that to him. He tells himself again and again in the madness of the moment. They'd both felt something; it was real, he knows it was real, and she was so gentle in her affirmations. We'll both win. But as he sits on the cold altar with his arm clutching around his slicked body, he realizes through the burn of his stomach and coldness that washes over the rest of him that such profound hope was a mistake.
Gwi-Ma's voice sneers, "What are you crying for? You did this to yourself."
To his horror, tears have cut through the blood on his face and drip freely from his wobbling chin.
"After everything I've done for you... all of the exceptions I've made for you when you've faltered... You sit here before me — crying like an infant. What a pitiful, pathetic display." His flame flares outward as his voice raises higher. "I gave you a chance to prove yourself worthy of my attention, of my gifts! And instead of receiving my grace, you've betrayed us all. Betrayed us to the same miserable fate as your family!"
The demons down below scream and beat the earth with their fists and sob. With the Golden Honmoon completed, Gwi-Ma will feast on whatever is left here... and they will be left to either feed his flame or starve. Jinu had been watching it happen before his eyes, had known it was their only chance to stop the door from truly slamming shut in their faces forever. There will be no more human souls to feast on. Gwi-Ma's reign will wither.
And they will all eventually wither with it.
It could be decades. Centuries. But they will fall, one by one, stumbling through this barren world until their emaciated ankles give in and they collapse. He's seen it before in the human world — as a child, as a grown man, watching people who had been just as desperate as his family, people who would struggle to scrape the bark off trees to boil into a meager porridge.
What could he say? That it all went to plan? That he was just fooling her? Leading her on, for the sake of their survival? Whatever lies he would've smoothly delivered before have become large knots in his throat. He's a fake, a liar, an imposter — he's defeated. There is no coming back from this. Whatever slim pickings of reverence he'd gained being their capable savior has been ground to dust with every choice he'd made at the end of it all. Whatever chance he'd had to be redeemed and permitted salvation by the Honmoon was a lie, even as it had left Rumi's soft lips.
Hanging his head, he says nothing.
No apology. No explanation. No plea for his survival.
He's done.
"No more slick words left in you, are there?" Gwi-Ma's seething. He wants to burn him into nothing, into ashes that the others merely trample across. How many demons are forgotten underfoot? One loses track. The tyrant laughs, but there is no humor in the sound. "No, of course there aren't... You were used as a hunter's tool, a plaything to be discarded, and now all you can do is live in greater shame. Isn't that right? Not only are you a selfish, murderous liar, but you're stupid enough to think one of them would ever save something as disgusting to them as you."
The memories slam into him like one body into another. He jerks back weakly, too tired to fight it even if he could. So his eyes look through Gwi-Ma, seeing Rumi's horrified expression as he falls. Over and over he falls, listening to the sobs of his sister — the crunching of dirt as the palace doors are pushed shut. Then he's bowing to the king. Bowing to Gwi-Ma. Bowing in defeat, over and over again. Four hundred years and it feels like every moment of weakness had only just been committed. He squeezes his eyes shut against the migraine that bloats behind his vision, brain-matter throbbing at the invasion, the intrusion of thoughts and voices and memories and—
"Enough!" Jinu screams.
And with that desperate, rabid sound, a throb of pink striations run along the altar, stopping at the feet of the demons down below.
It's a single, shocking word to those watching. Nobody tells Gwi-Ma what is and isn't enough. Not unless they sought death.
Panting, blood-soaked, hair unkempt against a sweaty forehead, Jinu's wild gaze finds Gwi-Ma through the haze of violent memories that still try to assault him.
His eyes have shifted from their humanity, back into the color of a Golden Honmoon that coats the bruise-colored sky above them.
And then Jinu snarls, "This is what you deserve."
As the crowd of creatures huddled down below gasp and murmur among each other, Jinu closes his eyes and waits for Gwi-Ma's flames to find him. That's how their master had almost always dealt with incompetence or insolence: burning wailing demons, sometimes to death, sometimes just enough that they can limp away and lick their wounds beneath the shade of sunken debris. The death may not be quick. Or it may be a swift, unrelenting hand. But as he waits and anticipates and almost yearns for something he'd once fought so hard to escape, he imagines Rumi.
Rumi's gentle hand, running over his tiger's massive head; her offer of a simple, cheap bracelet — an olive branch between hunter and demon — and how greedily he'd snatched it up; the way she had playfully toyed with the lines of a blue Honmoon, giving him a chance to sing alongside her. A demon and a human. The impossibly cliched darkness and light. Maybe it had all been a trick, but the way she had looked up at him... Was he just too stupid to see something more cruel there?
(No, no. She looked shocked. She looked mortified as he fell. She reached for him-)
Hope was a mistake. Hope was a weakness. Hope destroyed him.
Hope had such beautiful eyes.
"Take him to the pit."
Jinu's breath catches.
No.
Ice in his veins freeze him over for only a moment, and then bestial instinct takes over any sense of dignity. He rises to his feet and starts running for the edge of the altar, clamoring for the nearest escape, but it's as pointless as its ever been to try and flee. As his patterns flare up with light, he slams into the ground violently — pinned but still trying to force his limbs out of their invisible shackles. Levitation fails him. Teleportation fails him.
A bug stripped of its wings.
And this bug calls out: "No, no, stop! Let me go! Don't!" As he fights against empty air, clawed hands suddenly grab him beneath each armpit, hoisting him up and lugging him backwards. He tries to flail in protest against the pressure of Gwi-Ma's control — and against the demons who have loyally obeyed and have collected him in their grasp — but no matter how much he wills his body to respond, his legs only twitch as he's dragged away. Panic leaves his voice rough and desperate as it echoes through an infertile world. "Please, don't do this, just kill me! Please! Kill me!" And then again, with fury, "Kill me!"
"I should have left you begging on the streets," Gwi-Ma spits. He watches Jinu's writhing form pulled down step after sharply jutting step. "Left you to live a short, pathetic human life full of misery and death. Left you to starve. Well, if it's endless hunger you prefer, it's hunger you'll get!"
The crowd of demons begin to part down the middle as Jinu's body is dragged toward the single structure still standing from the old world: a red hongsalmun. Its two pillars vibrate as a portal yawns open between them like a doorway. Jinu looks from one demonic face to the other — some are bleeding like he is, gashed by his claws in their scuffle. Some of them look disappointed, tearful, despondent. Most look furious.
Among them, he catches sight of the Saja Boys. They haven't stripped out of their silky modern button-up shirts, nor their jewelry, but their skin has returned to shades of purple and blue once more. Their gold-colored eyes watch him as he passes, expressions indifferent. The only one of the four that can't seem to school his emotions is Abby, with furrowed brow and angrily clenching jaw. Blame. Scorn. Outrage. Rightfully deserved, even as Jinu still struggles against Gwi-Ma's gravity with every passing moment. The horned demons that tow him — that tower over him — clutch his bare arms tighter the more he fights it.
Then, they pass through the portal.
Gwi-Ma's altar, standing in the middle of dull rock and dark sky, shifts into even more of nothing. The other side of the portal is a vast expanse of dead trees and mountains tall enough to nearly scrape the underbelly of the Honmoon. But Jinu knows what this is — where this leads to. He's endured this punishment once before, long, long ago. At the mouth of these desolate mountains, a cave sits with a yawning maw. It's inviting to no one, but prepared to consume all the same. Ripped, discarded bujeok litter the ground where Jinu's knees brush — paper talismans once for the purpose of good, devastated by corrosion for hundreds of years in the dark.
Soon enough, the fight within him withers into soft pleas. Rough hands drag him through the cave's hollow entrance and into near darkness; the glowing patterns across their demon bodies are the only light that leads the way. All the while, every slight sound bounces off the cavernous walls. Jinu's strained breathing mingles with crunching footfalls and occasional uncomfortable grunts from his chauffeurs as their grip on him adjusts. He knows they're not permitted to talk during this unkind ritual, though maybe that's for the best; they probably have a lot they'd like to say to him, judging by how roughly their nails dig into the muscle of his bicep.
The deeper they wander in, the more ancient, mournful voices whisper and wail and beg... These are the sounds of demons long since destroyed inside this place, Jinu knows. Their voices are like stars that have burnt out and yet exist, centuries later, for those left behind to bear witness. Some of the voices he recognizes. Remembers from years past, before Gwi-Ma had sent them away to the Pit.
And now, he's sitting at the edge of that very same horrible, long chasm.
He tries, despite himself. Tries to teleport away when they drop his arms back to his sides. Tries to float when they shove him forward. For the second time, he falls again — deeper and darker and longer, he falls. Down in the Pit, you don't know when the ground will finally greet you, like a kiss from a fist.
Eventually, though: a landing.
It's hard and brutal and he loses conscious for a time.
A short, nauseating time.
When he stirs and opens his eyes, all he finds is darkness.
He fights to keep his breath steady, but his lungs start pulling faster and faster from the damp, stale air as the panic creeps in.
This is going to be all he has. For years, for decades, for centuries if Gwi-Ma so chooses. This will be all there is. Sitting down in a ravenous cavity of rock and darkness, forgotten, left to wither without the mercy of death. He paws around the black abyss for some shred of hope that something can grant him a miraculous escape — but no matter how many times he gropes around the Pit, there is only the same circular wall, over and over and over again-
His steadily rising cries for mercy are entombed from the outside — sealed shut with a heavy stone.
A heavy weight unlike anything they've ever endured begins to press down upon the demon realm.
There are a lot of demons who have given in to their panic and have spent hours upon hours clawing at the Golden Honmoon's barrier. Others have slowly sank to the ground, quietly comforted by what few friends or lovers they'd miraculously safeguarded in the little privacy they were afforded. Usually that kind of support didn't come easily and was often chastised, but this night Gwi-Ma was surprisingly silent on the matter. It was... as if he had started floundering in his own way, left to figure out just how long he had left before his flame would well and truly burn out.
A soon to be dying king with a crumbling crown, as foretold by the demon who would serve the final blow.
Not before his bondservants all perished first, of course.
But perhaps some of them welcomed the day that the great King Gwi-Ma of the demon realm had to truly fear for his continued existence.
Jinu had been taken away — would be punished endlessly, they know, and would be last to be consumed by the fires when nothing else was left to feed and stoke it. The Saja Boys weren't really sure what would happen to them, though Baby figures they would be given the smallest amount of leniency for not betraying all of their demon ilk for the love of a woman.
With their glorious leader gone, the four of them stand together long after the other demons have dispersed. They walk along an unappealing path of uprooted, decaying tree corpses, slowly shifting back into long robes and sheer gats. Mystery toys with the curved fangs jutting out from under his lips. Baby rolls a half-eaten sucker between curved monstrous claws.
Some jewelry lingers, though. None of them return to their top knots.
As they reach a clearing of cracked mud and long-collapsed huts, they turn towards one another.
A loose circle of demons, ready to face the pitiful end of everything, angry and tired and still fighting scathing voices of their own.
Romance speaks first, after the silence overstays. "I guess that's it, then."
"... Guess so," Abby mumbles.
They all anticipate turning and going their separate ways.
For some absurd reason, they do not.
Notes:
Next chapter will be from Rumi's perspective. Thank you guys for the warm reception so far! Comments as always mean a lot.
Chapter 3
Summary:
("You can be free from those voices forever.")
Rumi falls, too. But not like Jinu.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Rumi has waited her entire existence for permission to exist.
She'd wanted to prove she was worthy of the human part of her — and to deshell herself of the demonic heritage that had made her naked body a waking nightmare to look at in the mirror. Since she was a little girl, she'd dreamed about changing the Honmoon's colors, sometimes wishing so deeply, she'd cry upon waking from a dream after realizing it had all been in her imagination.
And she now she's finally getting to see it realized.
Her voice had soared, had intermingled with the beautiful harmonies of fans who had brought them to this moment. And down at the barricade, Jinu had sang with her; he was a beautiful sight then, radiant with promise and hope and all the things she had sworn he could have again. Freedom to choose. A chance to find his own redemption. A purpose beyond being a tyrant's loaded weapon.
She reaches for him. She wants to feel the warmth of his hand in hers. She wants to see their hard-won laurels gifted when their patterns vanish and their bodies are purified by the mercy of the one thing she had sworn to protect with her life.
("Because if there's no hope for you, what hope is there for me?")
And then Jinu sinks under the weight of the Honmoon.
("Then we'll both win.")
Gone.
("You can be free from those voices forever.")
Rumi falls, too. But not like Jinu.
She has felt pain before. Physical pain, emotional pain. Daggers in her spirit and claws through her flesh. But no amount of suffering she'd built herself up to handle could prepare her for the agony in her chest at the sight of Jinu being crushed beneath the Honmoon's weight. It's like the air is punched out of her. She becomes voiceless in her dread.
He had vanished from her sight. From her life.
The song's instrumentals continue to play, but she can only hear the blood pulsing like liquid fire in her ears. The golden shawl sparkles brilliantly across the crowd. Someone on the overhead speakers congratulate Huntrix for yet another incredible performance while Mira and Zoey rush to throw their arms around her, nuzzling close, eyes closing in the ecstasy that accompanies victory.
In the heat of the moment they must mistake her pale-faced shock for something else. What else could it possibly have been, if not the realization that all of their work has finally come to fruition? A world united by their music. A society truly shielded from the evil, disgusting creatures that fester beneath their feet. Even now, Rumi can feel stray tears from Zoey's eyelashes as she clings to her.
She whispers excitedly, "We did it, Rumi! We did it!"
"Keep it together you two," Mira's voice wobbles.
Rumi can only stare at the space where Jinu used to be, a space already filling back in with other bodies.
He is gone.
Simply gone.
"Ah — I'm sorry for the unfortunate news," an announcer chimes in over the many overhead speakers. "We've received word that the Saja Boys will not be performing as planned. It seems they've had an emergency come up… but they would like to sincerely congratulate Huntrix for their wonderful performance tonight."
Rumi's knees threaten to buckle beneath her. When tears finally track down her cheeks, Mira and Zoey can only look on in panicked confusion. They steady her arms in their hands and tuck flyaway strands of hair back behind her ears. Surely, these were just overwhelmed tears of joy.
After all, the Honmoon turned gold.
What was there to mourn?
By the time they're ushered off the stage and microphones are thrust into their faces by eager reporters, Rumi's make-up has been adjusted, and her smile carefully stretches across her painted lips. Nothing quite masks the puffiness under her eyes, nor the pink irritation that lingers — not very sightly for a well-cultivated idol persona — but most find it endearing tonight.
Surely, it's just a girl that cares deeply about her work.
She practices the art of disassociating well. Gives thanks to the fans, promises more to come in the future. Though Zoey and Mira's expressions betray their concern at times, the three work in a harmonious balance, greeting eager fans waiting to be noticed and cradling bouquets of flowers in their arms.
Faults and fears cannot be seen, Rumi thinks.
The fault of exhibiting grief.
The tightness of fear in her stomach.
A sort of numbness takes over as she signs her name on CD cases and glamor shots. One fan frowns at her from behind the red rope that parts them from overeager concert-goers. "I hope the Saja Boys are okay," the girl says, and then holds out an Idol Awards poster, slightly dented despite her great care. "I'm glad I saw them before the show, but…"
Rumi signs beneath Jinu's signature.
And then signs another poster. And then another.
The world around her wobbles and blurs and her palms begin to sweat—
Rumi.
Rumi.
"Rumi."
She startles, and realizes she's sitting across from Mira and Zoey in the back of a limousine with expensive leather seats, homeward bound. Their own music is playing softly on the radio, which she realizes belatedly has to be Bobby's doing from the front seat.
"Are you okay?" Mira asks, brow furrowed. "Back there on the stage, you looked…"
"I'm sorry," she says, forcing a smile. What could she say? What would settle that uncertain look in their eyes? The truth wasn't going to be it. That much she knew for sure. "I'm just — it's so much. We've worked so hard to get here, and I just can't believe… I mean…"
Zoey smiles sympathetically. She reaches over to put her hand on Rumi's, squeezing.
"It does feel totally overwhelming."
"But nothing my girls couldn't handle!" Bobby chirps from the driver's seat.
What was usually a warm glow from Bobby's kind words fizzled out before they could reach her. Cold from the inside out, she presses a hand to her chest and breathes in shakily. When she closes her eyes, she just sees him. Over and over again, she sees him. Encouraged. Heartened. Then plummeting.
"It's okay. I'll be okay," she lies.
One of many lies she has told, and with more to come.
Before they reach the paved driveway that leads into their garage, Rumi's phone buzzes in her pocket — not a voice call, but a simple text. As they lean in to read it together, she can feel a short-lived burst of anticipation.
It's Celine. She must have felt it. Felt the Honmoon change.
The words that reflect back at her makes her throat tighten, despite everything.
'Rest yourselves.
We'll talk tomorrow.
I am SO proud of you girls.'
They get home fairly late, but Zoey and Mira are full of unbridled energy. They throw off their jackets and kick off their shoes at the door, giving Bobby a cheery farewell and rummaging around in their spacious kitchen for bowls and the snacks to fill them with. They talk about maybe taking a few weeks off to relax, to plan out some kind of well-deserved trip and actually harvest the fruits of their years of hunting labor.
Somewhere between Zoey shoving Pepero biscuits in her mouth and Mira manhandling a popcorn bag into the microwave, they talk about a future they used to chatter about in the dead of night, when none of them could sleep. A future without fighting. Without fearing the next failure.
"It's going to be so weird not bashing demon faces in," Mira laughs.
"Right?!" Zoey claps her hands together. "I don't know what I'm gonna do with all of those demon insult journals! Maybe recycle them for jong-i jeobgi."
Rumi belatedly realizes silence has filled the kitchen. Both girls have stopped talking and are peering at her now — expectant, waiting for her input on something she'd tuned out. It occurs to her that she's been suspiciously quiet, so she masks it with a yawn that is admittedly a little forced. "Sorry, guys. That — that all sounds great… I'm just really tired. Maybe we can plan something for tomorrow? A relaxation day?"
Mira opens her mouth, but Zoey gives her a soft bump with her shoulder.
"That sounds great."
"Ah, yeah — " Mira agrees. "Yeah. Get some rest, huh? It's been a crazy two weeks."
A surprised laugh bubbles up from Rumi's mouth, because her friends had no clue just how crazy it had really felt. Two weeks since they'd bumped into the Saja Boys. Was that all it was? Just two? Fourteen days of nearly beheading one of them, of sticking out their tongues when the cameras weren't watching, of finding Jinu in the hushed darkness of nighttime, sitting with him and laughing softly and wondering what it would feel like to lean over and —
Rumi could never know what it felt like, to be tormented by memories the way demons were. But right now, she could at least understand a little.
Swallowing, she says, "I think I'm going to take a bath and hit the bed."
"Sure thing," Zoey doesn't delay in answering. "If you need us, we'll be here."
So — they definitely know something is off.
It wouldn't be the first time. It also wouldn't be the first time she hides it all anyway.
If Mira or Zoey are considering convincing her to stay for the couch and snacks, they hold their tongues. Rumi would have to be blind to miss the worry that creases their brow or the careful way they speak; it must be awful, she thinks, to know something is amiss but not know what. Has she been doing this to them all this time? With her nervousness about the bath house, or the way she'd hidden the decline of her voice? Is this just what she does? Inspire people to help her, only for them to get bitten for their kindness?
She offers a weak smile and has to force herself not to rush her steps as she leaves.
The moment her bedroom door closes behind her, she presses her body rigidly against it. The lock clicks into place behind her fingers. The room is too cold, too quiet. Some part of her wants to see a large, blue mass of fur curled up and sleeping on her floor. A bird in a silly little hat, tapping at her window. Did they get pushed down into that hell too? Were they demonic, or did they have a chance to remain free in the chaos? The thought of being the reason they're gone too…
One moment she's leaning on her door, the next she's in her bathroom, running the water in the shower. The mirror is damp and fogged, and she runs her palm across it to see what looks back. A fraud. A fake. A liar. For hours, she has dreaded this moment. For hours, she's pushed it away. She takes a deep, strained breath and slowly peels away her shimmering idol jacket from trembling shoulders.
A sob forms on her lips when bruise-colored patterns reflect back at her.
"No…" comes the weak response. She rips away her shirt, her bra, studies the lines that curve across and around her thin pale frame. "No, no, no…"
Not only has she not been saved from these patterns, the demon marks have grown further down her stomach — down her arms, too, and even closer to her wrists. Fingers clutch the marble counter, white-knuckled.
She was still just as wrong and broken as the child who had first shown Celine the funny little mark on her bicep. She was just as disgusting and foreign as the teenager who had slapped Mira's hand away when she had reached for a scrape on her elbow during training.
Jinu was gone, and she still wasn't whole.
"Why? Why? I've done everything I was supposed to. We sealed the Honmoon! We stopped Gwi-Ma, we — I was supposed to be fixed! I was supposed to be better!" She sinks to the floor. Her sobs fade into the spray of long-forgotten shower water. "I was supposed to be free. We were both — "
Her breath shudders.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry… I wanted to set you free. I wanted to save you, I swear."
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
What is that supposed to accomplish, saying such things to a bathroom rug? It's too late. This very moment Jinu is trapped a world that will despise him now. He'll be tortured for an eternity if he's not already been burned to ash, a betrayer to his own kind. She'd set him up for that. She'd been the one to put the final nail in his four hundred year-old coffin; every hammer stroke leaves a vicious image in her head: Jinu, surrounded by fire; Jinu, beaten by his fellow demon; Jinu, with his spirit broken, looking up at a world — a new life — that had rejected him.
And here she was, curled up on a bathroom floor, bawling her eyes out.
Yet another Gwi-Ma, promising a desperate man safety and security, only to rip it away in a lie.
She's floating.
The sky is both above and below. Endlessly, city lights twinkle and bleed together.
As he hovers beside her, Jinu slips his hand into hers with a feathery touch. Tentative. Sweet.
Their patterns glow together, unified.
Rumi isn't naive. She knows just what lies beyond the handsome, harmless-looking boy staring back at her. Like any demon, he was responsible for countless lives lost. He had hurt humans like he was trained to do, had consumed souls for a master that was relentless and cruel and would allow for nothing less. Jinu was dangerous. He was cunning. And she knows that at the start, no matter how much of it was sincere, there was always some part of him that had no choice but to collude with her for his own benefit.
But looking at him in front of her, buoyed together by hands ornamented with jagged lines… It could only remind her of a man who had gripped her wrist as if a bracelet could actually save his soul. Again and again, all she could see was a lonely, hopeless human spirit, desperate for another chance to live.
Not just survive.
Looking at him now, that is what she sees. A survivor. Someone who had been unmade so many times that he'd learned how to put himself back together. A person capable of great harm, but also great care. There is an endless wealth of possibility in the brown eyes currently tracing her figure in starlight.
"Rumi," he hums, "Will you sing with me?"
Of course. Of course she will.
She reaches up to brush his windswept bangs from one eye.
The gesture leaves long, thin scratches on his forehead that flood with blood.
Pulling back sharply, her gaze snaps to the claws that have consumed the tips of her fingers.
"Oh my god. I didn't mean to, I was—"
"It's okay," Jinu says, pulling her hand in to press against his cheek. She watches as gash after gash spreads open across his skin. Across his face. All over his arms. Down his chest. "It barely hurts. It barely hurts… It…"
His mouth opens, and the scream that leaves his lips is bloodcurdling.
She gasps awake on the bathroom floor before his name can escape her lips.
Notes:
Next chapter may be a mix of POV's, or may be a Rumi chapter as well. Never know until my fingers get to typing! Lots of fun things to chew on coming up.
Thanks again for any comments! It means a lot, truly.
Chapter 4
Summary:
We're just happy you're feeling better," Zoey says around a spoonful of Jolly Pong. "I totally understand what you mean, though. I thought I'd freak out a lot more than I did. But really, I think it was just... this weird sense of peace?"
Peace?
Rumi's genuinely happy for her.
She envies her too.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Sleep doesn't come easily for Rumi, the night the Honmoon turns gold. Jewelry and make-up stripped away, the lingering glamor from the stage is replaced with damp hair and nightmares; these dreams are short and sharp, not unlike a small knife wound, and keep waking her to the blue coldness of a quiet room... and a soft pink glow. When she lifts her shaking hands she can only watch her patterns flicker with nauseating light, as if compelled by her misery, her shame.
The panic from her nightmares flows into depression while awake, and that flows into exhaustion that starts the entire process over again. By the time the light from a crawling sunrise streams through the gaps in her curtains, she's given up on the idea of trying to make up for lost rest. Instead, she stares at the ceiling. Waiting. Waiting for what, she's not really sure. For reality to shift? For the possibility that she had dreamed yesterday all along?
Maybe she's just wishing the tiger and bird would rise from the bedroom floor with another handwritten note from Jinu.
What would it even say? 'Thanks for nothing'?
She let him down, and soon she would have to shatter Celine's perfect ending too. The thought of her horrified gaze on her bare arms constricts something warped and delicate in her chest. As the tears swell in her eyes and threaten to flee into the shells of her ears, she tells herself that this has to be it — no more tears, no more weakness. She isn't sure what will happen if the other two find her in such a sorry state, but the fear of it happening nearly suffocates her.
She's no stranger to covering something up. She just needs to keep doing it.
Because... because the demons are finally locked away, and their jobs are finished.
The patterns aren't gone, but maybe they're just delayed. Maybe it takes time for them to vanish, the same way that it took them so many years to spread. Maybe, maybe, maybe. There is still a chance things could be okay.
For her.
For her.
She presses her hands over her eyes and sees a dark-haired, tall figure running his fingers over blue strands of light, wary and hopeless.
("I don't trust it, but I want to.")
"It's not fair," she whispers in the dark. She turns on her side and watches the golden Honmoon pulse across her bedroom floor. She tells it, "He earned your mercy."
It's too late now.
It's over. It's done.
And she has to live with it, the same way she's lived with the sight of her markings year after year.
She has to.
(Just keep going.)
When Rumi comes out of her room, the other two have simple breakfasts set at the table, a third spot for Rumi created with care. As drained as she is, remembering that they're both here for her both heals and harms. All this time she'd been excited for the day she could finally be her true self around them — and yet she was moving to join them, knowing that there was so much of her hidden away from view. And after all of the concern she'd caused with her struggling voice and her performance as a hunter...
Making them feel like they have to look after her is a terrible feeling.
And it's happened more lately than she wants to admit.
"We were wondering when you'd roll out of bed," Mira says.
Rumi laughs displaying a well-practiced smile. "I guess I was making up some sleep I missed."
"Oh yeah, I was totally wiped."
"Not me, I couldn't sleep!" Zoey beams. "I was scrolling through all of our socials, getting hyped up by everyone else. I think that really was one of our best performances! Even late night talk shows in America kept bringing us up; we should totally do one of those sometime."
Despite herself, Rumi can't help but smile. "What, go international?"
"Only after we get a real break this time," Mira huffs. "No launches, no interviews, no rehearsals. Just couch and bed and maybe some jam sessions."
It almost feels normal at the table. If there's anywhere she can lose herself, it's in the company of Mira and Zoey, at least for a short while. They talk about all the things they want to do now that they'll have more free time away from hunting. Hobbies they had considered, solo works they'd like to have on the side. Sometimes its easy to forget that they're so young, that this is only just a small part of their hopefully long lives; Rumi has never thought past escaping parts of herself. She wouldn't even know where to start, and her contributions to their conversation are woefully uninspiring.
(Especially when she knows something they don't know.)
"I'm sorry for being so weird last night," she finally says. "We dreamed about this moment since we'd started training. And I know it was so special, and it should have been a celebration. Together. It was just so much at once... I really thought I would have a way different reaction."
"We're just happy you're feeling better," Zoey says around a spoonful of Jolly Pong. "I totally understand what you mean, though. I thought I'd freak out a lot more than I did. But really, I think it was just... this weird sense of peace?"
Peace?
Rumi's genuinely happy for her.
She envies her too.
Mira shrugs, a little in awe herself. "Yeah, it really does feel like we're waking up to a whole new kind of life. If we didn't have an idol group, I feel like I'd have been totally lost now." She smiles, glancing between Zoey and Rumi. "I'm really glad I still have you two. That this isn't... just it. You know?"
Their hands move to sit on the table.
All three move in tandem to cover each other's fingers with their own.
"Through thick and thin," Zoey grins. "And we've still got fans to entertain."
"Except now we don't have to worry about anyone eating them," Mira adds.
Zoey smiles, though she looks almost a little guilty. "You should have seen all of the buzz about the Saja Boys. Everyone's wondering where they went... I kind of feel bad for the people who liked their music. You could tell they were worried."
"Ha!" Mira smacks a fist beside her bowl. "If they knew what kind of freaky soul-sucking monsters they were worried about, they'd run screaming."
"I'm so sure now, their Soda Pop song was definitely about eating people."
"Oh yeah, totally."
"Smell you later, losers!"
As the girls giggle amongst themselves, Rumi focuses on eating.
Bite after bite, gaze boring holes through the table's wood finish, trying to stop the creeping heat in her neck or the guilt that burrows deeper and deeper still. It is a good thing, she thinks. It's good that the demons can't hurt anyone anymore. It's good that they can move on with their lives. It's good that their fans are safe.
She smiles back at them because it's good, good, good.
"How... How could this happen?"
Rumi had anticipated these words from Celine. It didn't make hearing them any less of a slap to the face of the child that still yearned for acceptance. Her body goes hot and her stomach burns like ice on skin, and she doesn't dare move as her mentor's hands roam across her arms, her shoulders, her collar — not daring to touch those jagged lines of contamination. Nausea and disquiet intermingle, reflected from Celine's eyes as they raise to meet Rumi's gaze.
She must see the struggle reflecting back, because she tries her damnedest to not reel in her horror. Instead, she reaches for a shawl that had been thrown haphazardly across her desk and drapes it around Rumi's shoulders, and then gently rubs circles there with her thumbs now that there is a barricade between her and the markings hidden beneath.
Their reunion prior had started wonderfully. There were happy embraces at the mouth of her quaint cabin, followed by the warm congratulations of a proud mentor. They'd all done so well and worked so hard, and they finally had a chance to rest. Rumi could see it then, in the relaxed slopes of Celine's shoulders; she was comforted, had truly felt at peace. She had longed for the day hunters wouldn't have to risk their lives — that there wouldn't be another Ryu Mi-yeong.
Most of all — and Rumi was sure of this, despite everything else — Celine had wanted them to be able to have a life beyond all of this, once their duties were fulfilled.
If only those marks on her skin would've gone away, softly into the night.
"Maybe it's... just part of me now," Rumi says in a near whisper. Mira and Zoey had left to give them a moment together with the promise of a delicious, triumphal lunch, but she still fears them returning and hearing the truth from her own lips. "Maybe I was too late... and it just... spread too far."
"No," Celine says firmly. She reaches up to cup Rumi's face in her hands. And god, she looks back, praying that she can be so certain as her mentor — her mother. "The Honmoon wouldn't do that. Not to you. It's purifying. It cleanses evil from this world. And it can see that you're a good person underneath this, Rumi; it knows that you didn't ask for these marks."
'Neither did Jinu,' she thinks. 'He didn't want his marks, either.'
And he was turned away by the Honmoon all the same.
"Then why? Why didn't it fix me?"
"Maybe we just... need to give it time," Celine says. Excuses the Honmoon, because it's all they have. "Maybe they'll start fading. The longer the bridge between the demon and human realm is fully broken down, the more you'll finally be free."
Free.
Rumi ducks her chin, and Celine immediately reaches beneath it, tilting her daughter's head back up.
"You're a hunter. You defended our world from harm. Only good can come from that."
Like so many times before, Rumi sees love reflected back.
Not for all of her, but most.
She learns how to stretch it thinly over the parts Celine can't bear to look at.
"Let's have lunch. Enjoy the moment we've been given here," Celine says.
As they prepare to leave her bedroom, she offers a soft reminder:
"Put your jacket back on."
Hours bleed into days bleed into weeks.
Rumi worries she may be going crazy.
Time is like blood from a wound that gushes out of her, impossible to staunch. Sometimes Monday turns into Friday. But there is comfort in the business of their post-Idol Awards touring — Golden had just released, after all, and they had been planning to release a few more songs to round out the year. It was strange to lose an entire half of your life's work overnight — hunting, that is — but idol work was easily just as taxing as risking death in the middle of the night. Celine calls her every other day to check on her markings, and every time she gets off the phone she swears they've grown a millimeter, a centimeter, an inch more.
But the work is healing. It's life-saving, and she's relearned how to lie to everyone's faces without a single tell. She beams on stage. She laughs in interviews. She slides into step with Zoey and Mira during choreography rehearsals, and they comment happily on how motivated and excitable she's become. When they're outside of the penthouse, she can focus on being an idol with every fiber of her being; she can shed the burden of hunting and enjoy the fruits of their labor as singers and performers, and she can avoid thinking about the itch of her skin beneath her sleeves, and everything can be perfect.
Everything is perfect.
Everything — will soon be perfect.
Everything is going to... eventually be perfect.
Only there are moments where her thoughts slip. The beginning notes of Soda Pop play on the radio, and she can't bring herself to change the station or shut it off — it is catchy, Zoey always admits, and the three of them absently work their shoulders to the beat, despite everything. Sometimes a happy fan will have Saja Boys merchandise on, unaware that there wouldn't be anything new to enjoy past their first single.
And sometimes, when those kinds of thoughts are heavy in her mind, Rumi ends up at her laptop, watching videos in the gloom of an early morning where she can't be so easily discovered by her friends. She types 사자 보이즈 and watches as videos from variety shows and interviews load on the results page. Jinu's face is almost always front and center in the thumbnails.
Click.
There is no sincerity in the way the Saja Boys answer questions from overeager reporters. Beneath the alluring smiles and false stories, there are demons who are working hard to prepare a feast for their master. She watches Jinu talk, though — slippery like a snake with his false charm, playing his part so cautiously. She knows what that's like, maybe now more than ever.
Lying, putting on appearances... hoping that it will all pay off in the end and you can be just a little less unhappy.
It makes her heart ache, as she brushes her fingers across the screen. All she can see is the indecisive, nervous man who had taken her extended hand; the pain in his expression when he'd wanted nothing more than to believe in her; how soft his eyes had looked when they smiled back at her. Her patterns ache miserably.
They light up across her skin as she leans in and kisses the small, pixelated version of him on her screen.
He just talks beneath her lips, a phantom, unaware of where he would be days after this video ends.
The following silence is punctuated by a soft groan, and she rubs her temples. "... What the hell am I doing?"
On her screen the interviewer asks: "And what's something about you that your fans don't know about you?"
"Well," Jinu says, looking caught off-guard despite himself, "I'm... a cat dad?"
Bathed in the glow of his colors, Rumi laughs, surprised by the sound as it leaves her.
Sleep.
Sleep.
Sleep.
Laptop shut, bedroom lock checked for the fourth or fifth time, Rumi collapses backward onto her bed. Her hair is freed from its binds and lies around her like a snow angel. There in the darkness, she wrings her hands and watches an unchanging ceiling as her emotions and thoughts catch up with her once again; it happens like clockwork, one moment distracted and the next drowning in the excess that Jinu and the Honmoon and everything in-between had left behind. She usually doesn't feel sleep capture her — more often than not she's tossing and turning, then falling into a lottery of dreams. She's never sure what she'll remember seeing, but she's stopped hoping for the best.
Tonight, she sits in an audience, confused by the unhappy mutterings around her.
"Just sing already," someone says. "Just sing!"
On the stage, Jinu stands in front of a microphone, alone. His hands clutch the stand, wringing its neck as his mouth hangs open. His panicked gaze darts around the studio, tracing the faces in the crowd as he struggles to make a sound. "What're you doing?! What kind of performance is this?!"
Rumi moves to stand up, hands fists at her sides, but before she can fight back against the mockery —
The spotlight lands on her, bleaching her skin and forcing her to shield her eyes.
"Well," a distorted voice asks, "If he's not going to, what about you?"
Stupidly, all she can think is: But I don't know my choreography... What song is it? Where are the others?
She's unable to see Jinu anymore, not with her eyes fighting to stay open.
When she opens her mouth to sing something, anything, all that comes out is a strained cough.
I can't.
The light is too much. It's too bright, too expansive now. It washes away the crowd. The studio. Jinu on that stage. It feels like the spotlight wants to smother her until every breath in her lungs has been squeezed out. Is this what it's going to feel like from now on...? Buried under all of these horrible feelings as she hides from the world?
Then, somewhere in the distance — a soft, rasping voice.
It's so, so quiet.
But it wakes her up like a jolt of thunder.
"We can't fix it if we never face it..."
She sits up sharply in her bed, eyes scanning the darkness of her bedroom for the source; there's nobody here but her, and yet the sound persists. A melodic voice that struggles to form the words. Languidly, every word drawls with effort.
"What if we find a way to escape it?"
Rumi crawls off her bed, hair pushed out of her face as it trails behind her. There's no one here. No one at all. But as her feet meet the floor, the golden Honmoon ripples beneath her toes. A compulsion she can't quite understand pulls her to her knees, where the weak voice seems to reverberate through the thin lines of gold.
"... We could be... free — "
Again, her voice sticks in her throat.
Jinu.
Notes:
I'm gonna go through and beta this a bit more thoroughly later today! But might as well get it up and out there. ♥
Chapter 5
Notes:
If you have specific triggers, please be sure to read the updated tags and enter with caution!
We catch up with what Jinu's up to this chapter, and it's not great.
Chapter Text
Jinu measures parts of his life by how hard and fast he falls.
The first time he falls, he's sitting in the muddy streets of a distant Seoul with dirty hands and an empty belly. He stinks of sweat and illness and unclean poverty, almost too weary to lift the heavy instrument and cart it across the bustling streets. His old bipa is in desperate need of new strings and polish, but it — much like him — manages to play in spite of itself. This, he thinks, is where he stumbles first. He is an unworthy brother and son, unable to provide for a sick family; he is a man who still feels like the anxious teenager that had tied his hair into a sangtu, days after burying his father in a humble grave just outside of the city walls; it had cost them everything they had left to give to lay him to rest.
He's easy prey. Jinu knows this. He flounders regardless.
The second time he falls is the moment Gwi-Ma's hypnotic voice finds his ears. If he's honest with himself, the coercion is woefully easy; all it takes is a bag of millet being dropped into his lap, proof of the demon king's power to provide. How could he not believe what is whispered to him then? The voice knows every single one of his failures, has spoken his faults even when he tries to sleep at night, puts his shame into words that no bipa can drown out.
When the bag of millet runs out and his stomach gurgles under his hands again, he gives up. He gives in. He falls further.
And for that, he deserves everything that happens after.
The third time he falls… that is when any chance of freedom curdles into a foul rot in his soul. The patterns invade him like tethers beneath his skin, mooring him to his disgrace. Every day after the moment he had pulled his hand from his sister's grasp, he sinks without mercy. For every laugh among the yangban and melodies he plays on behalf of the king, another viperous purple vine slithers over his flesh. Keeping them hidden from the noblemen as they pass him in the hallways leaves him anxious, too disturbed to disrobe even in complete isolation, all for fear that someone would see, would know, would judge.
Symbols of his cowardice.
He couldn't think. Couldn't play. Couldn't hear anything but his sister's pleas, couldn't see passed his mother's defeated stare.
Weight from dependable meals fill in the hollower parts of his body, but the voices keep him up in bed, accompanied by the glow of a waning candle — voices that remind him over and over how sickeningly comfortable the blankets beneath his body were, how traitorously warm, selfishly safe.
It is inevitable that the flames find and overtake him.
And when he falls that third time, there's a near immediate impact. Every bone in his body shakes when he meets the uneven earth of the demon realm. Here, he is robbed: of his breath when he lands, of the healthy color of his flesh, of the soul half-decayed inside him — all are gobbled up by Gwi-Ma's maw. He rolls over. Dirt and ash cling to his robes as he attempts to fill his lungs with the newly pungent air. Then he looks up — and cries out in fear.
The demons, parted on either side of him, watch with interest at this new, pathetic creature brought down before them. Some are engrossed in watching a human lose the last threads of their humanity, having known nothing of life beyond their realm. Others watch with their own memories assaulting them, reminded of the lives they'd left behind when Gwi-Ma collected their souls. Jinu crawls backward on his hands as if expecting them to leap on him, devour him, but none of them so much as lift a foot in his direction. They simply mutter among each other, some elated, some old and tired and disinterested.
Gwi-Ma's voice rises above theirs.
"Welcome to the rest of your life, little songbird."
"Wh… where…" The word is nearly voiceless on his lips as he begins to lock up with panic. The hair bound on the crown of his head has begun to unfurl, locks falling down his face, fluttering wildly at his lips as he breathes fast. His final meal eaten as a human threatens to climb up his throat, when he catches sight of his hands and finds sharp, unnatural talons where fingertips used to be.
'You deserve this,' someone says. Or maybe he thinks it. 'All of it.'
"Don't worry," Gwi-Ma insists. "As long as you obey your king… I'll make sure you're never hungry again."
His stomach growls beneath his palm as he sits against wall of the pit, panting from exhaustion. He'd attempted the sheer climb upward yet again — an exercise in futility that has lasted days now. The pitch blackness stretches long and far above him and every effort to scale the wall only ends in a series of disheartening falls, every single a shorter drop than the last. Aging scabs from his wounds are at times scraped bare again in the tumble, and while he sees nothing but the unyielding dark, he feels the claw marks ooze like his dry lips.
"… This sucks."
He's been talking aloud more and more, and though he's already growing unfond of his own voice, the alternative is letting the darkness bleed in and batter him with voices that aren't his own.
Eventually, his limbs burn too much to try again. He lays back and kneads the knots in his calves, flexes his bared, battered toes against loose gravel underfoot. It's hard to relax in the icy depths beneath the mountain and its winding caves; other than his jeans, there's nothing left to shield him from the chill.
Again, his belly gurgles.
Thirst is a constant ache in his throat.
Some ugly part of him thinks of the honey-sweet taste of a human soul as it glides past his tongue.
'Sick.' a voice says, 'You're sick. You crave a person's life. You're hungry, and instead of a bag of millet, you want to take someone from their friends, their family. Disgusting. You're worthy of being hunted.'
"Shut up," he hisses, and then presses his wrists to his ears; the blood pulsing under his skin helps disrupt the stream of unending contempt. Despite this, the relief he gains is immediately drowned out by a feeling of helplessness. How many days has it been since he's been cast down into this hole? It doesn't matter, he supposes, but can't help but dwell all the same. The dark stretches beyond just his eyes; it eats up time, erases the seconds and minutes and hours; sometimes he feels awake while he's asleep; sometimes he feels asleep while he's peering wide-eyed through the abyss. The pulsing headache that accompanies dehydration usually helps him reorient himself, but it can only do so much.
How frustrating it is, to want to live and die in the same breath.
Time marches not forward, but sideways, and he is dragged along with it.
He knows he won't die, not anytime soon; Gwi-Ma wouldn't allow something so simple; Jinu will be hungry, he'll be thirsty, he'll dream of the feeling of warm soup running down his chin as he greedily consumes it; he'll recall the taste of human candies invented centuries past his time; he'll wish for a blanket for the chill; more and more days will bleed together; days will become weeks; the pit is one long day, impossibly vast; he hums to himself for company; he misses his tiger and bird; he thinks about Rumi, wonders if she's finally found what she needed; cold, hungry, yearning, sleeping, rinsing to repeat -
And then the melting of days is brought to an abrupt stop by a little voice, calling out from the nothingness.
"Oppa."
It is not the first time he's heard her since tumbling into the pit.
His face contorts as he turns his body away, pressing his cheek and nose into the wall. 'Ignore it,' he thinks. 'She's not real. Just ignore it.' And yet he finds himself slowly turning toward the sounds of a child softly crying. There in the great big heaving shadow of the pit, his sister stands — and as always, his memory fills in every hair on her head, every loose thread on her hanbok, every blemish on her skin.
"You're not real," he rasps. He's apologetic as he says it, though. Always apologetic, even when he knows what's coming. The girl's eyes gleam wetly in response. Her existence looks all wrong in the pit, displaced from the past into the present. It's like the shape of her has been cut out of a photograph and laid on a black funeral shroud.
"You left me behind… Why? Why? You said you wouldn't leave like Appa. You said we'd have a home. All of us, together."
He doesn't remember her name anymore.
Not hers, not his mother's. His father's.
Gwi-Ma had taken those from him a long, long time ago.
"I'm sorry," is all he can think to say. It's not enough.
"I hate you," she spits.
"I know."
"I hate you, I hate you…!"
She's upon him in an impossible instant, her small fists crashing into his face, his shoulders, his chest. Over and over her knuckles thump into him as he lifts his hands up — hands he can't even see in the black void — to try and defend himself, pathetic an attempt that it is. It feels real. It feels like his flesh raises from the abuse, filling with blood beneath the skin. It's all a figment of his mind, but for a harrowing moment he can only feel its violence. She yells, "I hate you! I hope you die! I hope you suffer forever and ever — and I hope it hurts! I hope it hurts — "
Her hands open up, palms smacking him across the mouth, knocking his head sideways as he squeezes his eyes shut. He drops his hands to his sides, then, and accepts it —
There is another series of slaps to his cheek, but softer. Urgent. Not out of anger, but out of a need to refocus his attention.
A hand grips his chin after, and the fingers are too long and firm to be his sister's.
"Jinu. Calm yourself."
That voice.
"... Romance?" he utters. Ah, no. That's not his real name.
It couldn't be him, though. He reaches out through the dark, and palms someone's sharp cheekbone and ear before his hand is knocked away.
"Tch. You've got some nerve, addressing me like we're still bandmates after what you did," Romance growls. As Jinu's mouth drops open in surprise, something cool and solid presses into his bottom lip — and then it tips forward, and cold, earthy water pours past his lips. The immediate comfort it provides stings his eyes as he gropes for the source of the drink; his fingers run across what feels like a flat and solid moon flask, one of the handles broken off, a relic of some long forgotten time. Jinu ravenously gulps down every drop.
"He doesn't watch as much as he used to," Romance, faceless, whispers. "He's more frugal with his power."
Running his tongue over his softened lips, Jinu quietly wishes he could see the other demon. Is he even real? Maybe he's dreaming, awake or otherwise.
"Why are you doing this?" Jinu asks.
The darkness is silent.
Then, so softly, the darkness admits, "I don't know."
When the stillness afterward carries on too long, Jinu blindly reaches out again and only finds empty air.
"What's the matter, Jinu? Come, play for your king."
Curled up against the furry rib cage of a slumbering blue tiger, the demon that Gwi-Ma beckoned peers out through a long curtain of unclean hair. His robes had slowly started bleeding their colors days ago, blackening into cloth that had began to reek of ozone, much like the rest of the demon hoard. When Jinu doesn't move, he is unceremoniously torn away from the tiger's company — and then deposited on his knees near the steps that lead up to Gwi-Ma's altar; he stares in confusion at the familiar battered bipa that lays flat before him.
"A little gift," the fire tells him, so softly, as if a father slipping a present into his son's small hand, "so that you may know what my mercy feels like."
Hesitant, Jinu lifts the bipa into his lap.
It feels lighter than when he was human. More delicate, somehow. As he cradles the instrument he looks around him to find demons spectating with quiet interest. Expectant. Hopeful for a song that will breathe any kind of life into the gloomy world they're trapped in.
Gwi-Ma's tone shifts, impatient. "Well?"
"Thank you," he quickly says. "For your mercy."
The fiery mouth grows larger in its pleasure. "Sing for me. Sing of me."
The bipa feels wrong beneath his positioned claws, but the want to survive presses him to bow his head in concentration. His mind quickly puzzles together a tune, a series of words, all carefully playing upon each other; the king and his supervisors had always admired the speed of his wit as he spun songs from empty spools. Here before Gwi-Ma, his voice finds strength again, the same way it had with his country's leaders. The demons behind him stop speaking as they focus on the nostalgic twang of his lute, and then on his alluring voice as it carries up through the air.
"… There once was a mighty demon king…"
He sings for his new monarch.
On the third verse, his clawed finger severs a string.
Sleep.
Sleep.
Sleep.
Lying in the middle of the pit, shivering, he forces himself back into an uneasy slumber. It's hard to tell whether he's successful sometimes, because a lot of his attempts to rest are simply more of the same — inky blackness behind his eyelids, with the occasional relief of a dream in full color. It's not unlike a man who had gone blind late into his life, waking up and finding himself sightless yet again. His eyes flicker behind his eyelids, but there is no tint nor hue, no liveliness, no dream that takes him away from the pit. Even in his dream, he's still sitting in it, feeling around for something, anything, other than dirt and gravel.
His hands touch the pegs of his bipa where it sits in front of him. Just a dream, he knows. Just a dream.
Hushed voices whisper in the darkness. "Just sing! Sing for us! Sing!"
They chant it over and over, and all he can think is: I don't want to do this anymore.
The dark is too much. Too overbearing, too expansive. It consumes everything in its path. His bipa, the demons, the colorful memories of a world he longs to return to. He fears if he opens his mouth, that darkness will pour into him and drown whatever is left of the mortal man entombed under this skin. It's too much. It's too hard to keep going like this. Why did he ever bother fighting so hard to stay alive in the first place…? All this time amputating the things that had made him a human… and for what? What was the point of surviving for so long? If he had just died with his sister, his mother…
It's all so hopeless.
("That's the funny thing about hope. Nobody else gets to decide if you feel it," Rumi tells him, holding out a fragile threaded bracelet. "That choice belongs to you."
He's frozen by centuries of doubt. But when she moves to leave, his hand desperately rushes to find her wrist.
Not for the hope he sees in the bracelet, but for the hope he desperately needs from her.)
A soft inhale is drawn.
He's awake, but he's also not sure if he is.
("Why does it feel right every time I let you in?" Rumi looks back at him, singing around a small smile. "Why does it feel like I can tell you anything?")
Staring up at nothing — an unending void above him, a cold floor beneath him — he curls his fingers around the phantom memory of Rumi's hand in his. His lips tremble as they find the shapes of comforting words in the dark. The voice that leaves him is rough from disuse at first, but slowly gains strength as he croons:
"We can't fix it if we never face it… what if we find a way to escape it?"
And voice growing even stronger still, he tips his chin back and drags out word after harmonious word.
"We could be free — Free…"
Rumi's voice echoes all around him, quiet at first, then gaining power. It's just a ghost, he thinks, a hallucination like his sister or Romance. Rumi had certainly not been left out of his delusions, either.
He finds he doesn't care. It doesn't matter. Not now.
Their voices harmonize in shared passion — shared desperation — and even though he knows none of this can be real, he feels warmth blooming in his chest.
For a single, beautiful moment, everything melts away.
"We can't fix it if we never face it… let the past be the past 'til it's weightless."
Chapter 6
Summary:
Before she can so much as register the stage she's standing on, Jinu is wrapping one arm around her waist and pulling her in. She recognizes the choreography from a few years ago — a sort of western tango intermingled with dance pop, light and easy. As muscle memory takes over, she looks up at him and tries to parse what's happening; much like most dreams, she doesn't recall what is and isn't reality.
"Wh — what are we doing?!"
"A collaboration," he says back.
Notes:
No big warnings in this chapter, but things are shaping up towards bigger and better things.
Thank you guys again for the warm reception, it's been a while since I've been engrossed in telling a story through fanfic. ♥
Mostly beta'd, I'll be fixing any little errors here and there as I stupidly notice them.
Chapter Text
There on the floor of her bedroom, listening to the otherworldly sound of Jinu's voice as it fills the space around her, Rumi sings her heart out.
His brittle but lilting words seep through the very walls of the penthouse — no, not just the walls. They beckon from beneath her, even this far from the earth, in the great height of their home. Beneath the legs she'd collapsed onto, she feels gentle reverberations that shake the Honmoon as though they were shimmering guitar strings. Her thoughts are racing too quickly to piece together what it means in the heat of the moment; instead, she opens her mouth and joins in their song, her voice fighting against the constriction of adrenaline.
"Let the past be the past 'til it's weightless," her melody offers, soothes, implores.
How can he still be alive? After everything that happened, after being thrown back down into Gwi-Ma's violent swaddle of fire, how? Is she still dreaming, left to plead for the ghost of him to reach through the floorboards, only for her to wake up with regret and longing in her heart? If this is a trick, it's a cruel one. If it's a trick, it isn't a perfect mimicry of the night he'd sang with her.
He sounds so different, she thinks in a panic. He sounds worn down. Trampled.
Her palm presses against the floor in response, and desperation stings her eyes.
She belts, begs him — "So take my hand, it's open…!"
Beyond her flight of delicate notes, she hears his faceless harmony. Supporting her voice. Joining in, clinging to her presence like she is to his. 'I'm here', she wants to scream, 'I can hear you, and I'm here!'
The Golden Honmoon ripples and shifts into iridescent colors around her, like puddles of shimmering oil, glimmering opal that illuminates her in the gloom. And for a fleeting moment, the finely threaded barrier between the two of them feels different. She swears she can hear him more clearly as it shifts, sensing him. A solemn blip on a radar. A vanishing form in a forest, loved and looked for and yet consumed by the fog regardless. One wrong step in the bog, one mistaken branch, and she'll lose him all over again.
So close, and yet so far.
"What if we heal what's broken?"
His voice is faltering, tapering off, and she knocks her fist into the floor with a frustrated cry.
"Jinu! Jinu, where are you? Can you hear me?"
She presses her cheek against the delicate threads of the Honmoon, straining, as if seeking out his heartbeat in the very thing that had spirited him away from her. Nothing. She hears nothing else beyond the thrumming pulse of the building. While the Honmoon under her skin fades back into its golden brilliance, she says more urgently, "Nonono — Please, don't go! Say something…!"
But all that she is left with is a rush of energy and emotion that turns her legs to jelly and leaves her hands trembling. Again, she sings the song — their song in its entirety, praying it will draw him back toward the light, but only she remains. The longer she calls out to silence, the more frightened she is that he was never there in the first place.
The muscles in her neck tense at a knock on her bedroom door.
Wide, glossy eyes slowly turn toward a shadow lingering in front of the narrow, frosted window on her door.
"… Rumi?" Zoey's soft calls out, hesitant.
'Don't panic', she thinks, and then finds a familiar mantra to cling to, 'Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay calm…' She quickly gets to her feet, rushes to collect a robe that she'd draped across her chair, and drags it over the patterns on her arms before she ties it at the waist. Frantic hands smooth back her hair and scrub at her eyes as her footfalls pad across a completely ordinary wooden floor.
"Ah, one second…!"
As she opens the door, she's met with Zoey and her wringing hands. She's in the pair of sweats covered in cat-themed patterns — Rumi had bought those for her two birthdays ago, she remembers — and has clearly been sleeping for at least some part of the night. Her freckles are starker against her washed skin and her hair is curling more wildly in places a pillow had villainized. Rumi tries not heave any of her anxious breaths and smiles. Maybe a little too wide. She knows she has to look frazzled, if not flushed in the face.
"Oh, sorry. Did I… wake you up?"
Zoey wastes no time in explaining herself in a big, bloated rush. "No! Well, actually, I forgot to bring a drink to my room with me, and I had really bad cottonmouth, so I figured I'd get something from the kitchen, but then I heard you… singing? Like, really singing. The kind of singing you usually do in a booth or on a stage, only you're doing it in the… middle of the night, which is totally fine and all, but it's not usually how you do things, so…!"
The smile Rumi wears is forced, but perhaps a little more genuine as she watches Zoey ramble.
"I know, um." She sucks in her bottom lip, happily allowing her waning hysterics to be mistaken for embarrassment. "This is so stupid, but — I had this idea for a song, and I really needed to get it out. I just need to nail it and put it to paper."
"Yeah, you were really going for it." There's an awkward swing in Zoey's tone, like maybe she's not quite sure what to make of what she'd heard. And what was it that she heard? The thought puts Rumi on edge, and she gulps at the itch that she feels crawling slowly down her arms, her thighs. She tries not to think of what that usually means.
"How, um. How much of that did you hear?"
"The last few minutes," she admits, sheepish. She presses a hand to her chest as she looks for the right words. "The lyrics were really… sincere, and tender. Like, I could really feel them resonating with you, and it made them resonate with me, you know?"
Rumi doesn't know what to say to that. She'd been hiding those moments stolen away in the night, keeping the duet under lock in key in her memories. Not for the first time in her life, she wants nothing more than to throw her arms around Zoey, to explain the marks beneath her clothes — and now, to scream from the rooftops that a demon took her hand in his and looked at her in ways that she could never see herself. And in that moment, everything had felt so right. Felt good. The sky had never felt so endless and full of possibility, a happy future just outside of their reach.
When she thinks of the shape of his profile and the peaceful smile he wore, her heart shakes. She'd spent her life focusing so intently on her duties to both hunt and hide, the concept of falling in love had sounded both unimportant and fake.
Zoey, she wants to tell her, so badly, I think I fell in love with someone.
"I've had a lot of inspiration lately," is what she says instead. An understatement, she thinks.
Zoey assesses her for a moment before nodding and smiling more genuinely — if she's suspicious of anything, she's more than happy to abandon those concerns for something kinder, more palatable. She never was one for entertaining the worst. "I'm glad! You seem like you really got a fire lit under you the last few weeks. And your voice has sounded really healthy and strong." With the sharp of her elbow, she nudges Rumi's arm, leaving the slight ache of eager friendship. It soothes Rumi's nerves, if even a little. "See? I told you those tonics were legit."
Right, the tonics. The tonics she'd drank as unhelpful snacks.
The grape juice flavor reminded her of when she was a little girl, soothed by those simple pleasures.
"Well, I sure can't deny the results."
Her hand moves to her throat, ghosting along the same path Jinu had the first night she'd met him.
She'd been sleeping in turtlenecks for a while now.
Will the sharp edge of guilt ever dull, she wonders? It's no wonder demons would clamor for the chance to get it wiped away.
"Of course you can't! He's a miracle worker. Just in time for the Idol Awards — and I can definitely get you more if you need it!" She moves to touch a pocket for her phone, only to realize there are no pockets (or phone) on her person. "We've got a lot of rehearsals this week, I mean, so if you ever feel like you need anything else-"
"Oh no. No, no, don't sign me up for any return visits anytime soon. I'm healed and ready to go."
"Okay, if you say so. But the offer is still always there. Just don't overdo it! Especially with this late-night practice." Reaching out, she gives Rumi's arm a soft squeeze. "Besides, Mira and I want to hear you messing around, too! You know we love to listen to you brainstorming."
"Okay, okay," she relents. "Sorry again for racket."
"It's fine! We're hunters, remember? Our inspiration can be a little noisy. I like the noise."
And Rumi likes how confident Zoey is with her noise. Brash and fast and brimming with youthful energy. It had always made her feel more comfortable to create her own commotion. She wishes it were enough tonight to allay the terrible pit in her stomach that she knows will linger long after Zoey goes back to bed.
Her friend turns to shuffle down the hallway once again, but as Rumi steps back and starts to close the door, Zoey reconsiders.
"Hey," she says, "Did you already have backing vocals recorded?"
"Huh?"
"I just thought I heard another voice singing."
And truly, life had continued being busy. Live music shows, practice for year-end festivals, charity events, fan-signings. She feels like she has to thank Bobby with a thousand deep bows for the distractions he's inadvertently provided her. Not that it keeps her mind from racing when she's left to herself. One night she'd thought she'd never hear from Jinu again, and the next he's so tangible that even Zoey had noticed his presence. She isn't crazy then… right? He's really out there, below the surface of the human realm, enduring god only knows what. And here she is, powerless to do anything for him.
Radio interviews. Powerless.
Surprise meetings at conventions. Powerless.
Watching Golden continue to hold sway at the top of the charts. Powerless.
Their music is doing incredibly well, and despite everything, the handful of song concepts they're waffling on are pretty strong. The duet Zoey had heard that night isn't brought up again — maybe because Zoey senses something too sensitive in the space rumi saves for its lyrics. Maybe she thinks Rumi will reveal a demo, as she's done in the past; she wasn't as strong a lyricist, but it wouldn't be the first time she's locked herself in her room and suddenly reppeared with a new beat or verse.
The night Jinu had sang with her isn't the only attempt she makes at reaching him. She's just more cautious now when she does it, waiting until Zoey and Mira are indisposed with their own personal ventures before she sings to her floor like a completely insane person. Most of the time, she sings a one-sided duet, though there's frustrated moments where she just curses him instead for being a fickle jerk who makes her worry like this. At one point, she mockingly starts singing Soda Pop, and it ends up a wholly sincere attempt of reaching him by the end.
And then, there's the dreams.
Strange, fractured dreams. Hybrid beasts that consist of her faults and fears, of course — she's had plenty of nightmares about her problems over the years, none too kind to herself — but intermingled with her usual psychological mess is the haphazard and oftentimes abrupt appearance of Jinu. At first she'd chocked it up to lingering regrets and words left unspoken between them. But the more she revisits sleep, the more substantial the dreams feel. As busy days shift into quiet nights, she finds herself both dreading and looking forward to sleep.
Tonight is no exception.
Before she can so much as register the stage she's standing on, Jinu is wrapping one arm around her waist and pulling her in. She recognizes the choreography from a few years ago — a sort of western tango intermingled with dance pop, light and easy. As muscle memory takes over, she looks up at him and tries to parse what's happening; much like most dreams, she doesn't recall what is and isn't reality.
"Wh — what are we doing?!"
"A collaboration," he says back.
As they move across the stage in practiced, smooth motions, she catches glimpses of the excited crowds down below. A squeak of shock catches in her throat when she realizes some of those shrieking fans have horns and tusks and glowing eyes. Demons and humans intermingle beside one another and wave their wands — Saja Boys and Huntrix logos, mixed in equal signs of adoration.
"I don't remember Bobby booking this," she says, but clings more tightly to his hand and bicep. "What happened to your face?"
She wants to reach up and touch angry, half-healed scabs on his cheek. But they can't disappoint the fans.
"I can't remember right now," Jinu pants. She doesn't feel like she's breaking a sweat, but she can see the gleam of it on his brow as he starts struggling to keep up with her pointed steps. He says in a teasing voice, "It's nice that you're worried."
"Me, worried? About you? Keep dreaming, loverboy," she huffs, turning red. Something about his voice…
"I am. It's a nice one too." At the sight of her puzzled brow, he elaborates. "The dream. Hallucination? Whichever."
His hand is big in hers, but also sharper than she remembers. His neck looks thinner. Something in her mind clicks.
"Where are you?" she whispers. "How can I help you?"
"You can't," he breathes, and sounds frustratingly content with himself. Like he's dancing through a high he doesn't want sobered. "But I like that you want to."
At the end of her twirl, he releases her, and — ever the professional — she hits her pose. Her gaze catches another full view of the audience then. An over-eager demon with one eye and thick bloodred lips beams up at them and waves his wand before vanishing straight down through the stadium. There one moment, gone beneath the ever-turning wheels of the Honmoon the next. A water demon waves a homemade sign covered in glitter just before tumbling past a sea of human ankles. One by one, the colorful horned heads bob and fall away, and the crowd gets just a little quieter for every voice that is suddenly silenced.
Jinu stands in front of her on the long walkway, expecting something, and she realizes his idol outfit has become tattered and dirty.
Or had it been like that all this time?
She sucks in a breath when she realizes what he's waiting for, while the crowd thins on either side of them.
"Don't," she demands him.
Jinu shrugs helplessly before he's pulled through the stage floor.
When Rumi wakes up with a start, it only takes her a few minutes to calm herself before her focus pivots immediately.
Because maybe if she can't reach him in song, then sleep will have to do.
Chapter 7
Summary:
Heat burns up Rumi's neck. "You don't have to do anything. I'm not your burden!"
Mira's arms fan out beside her, parroting the frustration in her voice. "No, you're our friend. And friends are supposed to look out for each other."
The patterns under her outfit start to itch, and she digs her nails into her palms. "I just need time. There's so much to process."
Notes:
An awkward interaction, a rough interaction, and a kind of sweet one.
Sorry for any typos initially. Again, mostly beta'd, but a few spots I need to refine!
Chapter Text
Enveloped in a thin veil of fog, Rumi sinks into a sweltering body of bathhouse water and sighs deeply.
She's sat in heated baths before, sure, but nothing like this. It feels like every knot in her body is coming undone, from the joints in her toes to the aching buttons at the base of her spine. It's like an ointment applied to early two decades of tension. Not a cure, but a treatment to relieve some of the itch.
Her thoughts echo what she's been told time and time again by her bandmates: 'you should have done this aaages ago'. It's times like these that she laments what the patterns across her skin have taken from her; she'd love nothing more than for Zoey and Mira to be here, to giggle over anything or nothing, to talk future plans. That was supposed to be the big step forward for them now, wasn't it? Their futures, what they plan to do once the Honmoon was completely sealed, what a world without worrying about demons looks like to them…
But for now, this will have to do.
In all honesty, she's not sure when or how she got to the bathhouse, and if there's something she had been meaning to accomplish, she's all but forgotten about it in her haze of relaxation. Time has been kind of difficult to track day to day, and she'd been so caught up in the complex web she'd weaved hiding parts of herself from the world…
Maybe this is just what she needs to recharge and get her head on straight.
With that thought as an ample enough excuse, her eyes slide shut with ecstasy and she rests.
Peace.
While she stares at the darkness swimming behind her eyelids, she hears and feels the water ripple as it's displaced by the sudden but calm arrival of another body.
A deep voice breaks through her tranquility almost immediately, offering only this:
"Uhm."
Like a beartrap, her eyes snap open.
Mimicking an unmoving statue, a very dazed Jinu sits on the opposite side of the large rounded tub, arms stiff at his sides as they vanish under the water. He's still fully dressed from head to toe, down to the golden chain he’d worn as a Saja Boy. His plaid button-up shirt clings to his wet skin and his hair hangs in limp, sodden locks across his forehead. Some small part of Rumi's brain is reminded of the stare he'd given her when he held up her Save the Date invitation: deadpan and earnestly lost, with a searching gaze and mouth parted.
But the bigger part of her brain remembers that she's naked just feet away from him, and that realization cancels out any other rational thought.
Her response is delayed, but brutal.
"Get out, you sicko!"
Her hand fumbles for the bamboo handle of a shower brush and wields it like her sword, just before she proceeds to start smacking it into Jinu's head with swift vengeance. To his credit, he'd tried to turn away from her before the onslaught of attacks — but it was no use, and all he could do was lift his arms over his head and scramble to escape her mortified wrath. He says a few words, though she doesn't quite register them in the heat of the moment.
Things like 'ow, wait' or 'why me', mostly.
The wood makes one last satisfactory noise on the crown of his skull just before his palms slip on the lip of the tub. Then he flips ungracefully over the wall with a yell, flinging hot water off flailing legs and waterlogged jeans. Rumi doesn't get the satisfaction of looking over the edge and seeing him in a bent-up pile on the bathhouse floor —
Because she's suddenly jerking awake in her bed.
No bathhouse, no Jinu — back in reality.
Oh no.
As it turns out, controlling the logistics of your own dreams is really cumbersome. The first and most difficult hurdle is awareness. Knowing you're in a dream in order to control its nonsensical flow. After numerous attempts to reach out to Jinu through nap after nap and night after night, she had finally found him… and then had walloped him into submission with a scrub brush. Lying in her bed, covering her red face with her hands, she prays that she had completely made up Jinu's existence in this one very particular dream.
There's no point in lingering on it too long, even though she undoubtedly will.
But it does bring up another logistical issue, and that is actually finding Jinu. If he's really there sometimes and she's not just slowly giving in to some kind of madness, it means that there has to be some kind of overlap between him and her. If she's totally honest she didn't even consider that demons did sleep. Then again, she didn't consider almost anything about what life was like beneath the Honmoon. Even during the nights before the Idol Awards where she'd snuck away to spend time with him, he was always skittish about talking about himself, preferring to discuss things about the world that he'd entirely missed out on.
Looking back now… maybe he wasn't allowed to. He always seemed like he had more he wanted to say. She could see the want in his eyes, only for the words to die before they reached his lips.
She just wishes they'd had more time.
The idea that their dreams might be the only way they get more of it fills her with dread.
In the days that follow her embarrassing bathhouse nightmare, she works through her schedule with refined determination. Now that she can hyper-focus on something else, she doesn't have to think about the way her body disturbs her every time she bathes, or the awful feeling of lying through her teeth to friends who had a right to better company. If she can just focus on this new Jinu-shaped puzzle, everything else becomes easier. It's a rush of adrenaline that distracts her from the very real possibility that there is nothing she can do save him. No, no, there is always a solution. It can't just end like this. She had always daydreamed about the permanence of the Golden Honmoon — now she wonders if its perfect shine has unspoken loopholes that won't end in its collapse and damnation of the world.
A hard sale to even herself, if she's honest, but what else can she do?
Maybe if she can do something for him, anything, they can both win. They can both get what they want. Even now.
She can fix this. She can fix something. Doesn't everything have a solution?
"Oh my god, slow down," Mira pants from a distance behind her.
Oh, right.
Rumi skids to a stop on the sidewalk, tugging her hoodie around her face more securely. Their early morning jogs have been helpful to start the day and keep her thoughts sharp and straight like the blade she no longer summons. There's a calmness to the sounds of songbirds and their footfalls as they traverse the chilly path, and while they've never been able to drag Zoey coherently out of bed this early, she thinks maybe the expectance of quieted focus would drive their friend up a wall.
While Mira catches up, Rumi turns her face toward the rising sun and steadies her breaths. She feels patches of sweat cooling beneath the long layers of her leggings and sweatshirt, protective threads that shield everyone else from her truth.
Mira lowers the glasses meant to help conceal her from the public eye, her own face shiny with exertion.
"No way are you getting faster than me! I'm the taller one."
"Looks like you need to up your game," Rumi teases.
"You shouldn't goad me on like that." Mira smirks as she tugs on the brim of her baseball cap. "You know I get serious about challenges."
Oh, Rumi knows. She's pretty sure she still has an indent on her shin where Mira accidentally kicked her during a very aggressively charged game of chukgu in their earlier years together.
They find a railing to lean on that overlooks life below — a little truck bustling across a narrow street here, a nice-smelling food stand opening there. Sometimes a red squirrel would make a run for it up its tree and find some hidden nook. A feeling of calm easily washed over them in moments like these, where they can catch their breath in more ways than one.
Every so often, golden strands would ripple across the land.
She tries not to let her smile falter when it happens; the constant reminder makes her want to pick up speed and run again.
"We should get breakfast," Mira says. "We'll get Zoey's fave, so she can't be mad we picked without her."
Rumi is already starting to walk up the incline of the walkway. Her hand rests over her stomach, which almost seems to gurgle in response.
"You read my mind. All this running's got me famished."
"Perfect. And after this, we're going to talk about where we're going for our break."
Rumi stops, turning toward Mira with a puzzled expression.
"Break?"
"Yep. Two weeks off. Bobby already planned it into our schedule. He'll even water your plants while you're gone, so don't even bring them up. I'm thinking VIP into Lotte World, but negotiations can be made." Despite the beginnings of a frown forming on Rumi's face, Mira presses with faux indifference in her tone, counting off her fingers. "Aquarium, museums, spa days… I might even be willing to tolerate Mickey Mouse if Zoey wants to take a trip to the states; we're not so big a thing over there — which is stupid, because we're awesome — but we wouldn't have to try and blend in as much…"
"But we have so much to do," is the unhelpful response.
"Our workload is literally cut in half now," is Mira's oh so slightly edged response.
Rumi can tell what's going on immediately, even if she wishes she could feign ignorance. Mira's limit on bullshit has always been exponentially low, even if Rumi was an easier exception; she got away with a lot, she knows. More than Mira would allow for literally anyone else in her life. The newly uncomfortable silence is just one step away from an impromptu interrogation. Mira just needed one good reason — or one bad response — to try and cut through the heart of the matter, even if there's blood in the fallout.
Rumi opens her mouth to find some other excuse, but Mira shortcuts a predictable conversation.
"Okay, look, I'm not trying to be mean here — you know I'm not. You've been weird since we sealed the Honmoon. Like, more than before the Idol Awards. We've tried to find a way to talk to you about it, but you keep changing the subject, or just saying what we want to hear to get us off your back."
"I'm not being weird!"
"You're being a lot of things! And I know Zoey won't bring it up to you, so if she won't then I have to."
Heat burns up Rumi's neck. "You don't have to do anything. I'm not your burden!"
Mira's arms fan out beside her, parroting the frustration in her voice. "No, you're our friend. And friends are supposed to look out for each other."
The patterns under her outfit start to itch, and she digs her nails into her palms. "I just need time. There's so much to process."
"Then process it with us. Stop shutting us out of whatever's going on with you." And there it is. Beneath the resentment of Rumi's increased isolation, a dangerously vulernable sense of distress bubbles up. "When you're not focused on work you're sleeping, and you don't join us at dinner as much. And any time we try to plan something with you, you keep finding a way out of it. Sometimes Zoey and I feel like we're a duo. Do you even see us as friends, or are we just workmates to walk away from now that our job is done?"
The words are like barbed wire; they burrows into Rumi as she attempts to crawl over them — and to no avail. She can't find any honest words that would make it all better, can't feel anything but a pang of panic and regret and guilt. She thought she had been hiding it all with some measure of talent; after all, that was what she was good at. Hiding her faults and burying those fears to only dug up when night fell and she was alone in her room. But what can she do? What can she say? She can feel Celine's fingers on her sleeves, tugging them down, reminding her that it would only sow seeds of division between them. Make them wonder. Make them question things that shouldn't be questioned.
Now that the Honmoon is sealed… all she can think is that she's lied to them the entire time she's ever known them. There's no room for truth anymore. Not about these. Not when it has been a barrier between them all this time. How angry will they be, when they know she's never once fully trusted them? Despite how much she loves them? All of this effort, and all it has given her are confusing dreams and friends who feel like they're being slowly abandoned.
Mira must see something in Rumi's eyes. Maybe in the way they can't meet her gaze for long.
Whatever it is, it makes her tone soften. "It feels like you're — just drifting away, and nothing we do is helping."
"I'm… I'm not. I promise," she says, and her voice wobbles despite her attempts to keep it even. "You and Zoey are my best friends. I'd do anything for you guys. You have to believe me."
Mira's eyes widen before she folds her arms almost protectively across her chest. She glances away. Like old sour milk, her doggedness curdles. "I know," Mira mumbles, and then crosses the path to wrap her arms around Rumi. Rumi melts into her grasp and manages to keep the heat in her eyes from building. "I know. I didn't mean — I don't know why I said that. We're family. Always. I'm just… I don't want to lose any of this. You and Zoey, you're what matters."
Rumi understands. She really, really does.
She couldn't afford to lose anyone else in her life, either.
Rumi explains the situation between her and the girls, and Jinu offers, "Ahhh. That's rough."
Not remotely helpful, but she hadn't really expecting miracle work for a situation like this.
She watches him from the corner of her eye while she jots her autograph across a freshly printed Huntrix poster. There are stacks of them taller than her head, and Jinu's side of their crampled table isn't fairing much better. He pens his own signature across the corner of a glamor shot — he's giving an extremely cheesy smile to the camera in it — and then proceeds to toss the print away from him. It fights gravity in a series of flips before landing on the huge pile accumulating across the concrete floor. Rumi tosses hers away from her too.
Posters and printed headshots carpet every inch of the huge warehouse their table sits in. If she looks down under her shoes, she knows she'll find illustrated versions of herself striking a pose alongside her bandmates. One of her boots sits on Jinu's poster, and she shuffles it away, feeling guilty for scuffing his perfectly symmetrical nose.
"We've been… having more and more arguments, the last year or so," she admits.
Jinu assesses her for a moment. Then scrawls another signature in sharpie.
"You're hiding your true self," he reminds her. His voice is hoarse, and she can't quite place why that is. She feels like she should know, and maybe if she lingers on it long enough a lightbulb will go off. "People who care about you are bound to feel helpless about it. That's just what it means to love someone else."
… Helpless.
Helpless!
The lightbulb goes off faster than she anticipated. She processes the man sitting beside her as if it's the first time she's noticed. Her hands slam onto the table and she sounds off his name like an alarm. "Jinu!"
He winces, rubbing his ear. Oops.
"Yeah?"
Embarrassed immediately, she turns back to her work, signing with more urgency. "Never mind. I have things I have to ask you."
"But I was enjoying being your voice of reason," he grouses.
She lowers her pen and turns to scowl at him, because this is important, but her expression immediately softens. The hill of his shoulder looks smaller, and there's far too much depth to the collarbone that juts out from under his pink shirt. His cheekbones seem to collect more shadows. The rounded sockets of his eyes, too. It's been well over a month now since she'd last seen him in the flesh, and now that flesh seems to wither more with every new reunion.
Remorse sours the contents of her stomach. What the hell is wrong with her? She'd been sitting her for how long, rambling about the difficulties in her life, with her friendships — all while he's sitting here looking like this. She wants to reach out and run her hands across the thin wrist sitting beside her, but all she can seem to do is turn back toward the printed posters and resume her work.
"Where are you?" she asks again, not for the first time, and probably not the last. "Please. Just talk to me."
"Why does it have to be questions like that? Always questions. Why not just let me enjoy your company?"
"Because you're in trouble." She struggles for what else to say. "And I have to… do something."
Insufferably, his brow pinches.
"Like what? Seriously, I'm being genuine here. What can you possibly do?"
"I don't know! I don't know, okay? But it doesn't mean we should give up."
"… This is ridiculous. You're not even real, Rumi." He sighs, casting his frown toward his one of his many untouched posters. He begins to absently scribble a mustache on the picture's upper lip, then slides it off the table and onto the floor. "Nothing is, not down here." On the next glamor shot, he draws two devilish horns on top of his raven head of hair. Shoves it away, and it falls facedown on the ground.
"Down where?"
"You know where. You've seen it. We've talked there."
Crestfallen, she says, "I can't remember it."
"Good. Don't." He draws inky black patterns, not unlike his own, on the next face. He looks stressed at the very thought of introducing her to whatever cage he's been — maybe literally — crammed into. "It's over. Go live your life. Go on those trips with your friends, and find some kind of happiness past… all of this. The story couldn't have ended any other way for me, but you — you're half human. The only person in control of you is yourself, so don't squander that. I think I've caused enough trouble in my tenure as a demon, so if there's even a sliver of a chance you're real? Then do me a favor, and don't cause yourself anymore problems on my behalf."
She hears him. She does. But…
"But it's not fair," she breathes. Stubborn.
"That's life, he replies. Firm.
And so stupidly sure of himself. It makes her want to reach over and knock him upside the head, but she allows him room to speak, room to process whatever awful situation he's having a momentary escape from. She hates that he looks at peace when he says, "I'm just happy that whatever time I've got left, I get to spend some of it with you. Or, well. A version of you, I guess."
"Where are you," she demands, more desperately, because time is a limited resource. Even in a dream.
"Where I'm meant to be."
Her hackles rise toward him — for him. She can feel the brittle plastic of the pen in her hand bow as she squeezes it. "You know that's not true. You still sing it. Our song. You know what it meant for the both of us and you still sing it, and it reached me. And the Honmoon, it reacted to it — and it changed. That has to mean something."
As she fights him on it, she can see the slightest shift within him. He's got this way his eyebrows furrow when he's reconsidering, processing, trying to make sense of the mess left around him. That's all she can hope for this time, she thinks. She just needs to know that he's willing to give it a try: to keep surviving, no matter the odds, and believe there might be something beyond whatever hole he's tumbled down into. The look he gives the table reminds her of when that little girl had given him her drawing. She thinks of the wings he had been donning, the message that had rattled him.
He looked like a deer in the headlights when everyone had cheered back then.
"Man, you were such a jerk when we first met," she reminiscences with a smile. Looking around this hollowed out dreamscape, she can picture it now: fans all eagerly awaiting their chance in line… and then a stupid, punchable face staring at her from the inside of an upright sleeping bag. If she hadn't been so brimming with the desire to behead him then and there, it would've been a lot funnier. She snorts. "I can't believe you camped out overnight at a fan-signing event just to bait us."
"My levels of petty know no bounds," he chuckles.
As he turns to look at her, his gaze catches on her arms, and he sucks in a startled breath. "Rumi — "
Pressed against the table, the tip of her pen snaps off.
Then she's awake again.
As she sits up in her bed with a groan and a beetled brow, she looks where his worried stare had fallen... and she sucks in her own startled breath.
Her hands. Palms. Fingers.
They were completely overtaken by her patterns.
Chapter 8
Summary:
Gwi-Ma had asked them to bring him souls.
And it is the first and only time Jinu refuses.
When he returns to the demon realm, the pit is his punishment. The length of time he's left down there is nothing in the face of four-hundred years. A drop in the pond.
Notes:
A Jinu-centric chapter, with a new surprise guest. Next chapter will be a mix of Jinu and Rumi, I think.
Thank you guys again for all of the wonderful support! Mostly proofread, but will read again when it's not 4 am.
Chapter Text
"Just do it!" one boy laughs. "I challenge you!"
Another cheonmin child speaks up, "If you won't do it, I'll do it."
Jinu drags the back of his hand across his nose, stuffy with sickness that had started to clear with the coming spring season. His gaze skeptically moves across the faces of the other grimy children as they whoop and holler while some break away from each other to collect rocks or sticks by the riverside.
Then Jinu eyes the grasshopper that twitches helplessly in the other boy's grasp. This creature is bigger than the other insects his father would collect from the fields to prepare and snack on. Its larger legs look barbed and strange, and he loathes to imagine what it would feel like to chew them up. Would the little beast enact its revenge by slicing up the inside of his throat as it went down?
He looks uneasy, even as his stomach clenches hungrily.
"Don't be a baby," the boy says. "You beg for food, too. Right? Just plug your nose and chew."
He's too young to understand exactly why the harvest isn't able to feed people like his family yet; he simply knows that if the bags of barley or millet or rice vanish too quickly in the winter, the start of spring will be full of impatient hunger pangs. Last spring was kinder than this one, and he knows that when he returns home for supper, his chopsticks will scrape the bottom of his bowl too quickly and leave him wanting more.
So, he reaches out and takes the grasshopper in his hand, opens his mouth, and —
"Just open your mouth," the demon says. "Our powers do the rest. Do it, and don't think. It's a natural feeling."
"It's evil."
Jinu's voice nearly cracks on the word.
The demons that have wandered up the mountain path are mostly jovial, though there are a number of them scattered throughout that keep their gaze downcast and their shoulders low — those are mostly people who were once human. Many naturally born demons joke that they aren't broken in just yet. Jinu was one of them, freshly turned, watching the one-eyed demon that walked alongside him with a haunted stare. The creature just sighs, flashing crooked teeth bookmarked between rounded tusks.
"It's what you have to do to survive. If Gwi-Ma starves, we starve. We die."
"We'd deserve it," Jinu hisses, fingers digging into his shoulders as he self-soothes. Voices that aren't his own bounce around his head, triggering memories that sometimes stagger his footsteps. Gwi-Ma had left him to wander in this state for some years now, summoned only to play him music when he saw fit; now it seems his leniency has run thin.
The black robes of his outfit flutter behind him when a chilly breeze runs down the mountainside. Not far above them is the flat peak, where the Honmoon is ripped open like an angry red wound. It is their entryway to the human realm for now, until the Hunters mend it back together and they're forced to start from square one. If he's honest, all he wants is to clamor out of that hole and finally see the land of the living again. Maybe he could try to find his family; maybe he could run and somehow stay ahead of Gwi-Ma's grasp. All pitifully wishful thinking, but it's all he really has left to hold onto beyond a worn bipa.
"Living things eat other living things to survive all the time," the demon grumbles at him. "It's just how it is. It's how it's always been. It's not like we have anything down here to eat, huh?"
Jinu's stomach gurgles, much to his disdain.
Nothing grows in the demon realm. Seeds don't take to the soil. And even if they did, the sun doesn't reach them.
"And if you don't do it, Gwi-Ma'll punish you," another demon adds. She hefts her club across her shoulder and looks unimpressed by the way Jinu halfheartedly glowers at her. "You don't want to know what he'll do to you if you're stupid enough to refuse him."
As they reach the summit, they begin to crawl through the jagged portal like worker ants. Their claws scratch and stretch and force the Honmoon's injury wider — and soon Jinu crawls through as well, golden eyes radiating light through the darkness that temporarily blankets him. It's almost like burrowing out from a grave, he thinks. He feels his foot press off someone else's shoulder. Another demon hits him with the sharp edge of their elbow. Eventually, the flow of the monsters in front and behind his body carry him whether he wants to ascend or not. As he presses his claws forward, he feels the Honmoon give way to open air. Fresh air.
He's uncoordinated the first time he rises into the human world. He doesn't levitate like the others. Instead he drags himself out as if the walking dead and stares up at a tangerine sunset, his mouth hanging open in awe. It's been years — years since he has seen the sun, and though its heat is too far away now to wash over his purple skin, it warms something frigid inside him regardless. It would be foolish to turn his back to his king right now, but he finds he's too desperate for the past to do anything else.
He wanders away from the hoard, sits down on the bank of a gently running river, and spreads his fingers over the wet grass and smooth pebble beneath him. Insects fly and jump while birds flutter and sing in the trees, beckoning nightfall to curtain the world in that same ugly darkness he'd learned to live with down below.
In the sleepy village behind him, someone cries out in fear.
When the screams of frightened humans begin to stack over one another, he curls in on himself — and like a helpless coward, he waits for the violence to pass.
Gwi-Ma had asked them to bring him souls.
And it is the first and only time Jinu refuses.
When he returns to the demon realm, the pit is his punishment. The length of time he's left down there is nothing in the face of four-hundred years. A drop in the pond.
But it is enough.
'Do it, Gwi-Ma whispers. 'It will feel wonderful. You'll see.'
Leaned over the edge of an old man's futon, Jinu opens his mouth and breathes in his life.
It shouldn't feel so natural, the way the soul slithers out of the sleeping body and over bruise-colored lips. It is not like eating a living grasshopper; the soul doesn't twitch and kick, doesn't scratch down his throat as it writhes to its final resting place. It instead glides past his teeth and into his stomach as smoothly as honey — and just as sweet, like the desserts stacked in colorful piles at the palace banquets. And for the first time in a long time, he feels satiated. His stomach feels bloated with fullness, while his eyes close and he cherishes the comfort it provides.
When he comes back to his senses again, he has to wipe a smile from his face. The bedding he sits beside is empty, Gwi-Ma is laughing, and the old man is gone.
To his horror, the honey-sweet aftertaste continues to exist for some time later, until the guilt and shame finally washes his mouth out like soap.
Down in the pit, it's easy to get lost in sobering recollections of the past.
All Jinu really has is himself and the memories that either plague him or pick him up — and dreams on occasion. Lately he has tried to be asleep more than awake, especially when the voices or visions try to rattle him with more tenacity. Sometimes he has nightmares anyway, but it feels worthwhile when those storm clouds clear and leave pleasant dreams with Rumi instead. She had been in them more and more frequently, teasing him and distracting him with details of her life. On occasion she knocks him upside the head or asks him far too many questions, but he doesn't mind for the most part, even if he struggles to avoid false hope.
The awful thing is, she's starting to convince him she is real.
If he entertains the thought, it still wouldn't matter. The Honmoon made its choice, one that he was stupid enough to think could be anything other than a one-way trip back into the demon world. Rumi had been spared, the realm full of soul-snatchers was guillotined from their food supply, and humans were finally safe. And as selfish as Jinu was to seek out redemption after all he'd done, he knew this was as good an end as they could have gotten in a world where nothing was really all that fair.
The hunter saved the world. The demon got his comeuppance.
Somewhere in the pit's belly, a familiar voice speaks up.
"Well, it's definitely not the most comfy apartment I've seen," Rumi says, then awkwardly chuckles.
Jinu is unable to see her through the dark, but he imagines the sight of her sitting on the other side of this bleak chasm. He's mostly sure that he's not dreaming this time; he imagines this version of her is just another illusion conjured by his laboring brain, much like Romance and his whispers to Jinu in the dark over flasks of gritty water.
"Ah, well," he sighs, licking his chapped lips. "I wouldn't know. I've never rented an apartment before."
"Actually, I haven't either," she admits. His nose wrinkles as he chuckles.
"Born with a silver spoon."
"Hey, I'm not about to complain," she shoots back, a smile in her tone.
They sit together in the silence for a while before he finally speaks up again. Some part of him wonders if he should even ask or if he should just play dumb, but something about it feels disrespectful to the living, breathing Rumi existing out there in the world.
"Are you actually here?"
"… No," she admits. "Sorry."
She so sounds apologetic for someone who isn't real. Jinu leans his head back.
"It's fine. I thought so."
"It's really not," she says, and he hears her boots crunch on rock as she rises to her feet. "You need to eat."
He scoffs at the very idea. "I don't think that's happening any time soon."
"No, you need to eat," she says again, more firmly. Her assured footfalls echo closer before hands reach out and grab him under the armpits, hoisting him upright onto his feet. Jinu reels a little at the contact, eyes widening in the dark as he realizes the hands on him are too wide to be Rumi's. Jinu reaches out and finds a flat, firm chest and broad shoulders. Someone who isn't Rumi says, "Open up."
A blue glow materializes in front of Jinu's face that nearly blinds him after so many weeks in pitch darkness. At first he can't comprehend what he's seeing; he shields his pinpointing pupils with one raised hand as he wars between excited and panicked.
Beyond the beautiful bulb of expanding light, he can make out the shape of familiar eyebrows. A strong nose, a sharp jaw. Abby has a tense, determined expression as he stands in front of Jinu and attempts to feed him a human soul like he's some kind of demented baby bird. The soul slithers snake-like toward his face as all-consuming hunger begs him to open his mouth and accept the offering—
Instead, he slams his mouth shut and shoves Abby away. As the demon staggers backward into the darkness with a grunt, all at once the blue light vanishes back down his throat. Staying flush against the wall, Jinu's mouth becomes a rictus of revulsion, fingers curled into the rock under his palms. He watches the dark before him warily, his heart pounding and half-naked body prickling with sweat.
"What — what the hell?!" Abby says in the darkness. He sounds completely dumbfounded. "What's the matter with you? Do you want to die down here?!"
"How are you…" Jinu starts, then shakes his head. "No, you're not real."
"Romance was right," comes the exasperated reply, followed by an equally exasperated sigh. "You're already deep in it. I don't have time for this crap, so just take the soul before you actually starve down here."
Such a concept punches a skeptical laugh from him.
"Gwi-Ma wouldn't let anyone off that easy."
Abby's voice darkens, stormy in its unhappiness. "You don't get it, do you? He's not going to keep you alive. He's barely keeping everyone else fed." Jinu keeps his lips pressed tightly together as Abby comes closer again, though there is no return of the beautiful blue soul; he wonders who it used to belong to. "And sooner than later, we're all going to be the ones feeding him."
Jinu can picture it. He can see Gwi-Ma's shrinking flame with its opened maw, breaking demons down and inhaling their essence like cigarette smoke. What he can't picture is Abby's reason for being here, if he's truly here at all. He remembers how the demon had looked at him, when he was getting dragged away from Gwi-Ma's front steps. His face had been twisted up with fury alight in his eyes. There was no denying it, so-
"Why are you telling me this? I'm the reason this is happening in the first place. I helped them seal the Honmoon."
"Yeah, and I'd smash your stupid face in if you weren't so pitiful looking," Abby hisses. Jinu doesn't want to imagine what he looks like, even under the temporary light of a rejected soul. Abby just lingers, and while he can't see it, Jinu can practically sense the man fold his oversized arms over his chest. "We had a good thing going. I can't believe you threw it all away like that."
"What can I say? I'm full of surprises."
"Yeah, well, surprises aren't gonna keep you alive." The voice shifts closer, attempting some urgency once again. "Hurry up and eat-"
"No," Jinu interrupts, firm.
"Why?"
Ah, the ultimate question to a demon. Fighting what they were was a fruitless venture. Jinu had learned that centuries ago, and yet he'd clung to some small sliver of humanity — and Rumi had saw through to it, somehow, some way. He can see her now, gentle but firm, unafraid to cut away the rotten bits of him and find whatever was salvageable beneath. He thinks about the way she'd looked at him in his dreams, her eyes gleaming with concern.
"… Things are different. I want to be different."
"Different? It's way too late for that," Abby spits back. "You're a murderer, man. A killer like the rest of us. Do you really think feeling bad now is going to undo all of that? What, a girl batted her eyelashes at you and now you're suddenly high and mighty? It's because of her that you're turning into a glorified skeleton stuck down here."
"I'm pretty sure Gwi-Ma's the reason I'm here," is Jinu's annoyingly calm reply.
Abby presses a breath through his teeth in annoyance.
Despite this, there's less bite left in him.
"I can't… stay much longer. He'll be calling for us. Checking into our heads."
Jinu feels his something drop in his stomach, heavy as an anvil. He had suddenly had someone else near him, someone tangible, and soon they'll be gone again. It had been an insane risk for Abby to even be down here in the first place; Gwi-Ma would have never permitted it, and if he knew there was any kind of mercy being offered toward him… He could just imagine his bandmate being consumed in a burst of unforgiving fire.
"Why the risk? Why try to help me? I saw the look on your face before I came here; you despised me."
He slides back down to sit on the cold floor. After a moment of uneasy silence, Jinu senses a body slowly lower onto the ground next to him.
"Yeah, well. I was angry with you. There's a big difference."
"Big enough to gamble your own life by coming down here?"
"… Yeah. 'Cus I like you. I think."
"Oh," is Jinu's unhelpful response. He can't help but wonder what it means; when he'd brought the five of them together, it had only ever meant business. Demons were vengeful, fickle creatures who treated attachments like they were poisonous snakes. More than that, most demons were hollowed out and had stripped themselves of humanity centuries ago, left to be lethargic versions of once brimming personalities.
And yet here they were.
Two idiots sitting in the dark, now familiar with taking reckless actions on behalf of someone else.
As Jinu waits for Abby's inevitable exit, goose-pimpled and trying to push away a phantom taste of honey, a thought crosses his mind that makes his lips twitch with amusement. He asks, "Do you know why I asked you to join the group?"
"Uhhh, no. Don't think so."
"It was 2012 then… Maybe 2013. I was still ironing out my plans and looking for voices that could fit the group I'd had in mind. Everyone was complaining about this jerk in a gat who heard a song from the human world, and he would not stop singing it. Over and over, up the mountains, at the ruins, near the rivers — you were driving them all crazy. But you performed it well enough to impress me. You remember?"
Abby has to think for a moment. But only a moment.
Jinu can imagine the fanged grin flashing next to him.
"Gangnam style?"
And the two of them slowly devolve into boyish laughter, hunched up and giggling like madmen in the dark.
Chapter 9
Summary:
"Your patterns. They really grew, didn't they?"
She looks at her palms, mournful. Grieving what they looked like before, maybe.
"… Yeah. It's spread to almost every part of me now. I avoided Mira and Zoey today as much as I could… wore gloves when I couldn't. Said it was cold in the penthouse."
Notes:
Ooooh boy.
Chapter Text
The first time Jinu had been thrown into the pit, it took years before Gwi-Ma had realized he'd been left down there longer than intended. In fact, he'd only realized when the other bipa player had been slain by hunters, leaving an empty space among his musicians that should have been immediately filled. Jinu had been plucked up out of the pit by his patterns then, dragged across the realm and dropped on his bony knees before Gwi-Ma. He'd been all but dusted off — an old toy pulled out of the basement — as he trembled and struggled to open his eyes against the pulsing light before him.
When asked why he wasn't properly looking upon his king, he could only say in a strained whisper, "you're too bright," and Gwi-Ma had laughed like it was a comedic punchline. Maybe it was a blessing that he'd been thrown into that hole so early into his servitude. He'd like to think it saved him a lot of grief in fighting against the inevitable: he was a demon, he was a possession, and he would obey and do anything to keep from plummeting back into that damp, dark world again. It took him some months to get his head back on straight when he was dragged back into the demon realm but once he did, he corrected his course quickly. He got smart. Sharp. And for that, he reclaimed the fat and muscle on his body and broadened his shoulders. He became Gwi-Ma's favorite musician on call. He collected souls, chose them in ways that lessened the blow to his conscience. Eventually, he could consume a man's spirit without batting an eye. Instead of cowering in the dark, he had taken everything he learned in the palace and used it.
For his efforts, punishments from Gwi-Ma became lesser, divided by a distance of time. The visions and voices had never loosened their choke-hold on him, but his patterns weren't used as often to drag him up the altar of rock. He had an easier time talking his way out of a fire-lashing when things had gone poorly in the human realm. The flashbacks were unceremonious and stole his breath, sure, but the daggers that had sometimes plunged into his mind felt fewer and further between. Someone insane would call it merciful. At times Jinu had certainly felt it was.
It was all an important, never-ending act that he performed. A play with no ending in sight. He learned how to mask centuries of hatred with cool, composed indifference, instead allowing his frustration to boil under the surface in hidden sneers and eye rolls. And while Gwi-Ma had pillaged his soul inside and out, invaded his mind and delighted in the faults he'd found, Jinu had studied Gwi-Ma, too. He learned his mannerisms, ways to cater to his whims, banter that would end in Gwi-Ma's begrudging acceptance instead of annoyance.
He just didn't have to lay siege to Gwi-Ma's mind to do it.
All of that effort to stay one step ahead of the pit… and yet here he is, sitting in this stupid chasm, not sure if what he's experiencing is real or merely conjured by a maddening mind trapped in what feels like nowhere.
He at least knows any appearance by his mother or sister are figments of his imagination. His father is especially obvious — the sound of his voice had been lost over time, and he's had only vague recollections of words spoken to him from his youth instead. Romance still arrives every few days to pour water into his mouth, sometimes wordlessly, sometimes with whispered grievances, and sometimes even hours later he can still feel wet patches on the ground where some of the drink had spilled.
It doesn't make any sense, though. Just like the vision of Abby hadn't made any sense.
Why would they put in effort to unburden him, after what he'd done? They barely knew each other, kept each other at arms length for centuries. They all saw to it personally, as so many other demons had. Forming bonds with one another was a dangerous, awful game, one that he has seen the ending to before — time and time again. It was never pretty. It was never long-lasting.
And yet they tried regardless. He couldn't fathom why, or if he would have done the same in their shoes; if anything, he'd been willing to cling to the human realm while they all sank beneath him under the weight of the Honmoon. Maybe that's why he was shoved back under to begin with. If he hadn't betrayed Rumi, he'd have to betray them. Right? That's just what he accumulates now. Betrayals.
But Abby didn't pummel him into the ground. He could have, with how weak he is now. Romance could have taunted him with the promise of something to wet his lips before stealing it back. But he didn't. Maybe their reason is simply because it's the end of everything they've ever known. Maybe it's because they all desire some closeness just before the realm fades into a silent graveyard without headstones. Maybe it all really meant something to him, and he had been blind to it all along. He rolls those thoughts in his head like pebbles over and over, though he's never sure of their polish.
He's not going to keep you alive, Abby had told him of Gwi-Ma. He's barely keeping everyone else fed.
Jinu had known what awaited all of them, but the reality falling into his lap was difficult to accept.
And ironic, in its own way.
He'd taken a deal to put food in his stomach and had dreamed of grandeur that could fill his family's bellies alongside him. That same cowardice in the face of starvation had left him pulling his hand away from his sister and watching her vanish with their mother. He'd made horrible choices for the allure of food, and now here he was, preparing for yet another great famine.
He wishes he could say there were no demonic voices whispering to him this time, but they're merely easier to ignore.
All except for one voice — Rumi's voice, as she asks with care, "Are you here with me, Jinu?"
She sounds like she's trying not to startle a rabbit.
Blinking, he realizes he's no longer sitting in the dark. He's… not sure where he is, actually. The air is clear though, with the sun shining bright — but not unkind — in a sky brimming with clouds. Long, flowing strips of cloth hang from the branches of sacred trees that surround them in a multicolored spectacle. It's a beautiful place, the kind you'd want to revisit in the summertime as a child. But while he knows he's crawled out of the earth and into moments as gentle and gracious as these, he also finds this particular space foreign.
In front of where he sits cross-legged, there is a lonely gravestone whose ledge has been adorned with small offerings and flowers. Rumi is sitting beside him with a tentative hand on his arm. She watches him with an air of concern as he dazedly looks from the world around them to the name carved into the tombstone.
Mi-yeong Ryu. One of the Sunlight Sisters… Rumi's mother?
He has to clear his throat twice.
"I'm here… I think," he says, but he's baffled. "This isn't somewhere I've been before."
Rumi smiles in relief, something tired in her gaze. "Of course you haven't. I told you, we're in each other's dreams. Um. Mostly mine, I think… I don't really know why we haven't ended up in yours yet." When Jinu stares at her like she has two heads, she sighs deeply, but she keeps her hand on his arm as if it's an anchor. Maybe she worries he'll just float away if she lets go. "This is Jeju Island — or whatever my brain is making it into. I grew up here, trained here, met my friends here… and it's where I visit my mother sometimes."
Ah. His insides twist up at a single word. He tries not to think of his eomma, for fear that this is a shared dream and Rumi will lay witness to his many shames and sins. He waits with bated breath, but no phantoms are siphoned out of him in his moment of weakness. All that happens is a sharp ache and painful longing; he didn't know if his mother was buried, or where. Not that he thought himself worthy of sitting in front of her grave like this.
"She died when you were young, right?" he asks. At her solemn nod, he continues, "It must've been difficult, having only a stone to visit."
"It was. I've always had so many things I wished I could talk to her about. Things to ask her… Celine had told me she would hear anything I had to say, but it wasn't always so easy to believe that."
A question that had lingered in his mind for a while now swims back to the forefront. He hesitates to ask, especially when he looks down and realizes her hands are covered in purple marks now — just like the last time he'd seen her, in that warehouse full of autographs. Daring to dream and hope is a dangerous thing, but he would like so badly for these moments to matter. To mean something outside of himself.
"Your patterns. They really grew, didn't they?"
She looks at her palms, mournful. Grieving what they looked like before, maybe.
"… Yeah. It's spread to almost every part of me now. I avoided Mira and Zoey today as much as I could… wore gloves when I couldn't. Said it was cold in the penthouse."
Then the patterns covered every part of her but her head.
The thought immediately worries him, because she's going to have to tell her friends the truth or suffer the shame of being caught. It's going to be ugly and messy, and it's going to hurt her regardless of how well it goes. He knows, because it's exactly what they were planning to do to her before he'd betrayed the Saja Boys. Reveal her faults, her fears, and watch the yarn unravel…
Telling her the obvious is a fruitless venture, though.
Instead, he rubs his thumb over his wrist bone and considers what he should say instead. Maybe something to divert the topic to something more pleasant — admittedly, an act that isn't wholly unselfish on his part. There are so many things he wants to know about her. Anything. Everything. All of these little details about her could be things that he'll die not knowing… Her favorite foods. Songs she keeps on her playlist. Things she likes to do outside of performing, or movies she'd recommend to an eternally trapped demon.
Rumi speaks before he can ask anything so simple.
"My father was a demon, you know. I never met him. Or… maybe I did, but he wasn't around when I was old enough to remember. "When he hums softly in response, she turns to look at him, leaning into her arched knees. "Did you know?"
"Not exactly. I had a few guesses," he admits. Once you see something as unusual as a demonic hunter, you tend to start letting your imagination run wild. He'd never had a concrete answer, but… "I thought you might've made a deal at first, and it was too much to talk about… Then I wondered — maybe a hunter who made a deal while pregnant? It seemed crazy to imagine a hunter would do that, but then again, so did imagining a human being with a demon."
"It does sound pretty crazy," Rumi admits.
He leans his head forward on his knees, mirroring her.
Then he wryly offers, "The more I talked to you, the more I realized it wasn't that crazy at all."
The blushing look of awe she gives him in return sends a flutter through his stomach.
She's suddenly turning toward him in full, something burning in her eyes.
"I'm going to find a way to get to you." As she speaks, she clutches his sleeve in her hands, desperate but tender. In the wake of such a compelling look, all he can do is breathlessly take her in. "I don't know exactly how yet, but I feel like this has to be a sign. When our voices worked together, the Honmoon shifted into something else; if I can figure out a way to manipulate that, then I can come down there and find you. And get you out."
"Rumi…" he groans, resigned, but she keeps going.
"Don't start talking about moving on with my life, or how you're where you should be. I've heard it enough already." Just how many times have they spoken and he doesn't remember? Dreams are such a messy business. He gives her a frustrated look, brow furrowed deeply, but she presses on. "There are records on Jeju Island. Things about the hunters before us, and how our powers work, how the Honmoon came to be. A lot of that was destroyed over time, but not all of it. And on top of everything I am half-demon, so a part of me should have some connection to your realm-"
"Stop," he says, but she keeps going still.
"-and if you're going to complain about me risking my life for you, then consider this might help me too. Maybe I can find a way to be free from the patterns if you're here with me; you healed my voice, and you… I couldn't have completed the Honmoon without your help. We just need to get you out."
And oh, every fiber of him wants what she says to be true. He wants to throw his hands up in surrender and cry out to whatever god-like thing is out there, to beg and grovel for the chance to survive just a little longer, to have one more opportunity to do better, to prove he's salvageable. He could beg like he had when he was a young, hungry human. Like he had when he was a godforsaken demon wishing he'd never let Gwi-Ma in. Like he had when Rumi had offered him the possibility of change, to be more than a painful blister on the underside of the earth's surface. He would bow low and plead for fate to do something with him, make use of him in any way that could actually matter.
But that has never worked, and with where he is now… he doesn't think he has it in him to cry out for salvation. Not even from Rumi, who is looking at him with such conviction, as if helping him wasn't liable to damn them all over again. As if she knew what he really was, when he had withheld the truth about what he'd done to his family. How low he'd sunk.
He had been so close to turning his back on her that night at the awards. If he had given in to those voices, to all that despair and accepted what he was all along, she would want nothing to do with him right now. He can only look away, disturbed by the thought. "Don't be ridiculous."
"What's ridiculous is that I'm still here and you're not. I told you it would work for us both. I told you that you'd be free on this side of the Honmoon because I trusted it with my whole heart. And then this…" She closes her eyes, looking pained. "I never meant for you to go back down there."
Whatever words Jinu had intended to speak die in this throat. He stares at her as she sits before him, with stray locks of purple hair hanging across her temples, her face flushed and eyes burning with resolve.
Peeling her fingers from his sleeve carefully, he clutches her hand between his own — and then presses her knuckle to his cheek, doleful of the way these dreams dull his sense of touch. Rumi is frozen all the while. He closes his eyes softly and focuses on the shape of her hand where it's clasped between his, but he can feel her stare on him.
"… Say that last part again," he whispers.
She goes deathly quiet, as if not sure what he's asking from her.
But eventually, her voice returns. "I never meant for you to go back."
Something euphoric swells up between his ribs. Something he didn't realize he'd needed to feel until now.
"Say it again. Please."
A hand touches his other cheek as the dream begins to tilt, syrupy slow.
Rumi is firm, desperate for him to believe her when she repeats, "I never meant for you to go back."
He hears the echo of the pit around him, knows that the uncomfortable clench of his stomach is going to rouse him from sleep once again soon. The sun above them is blotted out by stormy clouds while Rumi's voice tries to reach him once more. Again and again, she speaks, but it only comes out an unintelligible warble. He's returning to the dark again, and as the light around him fades he clutches her hand between his until he pulls them back and finds them empty.
Though there's always disappointment when he wakes, he can't help but hold his breath and feel a rush of something different.
Maybe it really was hope. A dangerous, small sliver.
"She meant for me to stay," he says, to no one but himself — the only person who needed to hear it.
The morning after their dream, Rumi starts to prepare a strategy made out of the bare scraps she had left to work with in her head. The first problem was that she was due to go on a trip out of town with Mira and Zoey in a matter of days. Not only did she not have the mental capacity to enjoy this carefully detailed vacation Bobby had helped lay out for them, but she was sure to be found out if she spent any amount of genuine time with the girls. Gloves could only get her so far in a hotel room or at the beach, no matter how chilly the weather.
And from the look of Jinu, she couldn't afford to put off her efforts for even a moment.
The second glaring issue with was that they were supposed to head across Seoul for a fan meet-and-greet tomorrow — followed by a magazine photo shoot, which was yet another nightmarish situation she had to figure out. She had been terrorized by all manner of photography long before her patterns had gotten this bad; more often than not, she would have to dress herself in her own private changing rooms, and both she and Celine were always so careful to include stipulations on her dress code. Some of the clothing designers had wasted no time labeling her as 'woefully difficult'.
Which she was. She was woefully difficult.
And no matter how sorry she was about it, she still couldn't find a solution that made the people around her satisfied. Not then, and especially not now. She's like a fish left on dry land now, flopping and flailing and wishing she had arms to pull herself back into the water. Lying here in bed, she was too aware that time was ticking by with reckless abandon.
She had plans to formulate.
And yet she couldn't bring herself to get out of bed yet. The knots in her stomach and cold sweat on her body felt like illness, but she knew better — knew that it was just anxiety that wanted to burst out of her. It wanted to drag her down to its level and turn her inside out. It wanted her to crash out and lose what little sanity anyone saw in her.
When she inhales, it feels shallow. (Try not to think of Jinu's gaunt face.) When she lifts her hands in front of her eyes, she finds her purple-ringed fingers trembling. (Don't think of Celine's horrified expression when you took your jacket off.) When her body goes hot all over, she shoots up sharply in her sheets. (Don't imagine the hate and fear in Mira and Zoey's eyes when they see what you are.)
No, no. She would not lose it.
Not here. Not now.
(But it's all so much, and she's so tired, and so alone, and she doesn't know what to do next, and-)
Her stomach churns, and she scrambles out of bed to find the toilet.
There, she heaves some of her stress straight into the bowl, but never seems to run out. Like always no matter how much she tries, she can't seem to expel whatever poison has been in her body since she was a little girl.
From inside the safety of the bathroom, Rumi makes a phone call.
"… Yeah, I heard you puking your guts out," Mira says on the phone, but her tone is sympathetic. Lighter than whatever accusation Rumi had feared. "I'm guessing that means no lunch out for you today."
God, Rumi had forgotten.
Their lunch date today. Bobby had booked a really nice place out, too.
"I'm sorry." She feels so small.
"We definitely prefer you resting instead of gagging in front of our fancy sandwiches," Mira insists.
Zoey chimes in with a voice that's more distant compared to Mira's; the call must be on speaker phone. "Hopefully it's just a little bug! If you're still feeling bad later, we'll relax and watch something later to take your mind off it. And… I'll definitely change the scary movie I picked out to something easier to stomach…"
"… Thanks, guys."
At least this time wasn't a boldfaced lie.
She spent the next unpleasant thirty minutes lying on the tiled floor, which feels like it's swiftly becoming a second home. She thinks hard about… a lot of things. Mostly reflecting on how she's not as strong as she should be, how she can't do this, can't handle anymore, wishes she had a plan, hopes for a miracle for her, for Jinu — and then forces herself not to tear up and give in to the fatalism that more than once tries to forfeit her hand. By the time she summons the energy to get back up, her heartbeat has found a steady rhythm again and the tingling in her fingertips has gone away. She breathes in. Breathes out. Finds that her heart has not stopped beating in the interim.
She can do this. Has to do this.
She's done this for how many years now?
A couple more days can't possibly matter.
As she wanders back into her bedroom, she sheds her sweaty, oversized pajama shirt and looks nervously into the mirror. Maybe someday she'll find nothing but smooth, unblemished skin. Today, she studies the lines that stretch across her body. They slither beneath her undershirt and down into her pajama pants, reminding her of snakes. Or of an invasion of vines, eager to smother her with their pointed appendages.
Within that fleeting moment of self-disdain, she does think about Jinu. She thinks of the patterns that had grown across his hands when they sang together, and how she had almost forgotten how much she despised the idea of them. On him… on his hands, they looked okay. They felt different.
Now that she stares down at her palms, she couldn't help but wonder if he felt something like that about her, too.
Maybe…
Left to her thoughts, she doesn't hear the softest, most careful footfalls in the hallway.
When she recognizes the click behind her as her doorknob turning, her thoughts are cleaved in two.
Of all of her planning, all of her careful tiptoeing, all of her begrudging deceit…
For the first time in a long time, she had committed one of the stupidest possible errors she could have made.
She had forgotten to lock her bedroom door on the way in.
Now it's too late to call out an excuse to keep company at bay. And it's too late to reach for the nearest dirty laundry to cover her body with.
When she turns sharply around, she finds Bobby standing in the doorway to her bedroom with a small white pharmacy bag in his hands; if she had any coherent thought left in that moment, it would be recognition that he'd brought her something to soothe her stomach.
As any good manager would do for one of his girls.
An embarrassed apology dies on Bobby's lips almost immediately. He stares at Rumi's arms instead — at her clavicle, her shoulders, her neck.
All consumed by these strange, unsightly marks.
There are so many things she could try to tell him right now. If her mind hadn't whited out and stolen her the very words out of her mouth, she could spin something ridiculous but conceivable. Something a kind, trusting soul like Bobby would take for truth. Something that would buy her some kind of time.
Instead, she immediately bursts into tears.
Chapter 10
Notes:
An important conversation where long-held belief systems are subtly shaken. I did NOT expect this to go on as long as it did, so a lot of things I planned for this chapter will have to wait for chapter 11! Thank you guys so much, and comments are always appreciated. ♥ You keep me goin!
Chapter Text
There are worse ways to reveal your genuine self to the people you care about, she's sure of it.
It still feels like her world has been struck by a fast-moving wall of pure force all the same — a displaced ocean wave that rips up houses by their foundations, strips trees and flattens brambles, rumbles with the explosions of power lines when they strain and snap. All of the carefully built lies and excuses are deconstructed in seconds; they're nothing but debris now, flowing back down towards the shore in a heartlessly gentle way. All of that work over the years, reduced to what? Ruin.
Bobby walked in, he saw her for what she was, and the hazardous foundations she'd built for herself shifted — then collapsed — in complete and utter silence.
But there was also some small, awful part of herself that thought: 'Finally.'
She falls to her knees on the bedroom floor and sobs as though she were a child lost at dusk, tears dripping unchecked down her cheeks and a shameful desire to run home to her mother burning in the pit of her stomach. Bobby is a muddy crowd of colors in her vision all the while. He's frozen where he stands at first, but then clumsily abandons the items in his grasp as he rushes to her side, nearly sliding in his socks. An "oh geez," tumbles from his lips as he kneels down; it's obvious he has no clue how to even begin to address this accidental invasion of privacy and the questions it has brought to the surface.
For her, it's hard to say if she's more embarrassed than scared. Or more alleviated than devastated.
"Rumi, are you — no, of course you're not alright. Good job, Bobby," he rambles, fully in the crosshairs of panic but handling it with his usual flourish of restraint. His hands hover uselessly before him, then he reaches out to take her hands in his own. While it's not the same level of warmth that rushes over her as it had been with Jinu, the very sight of someone else touching the marks on her skin without fear or judgement helps to distract her from what feels like total ruination. He must not realize what's happening, she tells herself, or what it all means. If he knew what she was, even someone like him would surely be mortified by her presence, because demons are the villain in every tale as old as time. One of his girls was a monster who simply did a decent job of hiding its claws and fangs. How would she blame him, if he shrunk away?
It wouldn't be too late to lie right now. She could. But when Bobby's eyes meet hers, so full of genuine concern, she can't force another lie past her lips. It's just too much. Fighting her entire life to free her true self? Lying to the masses while hiding in the dark at her mentor's wary insistence? And now grappling with feeling so utterly helpless to save the one person who had accepted every part of her. It's too much.
What had she done in some past life to deserve this?
"I don't know what to do," she says, trembling. "I can't fix this."
"Hey, hey," Bobby soothes, as he pulls her forward into an unflinching embrace. With just a moment of stunned silence, she buries her face in his shoulder and settles into weeping more softly, and he runs a hand over the top of her messy braid. "Don't you worry. There's always an answer to any problem if we look hard enough! And besides, younger generations love tattoos. They'll be mainstream in no time!"
A stuffy laugh bubbles out of her.
Rumi tells him everything.
... Behind a locked door, this time.
The small balcony outside of her bedroom is a good place to talk, so she leads the way and settles beside a varied selection of potted plants lining the back wall. She had always enjoyed caring for them, even if she was a little embarrassed at the time to admit why: when you spend so much of your life devoted to killing creatures, there's something particularly special to keeping something else alive with those same hands. Therapeutic, even if she sorely lacks a therapeutic bone in her body otherwise. Bobby has been patient enough to watch her scrub away her tears and fetch her watering can. Meanwhile he texts Mira and Zoey to ask that they pick up the medicine (that he'd already fetched and since abandoned on a dresser), they agree without complaint.
The pharmacy he lists is across the city. It doesn't buy them a lot of time, but enough for Rumi to compose herself.
And compose herself she does, though her voice is stuffy by the time she's gone through the remaining half a roll of toilet paper in her possession. Breathing techniques that Celine had trained her in since she was a little girl helps settle the messy, emotional demon underneath her skin. There are no screams that ripple across the Honmoon this time. No awful bestial rumble in her words when she speaks. Calmness. She couldn't afford to lose herself and potentially harm the golden threads beneath their feet.
She's relieved that she hadn't lost control earlier, sobbing like she had. If Bobby had seen the dark pink violence that emanated from her very throat when she yelled, then he'd really second guess the person sitting before him.
"Just... start from the beginning," Bobby says, cross-legged on the ground.
One of his knees bounces nervously beneath his hand, but he seems clear-headed. Focused. He pushes a glass of tea closer to her as she settles down beside him, and it's left untouched as the words flow out of her.
When she admits, first and foremost, that they hunt demons, he laughs. It's more of a startled sound from him, as though perhaps he's caught off-guard with what he thinks is a joke. It only takes a solemn stare in response to wipe the smile off his face, though.
To some degree, she's a bit guilty thinking about just how little of herself she's ever revealed to Bobby, despite all the times he'd been there for them. As he listens now with parted lips and awe in his eyes, she can only imagine how crazy she must sound. Hunters, demons, her parents, their plan for the Honmoon — it feels like she's doing something heinous by putting everything into words in front of someone other than Celine. To his credit, he is silent and processing the entire time she details her life; he does not interrupt once, does not distract her too badly with his bafflement, though by the time she goes quiet, she can tell he has so much to say and so few ways to begin.
"So you... and a member of the Saja Boys..." As if in answer, Rumi's face burns red, and Bobby gasps, "Okay, wow, that would have been a PR disaster. But — okay."
"Yeah, I guess sneaking off to meet a demon would be pretty bad optics," Rumi laughs miserably.
Bobby waves a hand and corrects, "Meeting a boy."
Ah... That, too. It's funny how easy it is to forget the idol culture when you are halfway through a meltdown about being a demonic presence on the planet. She takes a deep, quenching drink of her tea as Bobby stares off into the distant horizon. She couldn't possibly imagine what was happening in his head, and frankly, she couldn't blame him if it wasn't terribly generous. And yet he presses his hands together, bows his head almost as if praying, and then breathes out deeply.
"So... Huntrix is from a long lineage of hunters, and all this time, you've been powering up a giant magical barrier that keeps demons from eating our souls for a big scary demon king."
She nods.
"But your father was a demon, and you've had to hide that from the others. And you were hoping by completing this 'Golden Honmoon', you'd be cured?"
She nods.
"And this whole time, the Saja Boys were demons trying to steal your fans to eat their souls. Only you ended up befriending one of them, and he agreed to join you and helped you level up the Honmoon. But he was shoved back down into the... evil demon place. And your patterns just kept spreading anyway."
A fresh wave of heartache overtakes her, but she squares her jaw and nods once more. Bobby runs a hand over the short hairs of his scarce mustache — and while she's not completely sure what he's thinking, there's a trail of expressions that he visits before settling on acceptance. Acceptance with a side of twitchy eyelid. "Okay... okay. Well, it's suddenly making sense why you guys kept calling them soul-sucking monsters! Or mentioning sending them back to the depths of hell."
He seems like he's on the verge of crashing out — and truly, she waits with a cringing frown as she expects such a valid meltdown — but he just smooths his hair back and steadies himself, not for the first or last time. It's really impressive, and it distracts her from her own deep, dark well of suffering for a moment. "Honestly, you're... taking this really well."
"Hey, I've had paranormal experiences," he defends quickly. "If ghosts can exist, so can demons!"
"But it's not just that," Rumi says. Struggles to get out, even. "I thought you'd... I mean — look at me."
"I've been looking at you," he replies, puzzled.
"I'm serious, Bobby. I'm covered in the same patterns as a demon. I'm half demon. Doesn't that freak you out?"
"... No? You've never been anything but good to me — and to your fans." At her stare, he starts up some particularly animated hand gestures. "Alright, so demons being real is going to haunt my nightmares for a little while. But just because you're a tiny bit different and you have your own unique problems — that doesn't change anything! And why should it?"
She should have never questioned that Bobby would say anything less, and yet the disbelief is palpable. He's rendered her speechless for a moment, because she had anticipated literally any other scenario but this. These dramatic moments where a friend comes along and happily embraces the person she was born as? They were silly little daydreams when she was eight or nine, just before reality backhanded her with the need for secrecy.
"Have you ever tried to hurt someone?" Bobby asks. "Other than the demons trying to eat people."
That's a complicated question, but she knows it's not meant to be. Sometimes she feels like she's hurting Zoey or Mira when she leaves them in the dark. When she was little, there were times when she'd see Celine sitting and staring at a photo of her mother — and she'd wonder if she was hurting her through an unspoken obligation. Eventually, she relents.
"No."
And Bobby smiles, despite everything. Facing him, it's like two people born in different universes. "H'oookay, then what's the fuss? You're still one of my girls." As he places a hand on her shoulder, she can only look away, struggling with the large lump in her throat. As he studies her face, he holds her hands up toward her gaze, as if asking her to reconsider. "Maybe the Honmoon didn't fix you because there's nothing to fix. You're part demon because you were born that way, and... maybe there's nothing actually wrong with that."
"But Celine said-"
"Celine is a person like anyone. And people can be wrong."
The idea of Celine being wrong about anything is hard to imagine. She'd spent her entire life hanging on her every word. She was a Sunlight Sister, and a true warrior. And she had raised her — took pity on a child who was half-demon because she saw the part of her that was half-human, the part that was like her lovely, strong mother. She was infallible. She was hardened, a little battle-worn, and graceful in her convictions. Telling her to cover her body was a form of care. It was a way to keep her safe until what was wrong with her could be mended. The fact that her patterns were touching open air right now...
But then, she hadn't thought that when her hands where clasped in Jinu's. She had felt so utterly liberated by his presence, in a way she had never felt before — and feared she never would again, after she watched him vanish below the Honmoon. As she squeezes Bobby's hands, she can only think of Jinu — and his sunken neckline, his chipped fingernails lined with dark grit. She has to will her eyes not to water, because it's embarrassing enough to have fallen apart in front of another person like this.
"Everything we were taught about demons... it wasn't all wrong... but it wasn't all right, either." As Bobby lets her hands go, she turns them palm up, studying the purple lines that ran across her life line, her heart line, her fate line. "We had to fight them. We had to stop them from hurting people, no matter what. But... they're not all cold, unfeeling monsters. Some were even human once. Desperate, miserable humans who just turned to the wrong kind of help..."
"You're talking about Jinu, right?"
With a nod, she curls one hand around the other, squeezing. It doesn't replicate the feeling of his hand in hers, but it grounds her in that beautiful moment of freedom. "He's gone now, and it's all my fault. I promised him something better. I think... he's dying slowly now, somewhere far, far away from me."
Bobby frowns.
"... I'm really sorry, Rumi."
They fall into silence together, watching the clouds in the distance as they shift ever so slowly across a sunny sky. It's not until Bobby's phone vibrates that he finally peels his gaze away from the skyline and towards the screen in his hand instead. Rumi's stomach does an uncomfortable flop where it sits.
"Is it them?"
A soft hum of confirmation. "They'll be here in ten."
Like a picked scab, fear wells up unstaunched, and she pales.
"We can't tell them. Bobby, we can't. If they don't hate me, they'll never trust me again."
But Bobby holds out a hand to try and mollify her trepidation before it starts anew.
"You need to, Rumi. For them, and for yourself. Keeping such a big part of yourself put away... Hasn't that already hurt you enough?" Rumi looks away, gnawing at her lip, feeling one small fang pinch at her inner cheek. Bobby says, "It sounds like this has already been putting a rift between you three, and — I just can't stand the thought of that."
"I don't know, Bobby... Where do I even begin?"
"With the truth. That's all you need. Just do exactly what you did with me. Only... you can skip a lot of details about demons and hunters. I think they've got that part figured out." With a determined furrow of his brow he adds, "I'll be there with you, okay? You don't have to do it alone."
... She didn't have to do it alone. Could that really be?
Such a novel, beautiful concept.
As he rises to his feet and offers her his hand, she takes it.
"I think maybe we should be paying you more than three percent."
"Oh, hah, you know," he starts, a little humbled. "I'm just doing what a manager should."
He might not realize just how above and beyond any of this actually is, but as she gently cradles the empty glass of what was once tea in her hands, she starts to think maybe there was no better option than their truest number one fan. It's decided in that moment — and against everything she's ever known — that her faults and fears may emerge from their dark detention to finally witness the light of day.
Here goes nothing.
Chapter 11
Summary:
When he would tell them of Gwi-Ma's most recent temperament, he would do so in a hushed albeit disenchanted voice.
Such feigned disinterest would not last long.
As Baby steps back through the portal today, he's met with an empty stone altar.
Startling, to say the least.
Notes:
Sorry for the anticipation of it all, but this chapter is covering some... interesting new updates in the demon realm. Next chapter will be back to Rumi and her nerve-wracking situation with the girls. Warning for a little bit of body horror? Or... something like that. I'm not even sure what to call it. Nothing too graphic or extreme, but I like people to not be blindsided too badly.
Chapter Text
What had initially started as short visits by Romance soon became longer and more frequent, always cloaked in a veil of darkness.
Jinu didn't mind. If this wasn't his starving imagination at work, then it meant he had some form of company for a few fleeting moments. In a place where time bleeds together and becomes its own tormentor, he'll cling to whatever distraction falls into his lap. At first there is never anything other than a few loose words, then water offered. Each occasion is almost ritualistic in nature; the rim of a jar or chipped bowl is pressed to his lips and he drinks without question.
At some point, his newfound company doesn't vanish with immediacy. Soon there are days where Romance lingers down in the depths with Jinu for minutes at a time. Jinu can nearly feel his gaze studying him, though he knows that must be his own shoddy perception at work; no matter how used to eternal nighttime they've become, a demon's eyes cannot adjust in this sort of thick oppressive darkness. He couldn't blame him for leaving the pit unlit — anything to avoid Gwi-Ma's more and more divided attention.
The day he dreams of Rumi in front of her mother's grave, Romance visits once again. At first he seems uninterested in talking beyond a few measured words, but it seems he has questions that have sat unanswered too long.
And Jinu tells him just enough to satiate him.
He feels like he owes him at least that much for the metallic water that has quenched his painful thirst time and time again.
"So… the whole time you were meeting with that Huntrix girl to gain her trust and find her shame, you were actually falling head over heels for her."
He fights the urge to nod wordlessly.
"Yes."
"And then she suggested a plan that would allow you to stay in the human realm once the Honmoon turned golden, in exchange for your assistance in keeping us from the stage."
"Yes."
"But she was just using what was left of the pathetic remnants of humanity you refuse to shed in order to use you — and throw you away."
There's something messy in the way his hackles rise at the accusation pointed so surely against Rumi. Maybe he sounds foolish as he's sitting shivering in a deep pit, but he snaps back, "She didn't use me."
Because he has to believe her. He has to believe her when she looks at him and swears she wants him beside her. Not down in the depths, but shoulder to shoulder in warm sunlight. If it were all a farce, then those little shreds of joy he had in dreaming alongside her would be ripped away from him, and he couldn't afford another deep ache. No, Rumi is a good person, he reminds himself. She gave him a fighting chance, and it was just the Honmoon that denied him a different path. It has to matter. It has to mean something.
Romance, however, just scoffs — at a madman that pines after their greatest enemy in the dark.
"Really? Because she's up there enjoying the fruits of her labor while you're wasting away down here. In a hole in the ground." His edged disdain bounces off the walls and into Jinu's sensitive ears. "To be frank, I don't think there's a way for anyone else to sink lower than you — literally."
Though he opens his mouth for some rebuttal, he finds he really has no great defense prepared. Regardless of how confident Rumi had been in her plan, he was the one foolish enough to believe in any part of it. That barrier had been made solely to keep them where they belong; why would it have ever given mercy to one of them? He was just the same as any demon under Gwi-Ma's thumb at the end of the day, even if he tried to pretend otherwise.
He bites the inside of his mouth and listens to the faintest scuff of feet shifting around on the gravel floor. Romance sighs. Reads his mind, even. "Well, maybe it's what you deserve. You betrayed us all."
Jinu shrugs, well aware its a gesture solely for himself; he's but an imperceptible phantom in the blackness. "You wouldn't have leapt for a chance to escape Gwi-Ma at my expense?"
The response is swift and sure and velvety smooth.
"Oh, absolutely. It doesn't mean I'm any less furious with you."
"But you're here anyway," he says, and simpers. He sits up, tilting an ear toward the demon. If there were a way to taste a life of blindness, it was here in this place. "I guess I left a good impression anyway."
At that, Romance blows air through pillowy lips.
"The work was exhausting. You ran us ragged with all these rehearsals and television shows. And being slobbered over by every kind of human was a — double-edged sword," he muses. "But… I enjoyed our time together."
Romance wants to say something else. He opens his mouth, then bites down on a word before it can leave. Jinu is patient, though. He rubs his fingers over puffy, healed lines of flesh on his arm until the other perseveres.
"It's been a long time since I've felt that alive."
He sounds defeated when he says it. Jinu's chin tips up sharply in response, eyes trying desperately to stare through the void. He can feel the throb of his heartbeat as it speeds up against his chest, empathy and understanding pulsing in his cold veins.
Demons would always be more complicated than the world gave them credit for.
But hearing such a bold admission from one in a place like this?
It sends a shiver up his spine.
Hope, happiness, a tenacity for life… things such as these were used to harm them before they would even get a chance to bask in such a glow. These feelings were rounds to be chambered and fired with reckless violence, their very meaning twisted into something else: hope was just a shortcut to regret; happiness was a symptom to be cured; to feel alive in the world was to question your loyalty your master. Even if you healed from the barrage of bullets, the fragmented pieces would linger inside you, poisoning you. It left you bitter for the things that made you human. It made trying bothersome. It made surviving harder.
In his own twisted way, Jinu did want something better for them. All of them. He wanted demons to live beyond slavery. He also knew that wanting was never going to be enough. More than that, he was also well aware that much like his attempts with his family, he simply wasn't good enough — selfless enough — to make a difference.
'You left them behind,' a voice growls. He flinches before his mouth twists up uncomfortably, and his eyes try in vain to look through illusions of the past. These voices and images come and go, and each time he braces for them, riding out their venom just as he has for centuries. 'You leave everyone behind. Because you were a monster long before you were a demon.'
His fingernails dig into the soft flesh of his underarm. Gritting his teeth, he presses on.
"How are the others?"
If Romance recognizes the episode he's having, he doesn't say anything. Their own bouts of madness were further and farther between than his — but it came with the territory of stripping away more and more of their own personhood. It didn't save them from being hit by their own salvo of voices, but it salved it.
"We're surviving," Romance says. "As we always do."
At that, particular faces flash in his mind.
"Haven't heard much about — Mystery and Baby."
He doesn't remember their true names.
In fact, he's fairly certain Mystery never bothered giving one.
"Oh, they're still too mad about your horrible and sudden betrayal to face you."
His mouth drops open, expression painfully casual. "Ah… Understandable."
Romance fidgets with the truth of the matter like it were one of his many rings. "Mm… Well… They don't want to admit it because they're busy anticipating the end of everything we've ever known, but… the four of us are happy to see Gwi-Ma so miserable. If we're to finally fade away, there's something comforting in knowing he'll fade too. Even if he'll be the last to go."
Despite the fresh guilt laid atop one another, Jinu feels the same way. There is something soothing about an end where their king will never be bowed to again. He will eat them, and then feed on himself, gagging on his own buffet of flames before he suffocates in the heat.
Jinu hopes it hurts. He hopes he burns his own tongue.
"What's Gwi-Ma doing now?"
"Screaming orders some days. Falling into silence most others. Rationing souls. The only reason we're not all withering away like you just yet is because of the last bounty of souls we'd collected. But he's already running out… and getting desperate. Baby suspects he's up to something particular; day by day, many of the younger demons are summoned — and don't return."
As Jinu's shoulders slump forward, there's a shift in Romance's energy. He stands up quickly, only apparent by the crunch of ground beneath his heels.
"Time to go," he says. "He'll be looking in soon."
"Of course," Jinu says. No point in Romance dying any sooner than he has to, especially not for aiding the mess Gwi-Ma left at the bottom of this pit. He licks his wetted lips and fumbles for words so rarely spoken among them. "… I am sorry. For how everything turned out."
The silence that follows is so deafening, he almost wonders if there was just empty space where the other demon had been. But reluctance gives way yet again.
"I am, too — sorry that you really thought you could love someone else without damning yourself all over again." Such words should be full of spite, of poison. But Jinu is confused to find that there is no malice in Romance's words. He seeks for it, expects it, but… only finds pity in his tone. "Feeling that kind of way for someone, caring for and trusting another person so much… it will always be a mistake. And you will always pay a price for it."
Rumi's soft smile, her concerned gaze, her knuckles against the sharp of his cheek — it all flashes in his mind.
A price to pay, huh?
He leans forward, defiant despite the dirt on his face and the strain in his throat.
"Know that from experience, do you?"
Before he vanishes, Romance offers one bitter truth:
"Who here doesn't?"
As Jinu all but rots in a hole in the ground, there are pressing matters outside of the pit.
Following his rather unceremonious defeat, Gwi-Ma had gone mostly silent atop his throne. He would blaze back to life to make sure his subjects were doing as commanded, then would sulk and seethe and lapse back into ineptitude as their newly de-fanged ruler. Occasionally he would unleash his vicious ire on a lowly demon whose only crime was lingering too close to the stone steps. Without fail, the creature would flail and scream while fire reduced them to powdery crumbs — killed not in punishment or as an example to others, but simply because Gwi-Ma was upset.
And like most cruel owners with their servants, if he had to suffer, the rest of them had to as well.
The majority of demons had been ordered to scale the mountain ridges with the impossible task of penetrating the golden barrier. They would drag their heavy feet in a long and winding line until they could reach the beautiful gilded lines of the Honmoon. With limited tools at their disposal, they would attempt to wrench it back open. Before the gold took over, concentrated efforts would eventually leave a small but workable gash in its armor. But now as they use their claws like pickaxes against the vibrant blockade, they're met with nothing but chipped nails and bone-deep exhaustion. Weapons clink uselessly against its flank. Rocks used as crude hammers would chip and cover the demons in a dark dust over time. Exhaustion was more prevalent than hunger so far, but it would only be a matter of time before the spiritual resources their king divvied among them would dry up. Then they'd be no better than the demon who had left them to this fate: shriveling up, growing weaker, and likely to be feasted on by their fiery master before they can properly fade away.
The Saja Boys had been lucky to not be punished alongside Jinu, instead left to supervise the rest of their miserable ilk as they ached and toiled with little more than the promise of a meal to keep them moving. Their only hope of survival was that the prophecy passed by word of mouth was wrong — that the Golden Honmoon wasn't the final nail in coffins that should have been buried centuries ago. For once, the concept of hope was not dashed. Not when it was hope that belonged to Gwi-Ma; that sort of desperation was tolerated, allowed.
Baby is the one forced to report any crumb of progress to their king, and his news is never anything Gwi-Ma wants to hear: No, there is not even a scratch on the barrier. No, they've made no progress. Yes, he would very much like to be fed, thank you my king. When Gwi-Ma's frustration didn't end in him getting consumed by fire, Baby would step through the yawning portal that had brought him there and rejoin the Saja Boys toward the mouth of the mountain pass. When he would tell them of Gwi-Ma's most recent temperament, he would do so in a hushed albeit disenchanted voice.
Such feigned disinterest would not last long.
As Baby steps back through the portal today, he's met with an empty stone altar.
Startling, to say the least.
His usual half-lidded stare turns owlish. Behind the altar's great height he can see the faint pink glow of his master's flames. Their pulsing light flickers, gasps larger, then smaller. Alongside the erratic dance of color are unmistakable cries for mercy. "Please, Gwi-Ma, my lord! I've been nothing but loyal! Please spare me, I beg you…!"
Baby stalks toward the sound with great caution and silent footfalls. His fingers run along the bottom wall of the gray altar until he reaches its end. Some part of him wonders if he should turn and flee instead of peeking around the corner. He could shield his eyes from whatever truth lies ahead and find peace in ignorance… but if there is one thing he's honed, it's throwing care to the wind and weaponizing his apathy like a sword and shield. He has to see. He has to face the beginning of the end.
And so he peers around the corner of the massive, empty altar.
At first he's not sure what he's looking at. Almost as large as the altar it hides behind, the body seems like some strange, pulsing lump bathed in pink fire. Toad-like, or perhaps like a tumorous mound born of the earth itself, sitting gelatinous and flaccid. The heat that pours off its body leaves the area sweltering, and he wipes at the sweat that has already started collecting on his forehead. The source of that kind of warmth is unmistakable when he's spent many lifetimes in its presence.
Gwi-Ma is no longer simply a wall of insurmountable fire, but something alive, something tangible.
There is only one arm on the mass, and on that arm is a hand with uneven fingers that end in pointed claws. Clutched roughly in its massive palm is the source of that pleading voice: a muscular, horned demon with unkempt black hair.
Baby is not one to remember the names or faces of the unfortunate souls trapped down here, but he thinks he recognizes him from the last shambling line-up of demons sent up the mountain. Even from his safe distance, he can see the horror in the creature's expression as he struggles in Gwi-Ma's grasp. And though Baby can't see Gwi-Ma's face from this angle, he can see pink lava dripping like saliva onto the ground in front of him. It sizzles, then begins to dim as it already starts to harden into rock.
"You have been nothing but loyal," Gwi-Ma says. "Which is why you will serve me to your end. In my honor."
His voice bubbles out of whatever great mouth stretches across his shapeless form. Baby imagines it lined with uneven teeth. Imagines a terrible darkness expanding beyond them, down their overlord's throat.
The demon is suddenly thrust forward into that awful space, straight into what must be Gwi-Ma's open maw. A ragged scream begins, but the sound never sees its natural end.
It's cut off and is replaced by a greedy chewing sound.
Baby's heart leaps into his throat, and for a dizzying moment he's paralyzed by the noise.
Between the smacking of his lips, Gwi-Ma rumbles, "I need more… I need strength."
He needs more? More what?
(You know what.)
The very thought forces his feet to move. He turns and rushes away, and when his legs don't feel fast enough he teleports the rest of the way to the portal. Lunging through the swirling magic, he doesn't stop sprinting, even as his throat begins to burn with polluted air. It feels like an eternity before he sees the small camp they'd made for themselves. His heart is hammering, sweat still dripping from the fatigue and memory of Gwi-Ma's fiery mass.
To close the remaining distance, he vanishes and reappears in a plume of pink smoke — slamming into Abby's stupid washboard abs face-first.
"Watch the goods," Abby gripes, though immediately tenses at the intensity of Baby's amber stare when he looks up at him.
"We have a problem," he pants. "A growing one."
Chapter 12
Summary:
"No matter what happens," Bobby says firmly, "You won't be alone. I know I'm not much, but… I'll be there for you until they are, too."
The gravity in his expression is unlike him, and earns a smile from her, feeble but genuine.
"Thanks, Bobby."
Notes:
Once again had so much more planned for the chapter, but it went on longer than anticipated. Let's see how this goes. Thank you guys so much for the comments, they really brighten my day! This is also woefully in need of beta'ing, I'll be working on it through the day but I wanted to get it up and out there for y'all.
Chapter Text
Rumi hadn't seen Zoey and Mira when they reentered the penthouse. She had stayed sitting on her unmade bed and twiddling her thumbs anxiously, all while Bobby had sat them down and asked for their patience and understanding (and for them to not lose their minds, she imagines). For every muffled sound of closing doors or footfalls or overlapping voices that reverberate past her bedroom wall, the leaden stone in her gut gets heavier and heavier, until she's unsure if she's strong enough to stand up against its anchoring weight.
It's not until Bobby returns that she wills herself to stand, though her hands immediately begin to fidget with the soft white robe that shields her wicked blemishes from the world. From her friends. She can't help but pinch the furry lapels closed at the thought of anyone else's eyes on her, until the cottony material is cinched all the way up to the soft underside of her jaw. She can envisage he long strokes of purple creeping up her face, given enough time.
Time.
She's been fighting against time for so long.
Soon there won't be anything to hide, she thinks. She wants to feel confident, to walk out with her head held high…
But standing beside Bobby in her bedroom, Rumi only feels nausea churn an empty stomach.
"I can't do this, Bobby," she whispers, urgent.
"You can. You got this, Rumi!" He says it with the same soft enthusiasm he offers just before a big show, and while it doesn't stop the desire to run away and hide, it wills her to stay next to him. "You've been through so much together… even just without the hunting part. They might be a little freaked out at first, but you'll all figure it out together. I know you will."
('So sweet, so easy on the eyes — but hideous on the inside.')
When she speaks again, her voice is low and rife with uncertainty.
"But… hating demons is all they've ever known as hunters. To them, they're… just soulless murderers. Monsters." In response, her markings pulse faintly with light — and she has to will herself to calm down, as she's had to do time and time again. "What if that's all they see when they look at me?"
Despair is like an overpowering varnish on every word as she closes her eyes. She can picture it: their shock, their contempt, their outrage. It's so easy to feel like her entire world is close to dissolving before her very eyes. Every moment with them where she had felt loved and valued… it could slip between her fingers the moment the truth is laid bare.
('I see your real face and it's ugly as sin.')
Even if they accept that she's half human, will they still look at her the same way?
Will they always quietly fear a part of her? Disown it? Want it hidden from their gaze?
Will they look at her the way Celine does sometimes, torn between love and duty?
Bobby stills at the sight of her, eyes alight with empathy as he wrings his hands together. He's trying to find the right words to say — anything to help raise her spirits and make her hope for the best. How he manages to put himself back together and keep her from falling apart right now, she doesn't know. Him still being here despite what he knows feels like a dream.
"I know… you might not see it right away, but… Looking at you, I just see Rumi. And they will, too. You have to give them a chance to show you that."
('A demon with no feelings don't deserve to live, it's so obvious.')
She swallows a suppressive lump in her throat.
Was it ugly of her to imagine them with such hateful expressions? That she's dreamt of their faces contorting in such a way?
Hesitancy fed by Rumi's silence, Bobby offers, "And if — if you really can't right now…"
In the moment, she nearly dives for his olive branch headfirst. The idea of putting this off for days, weeks, years — it's tempting, because it's all she's ever known. If she would just call Celine right now and explain what's happening, she knows she would think the same; in her firm voice, she would soothe her with the promise of fixing it someday, somehow, just not right now.
But… Rumi recognizes just how unsteady her life has become.
No, worse than that — how unsteady her relationship with Zoey and Mira has gotten.
So she shakes her head and straightens her spine. "No… you're right. I can't hide this much longer anyway. Not like this."
They had been trained to hold steadfast in their convictions. In their resolve.
To face danger head-on for the good of others… This is the hunter way.
"No matter what happens," Bobby says firmly, "You won't be alone. I know I'm not much, but… I'll be there for you until they are, too."
The gravity in his expression is unlike him, and earns a smile from her, feeble but genuine.
"Thanks, Bobby."
When the two of them finally emerge from the hallway and step toward the open kitchen, they find that Zoey and Mira are obediently sitting at the table, muttering between one another. In a less terrifying situation, Rumi would smile at this new, startling tolerance for staying put, even while knowing there is something pressing just around the corner. Patience was a virtue that took a very long time in training, and there were days that Celine surely regretted having to meditate alongside them.
As if their arrival has shot a bolt of lightning through her, Zoey jumps to her feet in greeting.
"About time! You had something important to tell us? No, wait — before that," She shoves her hand into a plastic shopping bag, rifling around as she rambles, "Before you do, I got you a hat. It's nothing special! Not that I'd get you an un-special hat! It's just cute. I saw it at the, um, the pharmacy — oh! And we left the medicine on the table, just like you asked — "
Mira nudges her with hushed urgency. "Zoey."
"Oh. Sorry!" Flustered, she swiftly sits and lowers her voice. "Sorry."
Mira fixes her shrewd stare on Rumi. "So… There was something Bobby said we needed to talk about?"
Maybe in a way, Mira had already been dreading and hoping for this moment, even if she couldn't possibly guess the reason. Rumi recalls a similar enough look she'd given her during their morning run, the day of their short but barbed argument on the trail overlooking the city. She tucks her patterned hands more firmly into her stomach at the thought.
Don't get cold feet now.
"Y — yeah. We need to talk. A real talk, and not just me… trying to avoid one." She glances at Bobby, finding that he meets her eyes as well. "Mira, you told me I've been acting strangely… and you were right. I have been shutting you two out. For a long, long time. And I know it's something I need to get off my chest now, because there's no way to hide it anymore. But I-I'm… I've been scared of what you'll think of me… or that I'll lose you. And I feel like the more I try to hide it, the more I'm hurting our friendship."
Their expressions soften as she goes on, their hearts putty in Rumi's shaking hands.
"… You can tell us, Rumi," says Zoey.
"Yeah. You always can tell us anything," Mira adds. "No matter what."
And then Zoey leans in sharply, hands on the table.
"And if it's a secret boyfriend, we're not even mad! We can hide him in one of the penthouse floors."
Her face blotches red immediately, and her already scattered focus wobbles.
"W-what?! No-" Rumi stammers, and tries not to recall the way Jinu's smile matched the warmth of his hands.
Before she can recover, Mira bulldozes onward with "Just as long as you're not leaving the group," and then Zoey's eyes go wide.
"Are you leaving Huntrix? You're not, are you?!"
With pleading hands, Bobby ushers them to calm down. "Girls, girls! You've got to control yourselves."
Motivated by Bobby's concerned expression, the two of them lapse into stillness. Rumi isn't sure whether she preferred the madness of their spirited albeit misplaced speculation — especially now that they're both watching her so intently — but it's too late to take any of it back. As her gaze fixes on Zoey, and then on Mira, she knows the best way to pluck a splinter is with a fast, deft hand. It's terrifying. It's like standing in front of a judge with a murder weapon still clutched in her hands.
But she stands to her feet and rolls the robe off her shoulders. Though she's wearing the same outfit Bobby had found her in, she feels naked and exposed. The instinctive need to cover her arms makes her clasp her hands over her biceps. And here it all is, presented for Mira and Zoey's wide eyes to process: fingers marked with rings of purple, bruise-colored striations like thick, jagged veins along her collarbone — all symbols of her heritage and her lies, both synonymous in her mind, growing up her neck.
The chairs make shrill sounds as they slide back and topple over. It’s only seconds after her robe had fallen that Mira and Zoey have leapt to their feet, the Honmoon smoldering bright around them.
Mira's Gok-do materializes in her grasp before she can get the words out: "What have you done with her?!"
Zoey's own hands fill with her Shin-kal, the knives parting like a fan of cards in her fingers. "Bobby, get back!"
But it's Rumi who moves, staggering back in a body already coursing with adrenaline that had nowhere to go. She's dreamt of this moment time and time again, and it had always ended the same: pleading that she's not evil, she's not a demon, she's human, and watching in horror as her words fell on deaf ears. Such nightmares had left her sitting up and crying out — sometimes with pink waves of raw energy rippling across the Honmoon beneath her bed. Faced with her friends now, she becomes a frightened deer in the headlights; she braces for the car, for the crunch of the bumper or hood as it strikes her.
But then Bobby immediately puts himself in the middle, with hands fanned out wide at either side of him. Rumi stares at his back and feels the horrible memory of her nightmare begin to crumble within his presence. "Stop! It's not like that! Just relax, and lets think this through!"
The bewilderment in their faces at Bobby's firm command is understandable, given nobody was ever supposed to know the presence of a demon among them — not anymore, and certainly not from them. It doesn't stop them from quickly circling around the table and approaching with their weapons at the ready, but having the soft, killable body of their manager between them and their perceived target helps to keep the moment bloodless.
"It's really me," Rumi says, but her voice sounds metallic in her ears. She reaches out blindly to clasp the end of Bobby's jacket, needing something to moor her to this moment. "Please, I swear-"
"That's not possible," Mira bites. Her eyes, usually full of cool indifference in the presence of a demon, reflect something more helpless. Fearful. "I don't know what's happening or what it told you, but you're being tricked—"
Zoey's freckles grow starker against her paling expression. "If you do anything to him—"
"It's not a trick. I'm perfectly safe," Bobby cuts them off, and then extends his hand to very nearly brush against the point of Mira's blade where it faintly quavers. The glow of her weapon reflects back in Bobby's steely stare. "You're totally freaked out right now, and it doesn't make sense. I get it. But I'm not going anywhere, and neither is Rumi."
A hush settles over the four bodies before Zoey's hands lower, just a little. "Maybe… maybe it's not…"
"… It's me," Rumi manages. She can see the cogs turning over and over in their heads, made obvious by the way their eyes flick across her body and take stock of every line, every part of her skin that they're realizing they've seen less and less of over the years. For all of their lives as hunters, these were symbols of evil. Nothing more, nothing less. How could they not be afraid? How could they not second-guess? She couldn't blame them, even as the emotion tries to steal the breath from her. "This is… part of who I am. Since the day I was born."
"Babies don't make demon deals," Mira snipes. She can't seem to bring herself to unlock her arms, to lower the Gok-do. But the energy has shifted nonetheless. Cautious, Rumi places a quivering hand on Bobby's shoulder, then carefully steps past him. It wasn't right of her, to allow him to shield her from the very mess she'd made — from the hoard of problems she'd accumulated in secret and had nearly buried herself under time and time again.
"There was no deal," Rumi says. She bows her chin and forces herself to admit it. "My father was a demon."
Where there had been a flurry of chaotic energy before, there is only thrumming tension now.
Zoey tries to find the words. She settles on, "That's… not possible?"
"That's not possible," Mira fortifies.
But truth is truth, no matter how ugly a thing. Rumi reaches down to the floor, collecting her discarded robe and draping it over her arm. Her hands flicker in a pink glow that threatens to grow across the rest of her, but she adapts, refocuses, steadies herself. Her voice doesn't waver when she says, "Celine knows. If you call her… If you ask her what the truth is, she'll tell you."
"I don't understand," Zoey says, and her hands drop to her sides. "You hid this from us since the beginning? All this time, when you would dress in different rooms, or — or when you wouldn't come with us to the bath house…"
The pieces begin to click together. She can see them rewinding the footage in their heads, recollecting every confounding moment of their time together. Things like her refusing to take her jacket off in a stuffy studio room, or stepping onto the beach in the same outfit they'd arrived in while the other two compared swimsuits, or her unspoken rejection of particular pieces of wardrobe they'd bought her for birthdays, put in her closet only to be admired while off her body.
"The patterns started growing when I was little… and Celine thought it would be best if I kept them hidden. From everyone." She digs her fingernails into her arm. The patterns feel hot and uncomfortable, and she wishes she could just disentangle them from her skin like corroding roots. "I'm sorry that I lied to you both for so long."
"But—" Mira struggles. "But our songs. Everything we've…"
"Let's call her," Zoey says quickly. "Celine. We just need to know. If we know then… then we know."
"I need to think," Mira says. Her weapon finally dematerializes from her palms and seeps back into the natural curls of the Honmoon beneath their feet. With a newly empty hand she collects her phone off the disturbed table, then clutches it tightly to her chest. "I need to talk to her. Then I can — I don't know."
She steps back, bumping into one of the upturned chairs before she course corrects. Rumi speaks her name, soft and apologetic, but she's turning and rushing out of the room with her phone still gripped like a lifeline.
"Mira, wait!" Zoey calls after her, to little effect. It's clear when she turns toward Rumi that she's being pulled and torn in different directions — but she lingers for a moment, studying the lines of Rumi's face, the forlorn look beneath heavy eyelashes. The uncertainty in Zoey's gaze as it drifts to the demonic patterns makes Rumi's heart constrict, but she stays still, breath held even as her lungs burn. The youngest lifts a hand, fingers nearly brushing against the choppy stripes across Rumi's arm before she pulls away. "Sorry, I… I'm going to go after her. But we'll be back."
And soon, Zoey is fleeing the room.
Fleeing. That's the only word that comes to Rumi's mind.
"Rumi, breathe," Bobby says. When she blinks, she realizes there are spots dancing in her eyes, and she sucks in a hungry breath. She's stunned. Her legs feel elastic beneath her, like a baby's first steps, with her center of gravity in peril.
"I did it," she says.
"You did," Bobby says. "You did it. Just give them time to process everything, okay? That's all they need. Just some time to themselves, to process everything. Like she said… they'll be back. And then you three can sort it out together. It'll work out — you'll see."
She's not sure about that. Ever since the Honmoon had turned golden, she's never been sure of anything. Her purpose moving forward, the shame beneath her sleeves, guilt for a man she barely got a chance to love — and now this. Bobby ushers her to their couch, and she tries not to remember the giddy sounds of Mira and Zoey melting into the cushions, eager for a moment of rest. The rest of the day revolves here. Bobby brings her a sandwich, offers her a drink and a blanket, keeps offering hopeful affirmations when he catches sight of a crestfallen face. She should be thanking him more, shouldn't she? She should be grateful for the worried glances he sends his phone when he thinks she's not looking his way.
All she can think to do, however, is patiently wait for something to change.
And so she waits.
And waits.
And waits.
Chapter 13
Summary:
Jinu hated when winter came. He hated that he couldn't steal away moments at the river's edge to catch fish or grasshoppers with his bare hands, or lay in the heat of the sun and sing little melodies until his father beckoned him for work. He hated that their fingers scraped their bowls so quickly into dinnertime, with their food storage emptying long before the relief that new barley in the spring provided. He hated how cold his toes felt in cheap shoes stuffed with cloth and fur and he hated the inevitable runny noses and raw throats. He hated that his father had fallen ill last winter and only seems stay sick even through the summer.
Jinu hates a lot of things, he realizes, but he tries to hate them with grace.
Notes:
I always plan so much, only for the wordcount to stop me. Next chapter will be so very full of dialogue and important conversations! But this one is a nice mood-setter, along with some introspective history filled in for Jinu. I do apologize for the time this one took, as my little niece was just born and the last few days have been a whirlwind. Much love to you all, and comments are always so greatly appreciated. ♥
Chapter Text
Jinu stirs awake as the cold of autumn gnaws at his bare toes. Investigating with groggy discontent, he finds his foot had slipped out carelessly from beneath a blanket shared among softly slumbering bodies. The limb returns back to the safety of warmth as he blinks, rubs at the sleep in his eyes, and waits for his vision to sharpen. As it clears, he watches dust mites glimmer in a ray of light that had invaded through a hole in the straw roofing. Such small moments captivate him to lay very still and imagine they're something else — golden dust that grants immortality, or perhaps the smallest creatures seeking mischief in their temporary home.
Shifting, he takes note of the red-cheeked toddler still resting comfortably between him and his mother. His sister had left a sizable patch of drool on his sleeve where she had spent the night clinging to him, burning him up on his chest while the bite of the diminishing fall season had jabbed small needles in his backside. When he puts a hand on her little body he finds her comfortably warm, and nods in approval before rising from his place on the pallet and tucking her in more securely.
As he adjusts to the shadowy shapes in the room, his gaze falls on his mother for a moment — her hand shifts across her pillow — and then he looks even more intently at the final figure at the furthest end. Jinu is scarcely breathing himself as he anticipates seeing the rise and fall of his father's chest. When he can't register an obvious sign of life, he very nearly crawls over his mother's legs to put his hand on his body too.
But then his father weakly cranes his head sideways to release a wet cough.
Encouraged by a sign of life, Jinu breathes at last and leaves the comfort of their blankets and jumbled arms and legs.
The home his family had been sheltering in this season wasn't anything special: a room tall enough to crawl through on your knees, with a withering thatched roof made from straw and walls constructed from mud and clay to keep out a seasonal frigidness. There's no ondol that stirs hot air beneath the floorboards, but they do have a small furnace that they stoke during colder hours of the day. In exchange for labor and whatever other goods they can provide, the landlord permits their lodging. Sometimes, if he's feeling charitable, he supplies them with some additional kindling and wood to burn.
If they're really desperate — or their landlord is, rather — they also trade bags of food in exchange for their stay. He hates when they give up hard-won meals, but Jinu turned twelve this season, so he listens well enough to know that missing lunch or dinner is better than sleeping outside at this time of year. The winters in Hanseong were brutal, and it wouldn't be more than a few months or so before snow would inevitably coat the land and turn the roadways into unpleasant slush.
Jinu hated when winter came.
He hated that he couldn't steal away moments at the river's edge to catch fish or grasshoppers with his bare hands, or lay in the heat of the sun and sing little melodies until his father beckoned him for work. He hated that their fingers scraped their bowls so quickly into dinnertime, with their food storage emptying long before the relief that new barley in the spring provided. He hated how cold his toes felt in cheap shoes stuffed with cloth and fur and he hated the inevitable runny noses and raw throats. He hated that his father had fallen ill last winter and only seems stay sick even through the summer.
Jinu hates a lot of things, he realizes, but he tries to hate them with grace.
"Eomma," he whispers, gently shaking his mother's shoulder. "Should I put more?"
"Mm?" His mother doesn't open her eyes, but he's confident she's listening well.
"The wood. Should I put some?"
She reaches out and rubs his shoulder, then checks the length of his arm before she squeezes his hand. It's a seemingly intuitive gesture she performs. Sometimes he thinks she's checking for something particular, but he's not quite sure what. She hums, "Mm. Yes."
Jinu crawls on hands and knees and feels his jaw clench at the cold air that slips between the cracks throughout the home. The embers left gasping for life in the furnace look like twinkling red stars. He nurses them with kindling, basking in the glow as they slowly come back to life. Heat seeps into his skin and he sighs in bliss. He's tempted to wrestle his father's bipa into his arms now that his fingers are warmed up. As his father struggles with his next inhale, Jinu can only abandon the thought. Sleep accompanied by silence is more healing, he imagines.
His mother rises shortly after him, then his sister. The toddler is a curious and timid little creature, slower to talk or walk than he had been, but her hands are less cruel than other babes her age — especially when they find ears or cheeks to tug on. She waddles over and slumps into his lap, needy of his companionship. While his mother tends to their father, Jinu buries his nose against the crown of her fine baby hair, sure to keep her curious touch away from the hypnotic fire. Sometimes he likes to pinch her cheeks in his fingertips and marvel at the healthy fat. He hated the idea of her losing it.
Eyes fixed on the flames in the furnace, he feels unsettled. He asks, "Is everything alright?"
"I'm sorry, my Jinu," his mother says quietly. There's something in her voice that makes the hunger he'd started to feel immediately flatten. "I must tend to your father. Could you collect water from the stream this morning?"
"Yes, eomma," he says. The flames shift from orange to pink to orange once more. He forces his eyes away from them to see his mother bowed as if in prayer, hands rubbing circles meant to soothe on her husband's chest. For some reason, he can't bring his father's face into focus, even as he strains his eyes to study the shape of his pale features.
Time doesn't seem to pass the way it should; one moment he's sitting and disentangling his sister's fingers from his long hair, the next he's standing just outside the residence, tying her small fidgety body to his back with a podaegi that she's already getting too big for. The outside isn't as cold as it should be, he thinks as he cinches the ends of the cloth wrap tighter around his waist. Her little legs clamp around him like a monkey, the balls of her feet digging beneath his ribs when she fusses.
The air is strangely humid, if anything.
As the pot for morning water hangs heavy in his hands, he calls out: "I'll be back soon."
His feet scuff against a dirt path that leads away from the slowly waking village street, down into wooded trails that have flooded with mulch from decaying leaves. There are echoes of other children as they weave in and out of the brush up ahead, giggling or throwing fits or shouting in a way that feels nearly ethereal in the gloom of morning. None cross the path in front of him, but he finds comfort in solitude. He's twelve, anyway — soon too old to be playing with such blind enthusiasm. His sister will have to learn someday too. Since father had gotten sicker and needed his mother's full attention, his sister had accompanied him more and more often during his filial duties. He doesn't always mind. Being out with her was sometimes easier than being home as of late.
Sometimes, anyway.
"Stop wriggling," he complains, readjusting his sister on his back. She doesn't pay his complaints any mind and instead seems to squirm more urgently, as if punishing him for such bold insistence.
As he crouches into the soil beside the stream it molds around his knobby knees, and he dips the large earthenware pot into the chilly waters. His sister thumps her fist on his shoulder as he prepares himself for the added weight in his hands.
"Oppa, sing," she says into his curtain of raven hair. "Sing, sing… sing…"
He can't help himself; even while grunting to stand, he opens his mouth to oblige her. But before he can practice the first few words of a song for her ears only, he's distracted by a flash of dull color among the green foliage. A boy appears suddenly before him on the path back toward the village — a boy with a blurred face and a pink, round shape where a mouth should be. His chest heaves up and down and mist spirals out of him like a dragon's breath.
"Jinu! Jinu, you have to hurry back," the boy says.
"Oppa," his sister whines at the nape of his neck, "Sing!"
"It's your father. You have to come back!"
His body burns cold, his feet frozen as the pot in his hands tumbles sideways from his grip and rolls over once, twice, three times into the river's edge. Beneath the sounds of flowing water and the distant, almost ominous squealing of children, he can hear whispers in his ears that overlap and ravel together, impossible to decipher.
"Come," the boy demands, then turns and vanishes into the brush. His voice carries so thinly up ahead, Jinu almost can't make out the words. "Come, hurry! Your mother calls for you! He's in a bad, bad way!"
The boy's voice. The children screaming in delight. The impatience of his sister as she fusses on his back. The growing, sinister whispers… Though he attempts to muffle the sounds with his hands, none of the noise is drowned out.
A husky voice caresses the drum of his ear.
'Maybe if you worked harder. Maybe if you ate less. Maybe if you hadn't taken so much from them all this time—'
A soft sob abruptly cuts through the noise.
As he peels his hands away from either side of his head, he finds only peace.
Peace, and the soft crying of someone else — upstream, he thinks, just off the path.
He turns on his heel then, and his pupils dilate as he attempts to see through a dark expanse of forest. The sound is not from his sister, nor anyone quite so young as her. No, this voice is more matured in its grief. Something about it pulls him in instantly, and as though a moth drawn toward light, he pushes through a shadowy collection of branches, deeper and deeper and without fear into the dark.
The weight of his sister at his back disappears. The humid, cloying air loosens around him. The hunger and fear and guilt that had been stoked within him goes out. When he finally reaches a clearing that housed such soft sorrow, he finds a girl crouched in the middle of it; she's close to his age, dressed in clothing he doesn't quite recognize, her face in her hands.
At first he's too captivated by her long flowing hair to process the rest of her — it's purple, as mythical and serene as jindallae flowers. His mother mentioned such azaleas blossoming where she had been raised in the North Gyeongsang province, of how they would grow across one side of Cheonjusan mountain in a large, beautiful blanket. As he steps closer, the girl finally peers up from her tear-stained palms and sniffs hard. Big brown eyes seek answers he's unsure he can provide as his stomach flutters and his heart clenches with sympathy.
"They know now," she says with a wobbling chin. "They saw. What if they don't like me anymore?"
She tucks her chin and looks down with shame, struggling to wipe the tears away. Little purple flowers coil up from around her bare toes as they blossom in the damp soil. Jinu moves then. He crouches before her, putting his hands around her shoulders in a warm and protective embrace.
"It'll be okay," he tells her, and rests his cheek on the crown of her head. "It's okay."
Jagged patterns grow like vines across their bodies, starting at where skin meets skin.
As the flowers overtake the forest floor and blossom in sweet-smelling patches in her hair, she clings onto him with her eyes shut and her nose buried in the coarse fabric of his jeonbok.
"Jinu," the girl in his dream whispers.
And the dreaming boy whispers back, "Rumi."
Chapter 14
Summary:
She shakes her head, petals floating from stray locks of hair.
"But it's wrong." Everything we were told… The stories I've heard as a child. Demons aren't all evil monsters without feeling."
"Well, just look at you. You're not evil, are you?"
Notes:
I got a nice long one for you all! Next chapter is gonna be human realm business, but we can at least have a little rujinu. As a treat. Happy thanksgiving to those to celebrate! And happy fanfic updating day to those who don't. This isn't beta'd (what's new) but I'll get to it ASAP!
Chapter Text
Swathed in Jinu's embrace, Rumi slowly relaxes, and with that calmness a flood of memories return to the both of them. Her mind is no longer that of the sad little girl lost in unfamiliar woods; he's no longer the young boy pinned between memory and nightmare. Recalling a lifetime of events after the day his father had died is a strange sensation, and when he stands up and helps her to her feet he feels hollow for only a moment. It's all just a dream, one he's revisited time and time again… but Rumi is here this occasion. And that means he can't bring it upon himself to wallow in self-pity.
Neither are so sure of how to alter these dreams, not really, or at least not yet; if anything, they're simply dropped in and left to sink or swim in the absurdity of it all, and so they wander as children instead of fighting to shed the images of their youth. It's a little surreal to walk alongside a smaller, more cherub-faced version of her, but he imagines it's just as odd for her to look at him and see a lanky young boy instead of the man she'd grown so accustomed to visiting. With flowing raven hair and childish features not yet defined by puberty, his voice is high enough that it boarders on ambiguous.
He recalls it would only be days after his father's passing that he would tie his long hair into a sangtu and make promises that he wouldn't be able to keep. He can still so clearly recall the way tears poured from his mother's eyes as she helped secure his hair atop his head, and the way she had apologized with her eyes when he turned to face her.
What must he have looked like then? A knobby-kneed child playing pretend?
As the two of them walk the path of this tenuous dreamscape, Rumi tells him everything that had happened since the night before. Had it really only been a day since they'd met in front of her mother's tombstone? Time has hardly been a reliable friend.
"… And now I'm just waiting for them to come back home," Rumi finishes, with a hearty sigh. Her large brown eyes take in the shadowy forest trail, with its streaks of occasional morning light knifing through the choppy canopy. Jinu is busy being enraptured by the patches of purple flowers that still carpet her flowing hair. She murmurs, "I must've fallen asleep on the couch."
It had to have been horrifying to reveal her true self to the other girls, he thinks. Especially after spending a lifetime hiding part of herself away like it was some awful malignancy. He could imagine their disturbed expressions when they saw that symbol of everything they stood against across her skin — and he could also imagine poor Rumi, so determined to hurry through her worst nightmare that she had fumbled in the heat of the moment.
He recalls a time where the most unkind part of him wanted them to know her truth, if only to hobble the hunters and get them out of his way.
(And then a sweet-spoken child handed him a drawing like he wasn't some ugly wolf in a sheep's pastel clothing, and it was all over from there.)
He speaks with mixed sympathy and amusement.
"Maybe next time show the demon patterns after telling them everything else."
Rumi groans, running her hands down her face. "Yeah, well. I wasn't exactly at my best today."
"I'm glad you did it anyway. Now you can finally move forward. Right?"
"… Right."
“If they’re really as good of people as you say–”
“They are.”
He's not so sure he can share such steadfast faith, but it's easy to think the worst when she had been the only hunter he's ever shared a genuine conversation with. Perhaps… they're both benefitting from seeing the possibilities within in one another, from one realm to the next. At the end of the day she's a hunter who had reached out to him, despite everything. A hunter he'd fallen in love with, and one he can't bring himself to discourage in this moment.
“Then they’ll come around," he says, nodding. "You've never been under Gwi-Ma's control. And you haven't hurt anyone. You've only ever tried to do good in the world. You’re not like us, Rumi. They'll see that.”
A look of discontent flickers across her face. "You're not-"
She stops herself, though he deftly finishes the thought.
"Like other demons? Your father was a demon, wasn't he? Someone your mother must've seen something good in." She peers up at him then, mouth parted, brow furrowed. He shifts his gaze toward the darker corners of the forest and thinks he can see the faint glow of yellow eyes in the distance, slipping in and out of a dreamy fog. Even in his own youthful form, his patterns have returned. He can feel them leeching across his skin, across boyish features. He says, "I'm not going to pretend demons are harmless or innocent. Or that they shouldn't have been stopped at any cost. It's just that they feel, and they hurt, and they're stuck. And there's nothing they can do until someone ends it for them."
And he'd betrayed them. Hurt them. Made a choice that would mean their inevitable extinction.
Maybe he's simply the one who ends it for them this time.
Softly, he tells her, "It took me some time to see it myself, but they're not much different from lowborns like my family. Trapped in their circumstances, penniless, dirty… left with scraps after their tithes to their king."
Rumi tips her chin down at that, seemingly penitent. He doesn't particularly think she has to be.
It's not like she had any hand in his lineage, nor any other demon's.
She says, "I guess it's been hard sometimes to… reconsider our convictions as hunters."
"I don't even know if that's the right choice," he admits. "Your mentor taught you the way she did to keep you alive. Too much sympathy could have gotten you killed — especially when Gwi-Ma doesn't allow a demon compassion."
She shakes her head, petals floating from stray locks of hair.
"But it's wrong." Everything we were told… The stories I've heard as a child. Demons aren't all evil monsters without feeling."
"Well, just look at you. You're not evil, are you?"
He doesn't mean for it to be some grounding, life-changing question — if anything it feels pretty straight-forward — and yet as Rumi processes such simple words, she touches a hand to her chest and seems wonderstruck and genuine when the answer comes to her.
"I guess not."
He lets her sit with this small, quiet epiphany as they stroll down a remnant of his childhood, and tries to consider it for himself. Evilness. There were many times he'd felt evil. It was easy to see her as a beacon of something else, something he could've tried to be if he weren't him. To be good — not wholesome, not perfect, but simply good, like her… He couldn't remember a point in his life where he considered himself a truly decent person. Looking at his small hands now, dirty but not yet sullied by years of toiling, of stealing, of shaking hands with a devil, he finds himself almost apologetic to the boy he left behind.
Maybe that’s why Gwi-Ma sought after him.
It occurs to him quite suddenly that Rumi is watching him, staring at him as he opines in his own head. He drops his hands to his sides and tries not to turn red-faced as he looks at her. She beats him to the punch, smiling knowingly before studying the wooded pathway, a little awed.
"So this is one of your dreams. I might be the first person ever from the 21st century to see it like this." A pause, and then she chuckles. "The first and only person, probably."
“… Guess you’re right." It's not like photography existed when he was little; in fact, he remembers the culture shock of returning to the human realm and suddenly finding handheld cameras on display in a shop window. She would be the only person from a modern time who could see it like this, even through a peasant's unsteady memory. He smiles at that. "It is weird having you here – nice, but weird.”
His dreams are so often lonely, isolated. Full of regret.
When she's in them, they feel kinder.
“Are you going to show me around before the dream ends, then?”
He winces, and tries not to think of what would've been waiting for him down the village street. Knowing his dreams, it wouldn't have been accurate — but it would have hurt all the same. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”
She blows out a breath, looking particularly precocious.
“At least a little bit? I’d like to know more about you.”
The boy rubs his chin, sparing a glance at where the pot he'd dropped should've been; it's gone now, replaced with dozens of little footprints that stamp into existence right before his eyes. His lips curl slightly at the thought of those days, hearing the phantom giggles of happy children. When you're particularly young, your mind dances circles around the crueler parts of life. You don't worry about it — about cleaning dirty clothes, or needling foreigners for treats, or fashioning toys out of nature.
He'd spent so many days turning branches into swords, sometimes running home to cry about a red line on his arm where one of the older children had lashed him too hard in a battle.
Inspired by warmer memories, he hums and says, “Well – this is where I spent a lot of time when I was a kid. When I wasn’t helping my father work in the summer and spring, anyway; you know how cold it gets here, so imagine what it's like without modern heating systems. But in the summer, it was perfect. We roamed the whole village unchecked.”
“I bet you were a complete menace,” she giggles.
“Actually, I was pretty shy," he recalls, and fidgets at the thought. "When I wasn’t performing music, anyway… I spent most of my time practicing how to catch fish. I really thought I'd be a fisherman at some point; imagine me on any kind of sea vessel. I still can't swim."
"You can't swim?" She looks flabbergasted. "All these centuries later?!"
"I can just float over the water now," he huffs.
He approaches the shallow stream he'd so often stomped through. He had left his home in fur-lined straw sandals, but now he finds his feet bare and caked with flecking mud. Sometimes they would let the soft mess dry and pretend to be carved stone Dokkaebi coming to life.
"… When my sister was a little older, I used to play pretend with her. We'd make little meals out of clay on the river’s edge. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve pretended to eat green onion pancakes…”
Noticing that she's been staring at him with a funny look on her face, the boy turns pink.
“What?”
Rumi's hands raise up in surrender. “Nothing! Nothing. You’re just… really cute right now.”
As he pouts, she can't seem to stop the laughter that bubbles up out of her. It's a little ridiculous how youthful he feels in the moment, but he can't bring himself to snap out of it — not when she looks so happy to be in his presence. Those looks of concern and guilt had been difficult to stomach, and for a moment he wishes they could stay so contented. They sit together and dip their feet in the flowing waters, finding one warm beam of light from above to comfortably rest in. The dream has tipped from autumn and winter to some kind of amalgamation of spring, he thinks. The water should be so cold it hurts. Many small fish dart through it, perhaps captivated to return from the recesses of his memory.
"… It's a little strange that we can do this in the first place," he admits. "Have you ever considered how it works? Why you're able to find me like this?"
"Oh, I've thought about it alright. It's too weird not to." Rumi ruminates. She presses her small hands in front of her, squinting into the murky green world beyond them. "The only thing I can think of is that the Honmoon somehow linked us together… I mean, you manipulated it before, right? When we sang, I could see it reacting to you. And before you fell, I know I saw the glow of your soul. So it was effecting you somehow."
"Or maybe we're soulmates," Jinu teases.
Her face turns ruddy the moment he says it, and then works through an impressive series of expressions. "Soul—?! You, that — Soulmates!" She punches his arm. "Yeah right! As if!"
"Aiiish, so you've always been this mean!" And he rubs his shoulder, a little surprised to feel a distant ache where her bony knuckles found him. "You're weirdly strong for a ten-year-old."
"And you're — " She stops, stares at him. "Well, you're not how I imagined you'd look."
“Funny. I was about to say you’re as short as I remember.”
Her nostrils flare like a great beast as he struggles not to grin any wider.
“Anyway," she huffs, "We’re… linked together somehow. And maybe this is a good thing. It means there’s something tethering us together. Don’t think for a moment I’ve given up on figuring out how to drag you back here.”
He frowns, looking away. It's a response she's used to, but she practices patience in the face of his lacking enthusiasm. “Jinu… I know you’re worried about being upfront with me, but it’ll only hurt me more than help, if you don’t open up to me. Tell me what’s happening down there. Please.”
Would it really help her? He doesn't particularly think so. But she's looking at him with eyes that remind him immediately of his sister — youthful, bright, sitting over a button nose and small frown. Such tactics from the face of a child make him want to fold almost immediately. Looking down and sighing deeply, he nods.
“… After I fell back to the demon realm, I was sent away. Into the Pit.”
She swallows hard. “The Pit?”
“Mm… Through one of the mountains at the far end of the realm, in an old cave system. At the end of it is a deep, round chasm that demons can be thrown into and left in for however long Gwi-Ma sees fit. When he's less inclined to incinerate a demon, he sends them there as punishment. It’s mostly a way to make us obey him more efficiently.”
The forest dims as he speaks, as if influenced by the very memory of the Pit.
Rumi watches with a critical eye, then turns to him, expression softening. “I’m so sorry, Jinu.”
“You don’t have to apologize. I knew what the risks were.”
“But I didn’t,” she mutters. He can feel her gaze as she eyes him up and down, from head to toe. “Is that… why you looked…?”
He’s quiet for a moment, aware of the thinning man beneath this childish appearance. He knows he hasn't always been able to hide the obvious; dreams are too difficult to maneuver for such cunning illusions. “I’ve been cut off from the energy Gwi-Ma uses to keep us fed. But soon it won’t matter. Every demon in the realm will eventually starve once whatever's left of his reserves are gone. Demons will cease to be – and that’ll be that.”
Rumi's small hands clench together in her lap. “I don’t like it. It feels wrong.”
“Just because something feels wrong doesn’t been it’s something you can stop, though." He reaches over to slide his hand into hers, watching as their patterns glow softly together. It seems to relax her, if even a little. "You did what you were supposed to do, didn’t you? Humanity has been pulled out of Gwi-Ma’s reach. The demons won’t be a threat anymore. And no one else will have to suffer another desperate deal with him.”
She chews on the nails of her free hand, thoughtful. “If Gwi-Ma were gone, do you think demons would still be a threat to people?”
Another dangerous thought, he sees. He admires the way the gears in her head are always turning, always looking for the next potential solution. It takes him a moment to decide whether or not he should try to dissuade her with blunt honesty or feed into that hopeful part of her that hasn't been squashed just yet.
Again, the big brown eyes absolutely destroy his nerve.
“I’m sure some of them would be. Demons can be good and bad and everything in-between. Like any person. I think… there are demons who’d enjoy a life without harming others. Demons who could unlearn the things Gwi-Ma taught them.”
“Like you,” she says. Firmly.
And he relents, “… Like me.”
The look she gives him is the same starry-eyed expression she had on her face after the first time they sang together. Back then, she looked so sure that better futures awaited the both of them. Sitting here in a precarious dream that could shift into a nightmare at any moment, he wishes he could capture that bold, optimistic essence in a bottle. For when he felt a little too weak, a little too despondent. She squeezes his hand, and then —
"I do have a question, though," she says. His eyebrows shoot up at her. "This is your dream, right?"
"Uh. Right?"
She takes her hand back from him, and then gently combs her fingers through violet hair, pulling the length of it over her small shoulder. Little petals fall from loose strands as she jostles one of the flowers, but another blooms to take its place.
"Then what's with the flowers?"
Choking on air is foolish, and yet he does it effortlessly. Right. His dream. He thinks about her long purple hair and how beautiful it looked in the light — how ethereal it had been through the eyes of a gullible child. Before he could remember who she truly was, he had thought perhaps she was some kind of beautiful deity. The kind you would pray to for better days. His ears have turned red beneath his hair. He starts losing track again — of the four-hundred years. Of the Pit. Of his father's death, or what is to become of his family. For a fleeting moment, he entirely forgets he's not a little boy pining over his childhood crush.
"My mother told me about them. That they would cover the mountain in the spring when she was little. That they were the most beautiful thing she had ever seen then…"
"Oh?"
"I just… thought they suited you."
And Rumi's eyes twinkle with youthful delight as she begins to lose herself to the possibilities of their dream as well. "Oh, you think so? Are you blushing?"
"You're teasing me," he complains.
She leans in to look at his coy features, and a girlish chuckle escapes her as she plucks one of the azaleas from her curtain of shiny hair. Then she tucks the flower over one of his ears and reaches down to grab his hand. "Alright, alright. Come on."
"Uh — where are we going?"
"This is a pretty gloomy dream, isn't it? Let's bring a little life to it."
She tugs at his hand, bidding him to follow, and he does so without another word of disapproval. As she leads the way, the path is a blur of desaturated color that seems to warm up the longer their footsteps carry them. Colors swirl in the corner of his eye, puzzling him until he realizes that Rumi's clothing has shifted — replaced with a traditional hanbok, dyed in expensive colors that make the existence she's carved here more exuberant against the gloom. It's not until Jinu looks down at himself that he realizes he's in silky, bright robes himself — adorned in riches he couldn't fathom, hand warm and clean in Rumi's as he finds himself struggling to keep up with her energy.
"How're you doing this?!"
"I don't know! Just go with it," is her unhelpful answer, robed in delight.
As they break free of the long and winding path, it opens up suddenly to a brightly lit sky and a sea of purple so saturated and vibrant, it steals his breath away. The large blanket of jindallae flowers wave in the wind as if welcoming them, while their sweet fragrance shrouds the sloping hillside. In that moment, there is nothing else to fear — no bitter ending in sight, no loss of innocence, no memory of his sins as they buried this part of him. No Gwi-Ma, no demons, no hunger, no eternal night. All he can think is, 'I wish my mother were here to see this right now.'
The hand holding his pulls him forward, and both he and Rumi happily cut through the flowers. They do not flatten beneath their feet — they merely bend, then mend, rising back up toward the sunlight. There is a wonderful warmth on his back from the sun and a cool breeze on his face, and he feels alive and whole and fed like a flower by its rays.
He feels limitless, unbound, happy. Freed.
Toppling into a pile of flowers, they carve a space for themselves there and lay breathlessly beneath a radiant sky. As Rumi turns onto her side and looks at him, she seems pleased with herself. Does she feel as unchained as him here in this place? Has she shed those awful feelings of responsibility, of fear for the future? He hopes so.
He —
"Rumi?" a distant, soft voice whispers. Not from him, and not from his dream.
From somewhere far, far away.
As the two of them sit up, covered in leaves and petals and shining in their garments, Rumi looks up to a great blue expanse. He cants his gaze skyward, too, and only finds the soft curves of a passing cloud. But the voice persists in a soft whisper that feels — gentle. "Rumi, wake up. Hey…"
"Zoey?" Rumi whispers.
When Jinu turns toward her, he finds the little girl that had hurried him into the sea of flowers is gone, replaced with the woman he had left behind in the human realm. The childlike wonder she had carried across the hill is replaced with uncertainty — with painful longing. When he reaches out then to take her hand, his fingers are long and matured, tendons faintly pronounced as he rubs his thumb over her knuckles.
As their eyes meet, he nods.
"Go on. Your friend's waiting for you." His lips twitch. "You can finally move forward. Remember?"
She shakes her head. "I don't… want to leave you alone again."
"You have to," he says, then gently tucks her hair back behind her ear.
Like a sea of jindallae…
She has no time to fight the pull of the real world. One moment she's there, and the next she's simply gone. Back to where she needs to be, he reminds himself, cautious not to slip back into selfish thoughts. As he finally breathes and relaxes, he lays back down in the swaying ocean of blossoms. Eventually, like with all dreams, it has to end. The darkness will consume the sky first, and then slowly shrink around him until it envelopes him too, pulling him back into reality.
But for now… for now he can rest, watching the clouds drift by and delicately turning one of azaleas over in his fingertips, again and again.
His smile is soft when he touches the flower to his lips.
Chapter 15
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
When her mother and father had begun to take apart their relationship brick by brick, Zoey had catalogued the warning signs in private. There were dinners that had once taken place at a dining room table, now drifted to different corners of the house — if her family was home at the same time, anyway. Then there were conversations with barbed words that her parents couldn't quite keep from leaving their lips in her presence. There were the little things that added up, collected like grains of sand to form a rocky shore: blame, disinterest, heated arguments over something as simple as an innocuous sock left half-wedged beneath the coffee table. Her mother and father's bed became only her mother's with little fanfare; she grew to rely on the sounds of her father snoring from the living room couch where he'd taken up residence at night.
Her mother's mascara would look smeared at the edges at four-thirty in the daytime. She was a woman who had refused to cry in front of other people, built from the backbone of a family's misguided diligence, but Zoey knew. When their only daughter wasn't slipping her headphones on and listening to music from across the sea, she would sit in her room as day faded into night, taking in the painful silence that would permeate across the house. Sometimes she would find herself looking for answers to their bramble of problems through the flawed lens of a google search.
How To Heal a Broken Marriage
My Marriage is Falling Apart: Ways to Avoid Divorce
Strategies for a Difficult Relationship
The ideas within every hyperlink seemed sensible to her. Helpful. Collecting solutions to problems that only kept concaving, compounding — isn't that what anyone would want? She had sent these editorials and self-help videos to her mother once with shaking hands, and it had ended with a calculated lecture and an uncomfortable car ride to a school that she had never quite felt at home in. Sometimes she have moments of nostalgic clarity, calling her back to a kinder time. She'd laugh at bad movies with her father, or go on coveted shopping trips with her eomma, and then she would sit and miss the three of them watching fireworks or driving around Valley Street to look at Christmas lights — together.
Togetherness was so important. How could they have forgotten that?
And yet its significance withered all the same. She had watched her family erode, scored by the frenetic sound of hip hop that she fed through her ears like life support as a divorce finalized.
It scares her, truly, that she's nearly allowed the same thing to happen a second time. Different circumstances, different kind of family, but a dangerous line between unity and isolation all over again.
Rumi shows them her patterns. Bobby steps between their blades. Mira rushes away.
Zoey tries to figure out where she should be, and then flounders for the answer yet again. She turns and follows Mira out the doors of the penthouse, mute with shock, robbed of the maundering that used to get her into trouble growing up. Maybe for once it's good to find a quietude she doesn't want to eagerly fill. The silence could be a canvas right now, like a good sheet of loose leaf paper. A space to put her thoughts.
There are a number of balconies on the opposite side of the tower, and it's there that the two of them slip away and begin to collect themselves. Zoey stands at the railing and watches Mira pace back and forth, and she's practically vibrating with what looks like anger to anyone who doesn't understand her. Zoey knows otherwise. It's panic. It's a need to act, only there's nowhere to go, no demons to fight, no songs that need singing.
But there is a phone still clenched in Mira's hands. It's there on that balcony that Celine picks up an urgent call from two rattled hunters. Mira lunges into the conversation headlong, and her questions are so terse, tense, and unlike how any of them would have addressed their master as kids. Zoey can't help but double-take at the sound of it herself.
Celine tells them everything, or at least enough. The truth. It confirms what Zoey had already started believing even before the call was made, if she's honest with herself. How many times had she and Mira quietly talked in confidence about Rumi? Worried after her as she shrunk away in solitude?
Rumi had left a haphazard trail of puzzle pieces strewn behind her, ready to be assembled, painting a full picture at last: a love of long-sleeved shirts, a prudish desire to evade public baths, a weak excuse to use a different changing room…
The two of them are still reeling once the call with Celine is over. They're so overwhelmed that they sit down synchronously on the smooth concrete beneath them, and then stare at the glittering cityscape. Despite the soft kiss of the afternoon sun, Zoey feels cold all over, but she finally finds her voice in full again, itching to speak.
"It's really true… Rumi's part demon. Not from a deal or some kind of magic, but… from birth."
"From birth," Mira repeats. She tries to keep a hardened expression, but her eyes are too obvious. Her gaze, soft and desperate, seeks for something untouchable across the skyline. It's not unlike the look she had given Rumi on top of that speeding train, just as their argument had swelled into words that were difficult to take back. Mira's voice is almost a whisper now. "All this time… we've done so much together. I always knew she was struggling with something. Like, maybe some kind of body image thing. You know? Being an idol is hard, and people can talk so much crap, but…"
When she can't bring herself to continue, Zoey softly finishes, "But nothing like this. Demons aren't supposed to be — good."
Or a hunter. Or a friend.
"They're monsters," Mira can't help but spit, the same way she has since the day she'd learned of their existence. Demons were the antithesis of humanity, and yet they had stood across from someone that shared in half of their bloodline — someone they loved dearly. Love dearly. "They're cold, and unfeeling, and all they want is to bring harm to others. That's why we kill them! To protect innocent people. To prevent suffering…"
Nothing about it feels natural or right, not after the years and years of their life's work telling them otherwise. Zoey tries to disentangle a complicated web of feelings herself. She fails to make sense of most of it, but there's one thing she knows for sure: she couldn't let this family crumble apart in front of her. Not again. Not them.
"But Rumi's not evil. Or cold, or unfeeling, and she'd never hurt us like that," Zoey turns toward Mira with urgency, leaning in on her hands. "She just — wouldn't, no matter where she came from."
"I know that!" Mira wraps her arms around herself as though it can keep out the reality of the situation. "I know, Zoey. I know she's not any of those things, no matter what. But everything we've been taught… everything we were supposed to believe in… What am I supposed to think now?"
At the end of the day, Zoey wonders how much it even matters anymore. The Honmoon is sealed in full now, isn't it? All of their doubts could at least be assuaged for the time being, knowing they'll never have to raise a weapon to a demon's throat again. And… and at the end of the day, Rumi was half human, wasn't she? Maybe it mattered. Maybe that was what was most important to remember. She can still hear Celine's voice, muffled through the phone speaker — 'Rumi's mother gave her humanity. She's not like them.'
But something about the memory of those words sours the bile in Zoey's stomach. It's easy for her to imagine two parents from entirely different worlds, finding roots deep in the dirt of common ground. Two wandering souls brought together, feeling love so deeply that they created a new life together, even if it inevitably ended in tragedy. Maybe Celine was right to say it would soften their willpower if they'd known the truth, but there's something wrong here. Something distorted in the process.
Her mouth moves on its own. "If Rumi's mom loved a demon enough to… have a baby with him…"
Mira looks at her then, and an uneasy understanding sparks in her expression.
"You think demons are capable of that? Loving another person?" The venom that had been in her voice before has diluted into genuine curiosity now. Zoey just wishes she had a better answer to offer such an expectant look.
"I don't know. But a hunter saw something in one of them. Enough to… you know."
Like a blushing maiden, she taps her pointer fingers together, her expression explaining enough.
Mira presses her hands over heated cheeks, narrow eyes widening. "That's crazy."
"A Sunlight Sister had a baby with a demon," Zoey says out loud, just to get it out there.
"No way. No, no, I just can't think about that for too long, or I'll totally lose it."
"… Demons can be pretty hot," Zoey mumbles, and imagines the soft caress of Mystery's overgrown bangs across his cheekbones. Their mortal enemy being attractive had been an entirely new experience none of them had been prepared for. Maybe Rumi's mother wasn't very prepared to face that reality herself. Zoey's pretty sure she's going to have so many questions to ask once the dust settles and they're not losing their collective minds. "Okay, okay, so demons are hot sometimes, and they might not all be cold, unfeeling ogres who only know violence. Maybe. But also, maybe we just don't think about the other demons right now. We just think about Rumi."
"Right…" Mira sighs softly. "She's been alone in this. All this time she's been hiding this from us, it must've been…"
"Really lonely. Really scary." And so full of unbridled self-disdain for a piece of her own history. In the smoke and debris of the aftermath, such a thought makes Zoey's heart clench. She had anticipated the patterned girl in the kitchen to have been a demon in disguise at first, but the shame and panic in Rumi's eyes couldn't have been forged. Not like that. "… I can't imagine how it must feel, killing something I'm connected to by blood. Her mom died, and who knows where her dad is now. And it's not like Celine's around much these days. She's really been handling all of this on her own."
"Yeah," Mira agrees, pulling her knees up tight and perching her chin. "I don't even know what to say to her. I wouldn't know where to start."
Zoey fidgets. "Are you mad at her?"
"Maybe? A little bit. Yeah." But then a long-suffering sigh tamps down any certainty in her tone. "I don't know if it's even fair to be. I feel like an idiot for this being under our nose all these years. And I'm angry that they didn't trust us to know in the first place. I get why, but I don't care that I get why. And… if I am angry at Rumi, it's nothing compared to how angry I am for her."
Something tightly wound in Zoey's chest relaxes as she recognizes a very mutual understanding, and in that moment she realizes that she was wrong. Her, Rumi, Mira… they weren't like her parents, and she didn't have to fear their dissolution any more than Rumi had to fear their acceptance. At the end of the day… Zoey can't see a world where she's not standing beside the two of them, ready to endure whatever's thrown at them. It brings a soft smile to her face, and while the world seems a little less clear, she feels revitalized. Hopeful. If they can face these strange little battles with their hearts instead of their weapons, maybe everything could be okay. Weird at first, but… okay.
"Well, we can't hide from her forever," she says. "Let's take a breather, and then… we can set everything right. The three of us."
Mira looks pained by the thought.
"What should I even say?" She struggles to ask, eyes shining stubbornly — only shining, teaming wet at the edges. "How many times have I said how much I hate demons, and how much I want them to burn for eternity, or how ugly and gross they are? And she — just agreed. Like she wasn't half of what they were."
And it's a good question, because Zoey's not really sure either. How many times has she said something awful? And even more difficult to grasp: how many times had Rumi? It was easy to comprehend Mira and herself, but for Rumi to agree to vehemently, distancing herself from what she'd hidden under her clothes… There had been plenty of vicious lyrics scribbled down, line by line, that had served to feed into their hatred, into disdain for the creatures they swore to destroy. And it must have been rightly so for all the pain they've caused over the years.
But she can't help but think of Rumi's apprehension, eyes scanning over the rough draft of Takedown… The last thing either of them want to do is butcher a fragile situation, to blunder their way through a field of mines that had started accumulating the day Rumi was born.
Zoey considers her words with great care, and hopes what she says is enough for now.
"When you've been taught a part of you is bad, you try really hard to erase it all. Even if it means saying bad things about it. I have no clue what I'm doing or how any of this is supposed to go, but… she's still her. Nothing's changed, right? I mean, not really. So… I don't know if I'm supposed to look at her differently now — but I don't think I can. Or that I'd ever want to."
Mira manages a weak smile.
"We can convince her to go to the bathhouse with us."
Zoey laughs, leaning into Mira's shoulder.
"Finally."
"Go on. Your friend's waiting for you. You can finally move forward. Remember?"
"I don't… want to leave you alone again."
"You have to."
Rumi's dream stops abruptly, no different than a steep drop from an uneven ledge.
She opens her eyes to the sound of Zoey's gentle coaxing then — at first with groggy disconnect, and then with sharp, startled clarity. She practically fistfights the blanket draped around her while Zoey leans back and raises her hands in surrender. No signs of a weapon in sight, though perhaps Rumi should have given her friends far more credit than that; it's hard to imagine compassion when you offer little of it to yourself.
"Good morning!" Zoey stammers. Unhelpfully, Rumi's response is to stare blankly at her from the couch cushion she'd drooled on. Her braid is in a disheveled mess, fine purple hairs displaced during her restful sleep, undershirt rumpled and leaving her patterns on full display. She knows she must look like a possum trying to decide whether it wants to play dead or alive, judging by the way Zoey hurries along. "I mean — good night, I guess, but it's almost morning. Technically."
"Right. Um." Sitting up and trying to still the quickening thud of her heartbeat, Rumi smooths her hair as best she can and pulls the blanket high to mask the purple marks running across her flesh. There are probably a million better responses she could offer that wouldn't make her look stupid, but she finds herself lacking in confidence and too breathless to make it through more than a handful of words. So: "Hi."
"Hi," Zoey says. Sitting on their coffee table, she swivels her body around with grace and returns with a flat, rectangular box in her hands; there's a sun-shaped cartoon figure on the front, and when the lid is opened there are an assortment of twists, and milk cream and mochi donuts. "We brought you a snack. We brought back coffee too, but to be totally honest, I've been wired for hours now! So you can have mine, if you want."
Whatever Rumi had expected after their heated stand-off in the kitchen, it hadn't been this. She'd hoped for grace and gentleness in its outcome. Prayed for it even, despite not being entirely sure where her faith settled. It's difficult to keep her voice light, to play a little pretend and act like her world hasn't been rolling her around like a loose stone along a riverbed. But she tries. Oh, does she. "Wow, those look good."
"Of course! They were super highly rated when I looked them up; they'll be the perfect snack."
The box is closed before being offered for Rumi to accept; as she reaches out to take the box, Zoey's gaze shifts to her hands and the snaking lines that have overtaken her knuckles and webbed between her fingers. Rumi isn't surprised that Zoey doesn't quite look at the marks the way Jinu does. Not with fondness, not with understanding, but with a throat that swallows nervously. It still makes her stomach sink, and she practically struggles to remember language.
"Thanks. Thank you… Zoey… I…"
"Can I see them?" Zoey says suddenly, and her intense stare moves from Rumi's fingertips to her face. Her palms are flipped upward in anticipation, open and willing. "Your hands?"
There is hesitation on Rumi's end, but she gently places her hands in Zoey's. The familiar feeling almost feels deceptive, like any moment the illusion will break and she'll be all alone again — but no such thing happens. If Rumi could just sneak into her mind and see what she sees…
But Zoey just brushes her thumbs gently across the planes of her fingertips, where her gel polish has peeled from unmaintained nail beds. "Aiiish! Okay, then we've got to get nail polish, too." Zoey turns toward the rest of the penthouse floor and calls out, "Mira, we're going to need the nail polish!"
"You got it," Mira calls back, and Rumi turns and sits up like a startled meerkat. Mira is wandering around their kitchenette like it's just any other day they've finally been freed from their obligations. "Coffee, doughnuts, nail polish — are we thinking music or movie?"
Rumi's hand touches the soft indention of her throat, almost expecting her voice to freeze on her.
"What?"
"Music or movie," Mira repeats. "Every good sleepover has one or the other. Or both, if we think we'll be bouncing off the walls for a while."
"We'll do our nails and watch some cartoons! You're never too old for cartoons, right? Personally, I've got a list of at least twenty shows we haven't gotten to start yet. That's not including my non-animated list."
Though she watches Zoey like she's grown an extra head, Rumi's expression softens. She can see it now. See what they're trying to do, in spite everything. Had they reached out to Celine? They must've. Must've had a long, confusing talk. She had been so scared of what they said behind doors she had been too afraid to press her ear against.
"I don't understand… After what happened…"
Mira takes the lost tone in her voice as a cue, maybe. She abandons digging through a heavy tub of nail supplies dragged out of one of their many cabinets and walks around the side of the couch to meet them — to sit down next to them and form the triangle that Rumi had grown to find some comfort in. Even if she couldn't be her true self then, moments like these had always helped to keep her going. If she could just stop hiding herself. If she could just be what they needed from her. If she could only fix the parts of her that had been forged in shame.
If only, if only, if only-
Mira speaks then, cutting her unkind thoughts short. "Okay, so. Things could have gone better today. And I know our reaction wouldn't exactly have the most glowing reviews when it comes to friendship…"
"I could have found a better way to tell you. You both were reacting the way we were taught," Rumi says quickly. "I was just… scared. Of what you two would see, when you looked at me."
Zoey shakes her head. "Remember that talk we had, just before the Idol Awards?"
"When we agreed on Golden," Mira says.
"Yeah. What I said then is the same now, whether you're — part demon or not. We all work together perfectly. And I knew a long time ago that I belonged to something really special. Something that didn't care what kind of person I was compared to everyone else." Zoey's chin wobbles, but she reigns it in. "When I'm singing or fighting next to you and Mira, I feel — like I can really be myself.
Zoey reaches out and clasps her hand around Rumi's.
And she says, "I'm sorry that you couldn't feel that, too. But maybe you can now."
Rumi's other hand is just as quickly caught in Mira's as she inches closer.
She says, "It's going to be weird at first, and we've got a lot more to talk about tonight before I'm satisfied. But nothing about you has changed from the person we've known since we were teenagers. You're still you. It's just that… parts of you make a little more sense now."
She's not sure how she hasn't broken down yet, if she's honest. Sitting here between Zoey and Mira's awfully sincere stares and gripping their hands in her own like they've done time after time, she hasn’t decided whether to bawl her eyes out or smile until her face hurts. With so much uncertainty and guilt eating at her, it had only seemed right to her that something else would decay before she had a chance to fix it. Fix herself. Jinu had suffered from a gilded freefall she'd practically pushed him into, and it had terrified her to think that Mira and Zoey would tip and plummet next because of her.
She was part demon, after all.
And all she ever knew in life was that demons weren't to be trusted. Weren't to be loved or cherished. Not to be seen as anything other than a deep, dark secret to be shoved down into the earth's surface, disowned from the very light of the sun. But then… she'd met Jinu and saw the desperation in his eyes that she would so often see reflected in her own mirror.
What is it that her friends see now, looking at the demoniac signature sprawled across her skin?
They'd given her their answer already, even if she struggles to register it. As the three of them lean in and embrace over the smiling sun on the doughnut box, she laughs and rubs her hand across dewy eyes.
Maybe she's really just Rumi through it all.
Notes:
Sorry for how long it took to update! Between real life busyness and this chapter being dialogue heavy AND longer than I anticipated, it was a fight to complete. And I still ended up having to split it yet again! So the next chapter should hopefully be out MUCH faster. Next time -- talking about particular cute demon boys, perhaps? ;)
This chapter is not proofread because I really needed to get it out there, but you can bet I'll be poking away at grammar and word choice over the next day or two. Thank you guys for your support!!! The comments mean the most, and I'm always pumped to read them. ♥ Also, check out the previous chapter for an illustration! I've been slowly adding them to different chapters, and I'm hoping to eventually have one per chapter, if my real life is kind enough to give me the time. :)
Chapter 16
Summary:
Their unified shriek becomes a choir of disbelief, and bits of half-chewed doughnut are fired like buckshot from their mouths.
"The Saja Boy, Jinu?!"
"The soul-slurping demon Jinu?!"
"The Jinu that stole your tonic?!"
Notes:
More important conversations! The next chapter should be switching back to the demon realm for a bit, or at least starting there and shifting back and forth. I never truly know until I get to writing, haha. Either way, I hope you guys enjoy! A lot of building is going on for the bigger stuff, so be patient with me as I do some setting up. ♥ Comments or kudos are always so appreciated! Thanks for the support.
Chapter Text
Rumi had not had any time to let her guard down, not outside of Jinu and their dreamscapes. Maybe if she's honest with herself, she hasn't been able to truly be at peace with Zoey and Mira since the day she'd met them. It wasn't from lack of wanting, of wishing, of praying that someday something could be different. But no matter what she had been doing with them, there had always been this great oppressive fear hovering over her head. What if her shirt rode up too high during training? What if she lost control of her emotions to the point that her voice warped? If a new, awful symptom of her demonism appeared, would she be able to mask it in time? All of these were things Celine had warned her about ad nauseam, leaving her to walk on those sharp eggshells. She would never be herself comfortably, not until the Honmoon amputated the worst parts of her and left her a shining beacon for humanity.
But now, bundled up on the couch in freshly washed bear-and-train pajama bottoms and feeling overstuffed with snacks and drinks at an ungodly hour of night, she finally finds herself at ease.
Maybe she should be angry at how simple this solution was — how possible it had been all along, for her to exist with every cursed imperfection. Zoey and Mira were trying their damnedest right now, even if they were hesitant to make missteps. She could see their mixed opinions battling in real time when their gaze meets the coils upon coils of discoloration striped down her limbs; it’s the mindset of a hunter, so completely at odds with the fact that one of their closest friends was a product of the things they kill with reckless abandon. They're trying, and honestly? It's better than a lot of the outcomes her overactive imagination had dreamed up.
She eats another donut twist, flecks of sugar collecting in the hollow of her blanket before she brushes them away, explaining to the both of them how the shame had crept up into her throat, into her voice — how it'd been the reason she'd rushed into Golden, so desperate to defeat that part of her before it took too much for her to stand. One thing leads to another, and as the long forgotten movie on their laptop rolls credits, she decides that now is better than later to talk about — boys.
A particular boy, anyway. A man that has stayed close to the forefront of her mind, even as she sits in the comfort of their company. A man who she finally admits had helped her — helped the Golden Honmoon come to fruition.
Their reactions are expected. Anticipated. But she still stiffens and leans back when their voices carry like fire alarms through the penthouse floor. The energy behind their cries hit her like a blast wave and her body slants back diagonally in the aftermath.
"Jinu?!"
Their unified shriek becomes a choir of disbelief, and bits of half-chewed doughnut are fired like buckshot from their mouths.
"The Saja Boy, Jinu?!"
"The soul-slurping demon Jinu?!"
"The Jinu that stole your tonic?!"
"Are you nuts?!"
Rumi's hands go up, hands flapping in what she hopes is a mollifying gesture.
"Listen — guys, listen!" Her attempts to take back the reigns on the conversation seems to work, at least for now. While their eyes are still bugging out, Zoey and Mira's mouths snap shut, which gives her at least a little time to get her thoughts in order. A hard task still, but she has no choice but to manage. "I know it's crazy, but… it's true. He figured out I was part demon at the bathhouse — but he helped me keep it hidden in the heat of the fight. After that, he wanted to meet with me. To talk about my patterns. And… yeah, I was planning on cutting his head off at the time. I kind of tried a few times, actually."
Sighing softly, she tucks a long lock of hair back behind her ear, looking away. She's not sure if she's ashamed of herself or not — for falling for a demon. For loving him more now than when he'd fallen, separated by an entire world and the barrier she'd helped to make. If their faults and fears must never be seen, then Jinu's name would have never left her lips again — he's a weak spot, a bruise she keeps pressing, a wound she doesn't want closed up. Thinking about him sitting in the dark while she's leaning on her friends and eating snacks makes her a little sick, suddenly.
Zoey and Mira are watching her intensely. She breathes in deep, and continues.
"Eventually… we started coming to an understanding. About each other." She pulls the blanket more tightly around herself as her patterns begin to ache. If she closes her eyes now, she fears she'll just see him falling into the dark, so she focuses on everything else; the things he'd fed her a little at a time, from the day they met to the peaceful moments within their dreams. "He was a lowborn hundreds of years ago — and his family had been starving. When Gwi-Ma came to him and offered a way out, he took it… and ever since, he'd fallen under Gwi-Ma's complete control. He hears his voice in everything he does, and Gwi-Ma uses that shame and guilt to keep demons like Jinu in line."
"You're sure it wasn't just a sob story to get your trust?" Mira's skepticism is clear in the unhappy line of her lips. Rumi shakes her head and offers only grim certainty.
"At first I thought it could've been. He was definitely trying to manipulate me when we'd initially met. You know, typical demon work. We all know the signs."
Demons are conniving. For every couple of demons that are entirely hopeless when it comes to tricking a hunter, there's at least one or two that have lived long enough to keep them on their toes. Jinu had been no exception. Even so, she can't help but think about the naked look of panic in his eyes after he'd taken her wrist. The sincerity in their duet had been swathed in the light of the Honmoon's glow, as if it had approved of the bond that had welded their fates together, for better or worse. It was real.
What they had was real.
Rumi speaks with soft reverence then.
"The more I spoke with him, the more I could see… that there really was a person in there, beneath all the things Gwi-Ma forced on him. Someone who was — trapped in this cycle of shame… unable to truly be free. He may have been a demon, but it wasn't all he was. I could relate to that feeling more than I realized." The girls share uneasy looks between each other, but Rumi presses on, touching a hand to her throat. "That's when he helped me get my voice back."
The silence is loud.
For all the love Zoey and Mira had for her — and it was undisputed, plentiful, and painfully earnest — it hadn't been enough to heal her. And how could it have been, when they didn't get to know every part of her? How could they have ever imagined that the loss of her voice was bound to the marks on her skin? How could she have ever explained to them that meeting Jinu had been the balm that healed the invisible damage no one else could see?
Mira reels a little.
Only a little, to her credit. She's putting in a lot of effort to keep herself in check.
"Okay…" she says, word taut at first. "Okay, okay…"
"Sorry," Rumi says. She picks up her coffee and sips, a little pink in the face. "I know I'm unloading a lot of questionable things on you guys at once. I understand if you're — angry?"
"I'm just trying my best not to lecture you about demon stranger danger," Mira grumbles, halfhearted. "I believe what you're saying; it's just that the idea that a demon helped us seal the very thing that would keep him locked away… is a lot."
Rumi's stomach twists, and all the while Zoey's gaze sparks with keen insight.
"… Did he know he'd be pushed back down?" she asks.
And god, Rumi can't let herself devolve into another crying session, not again. She feels wrung dry from the past few weeks, to the point where she fears she'll faint from dehydration before she can bring herself to stop. She has to swallow down the worst of it and settle for a voice that wobbles when she brings herself to speak.
"I thought that if he were in the human realm when the Honmoon was sealed, it would know what he was doing. See the good I see and spare him. That's what it was supposed to do for me too, wasn't it? Or — that's what Celine kept telling me." She stops to look down at her hands, turning them over, watching the way Gwi-Ma's imprint shimmers slightly in the light. "I thought if I showed the Honmoon who I truly was, it would spare me. Fix me. And if it could do that for me… why not him?"
But she was wrong.
She was wrong, and they both lost their battles — his more long-winded than hers. She at least had her freedom. She had her voice, her friends, her future… and he was left with nothing. Born trapped in an unkind world, and soon to die trapped in an even worse one.
"You're not like him, Rumi," Mira says. "If there was something good left in him then, a lot of people still died from the stunt they pulled. And he'd spent all this time consuming souls for Gwi-Ma. I don't… think he stood a chance."
What else could any demon do, though?
Rumi can't help but wonder now, at the end of everything.
What would any of them have done, after centuries of being forced to live that way? Her father must have been trapped in the same unyielding horror. Did he give in immediately to that darkness, or did he fight Gwi-Ma's demands until he was bludgeoned into obeying? Maybe it was true and most of the demons they'd fought naturally thirsted for blood, for souls. But if that’s all you're allowed to be and there's no room to revolt against your fate, what else can you become?
Such thoughts have been a constant, nagging source of frustration.
When Zoey speaks up, she seems displeased by her own restless thoughts. "I can't imagine he'd be alive anymore. He betrayed his own kind… turned on Gwi-Ma himself. I don't think there's any world where he'd get to survive switching sides like that."
"No," comes Rumi's firm response, and Zoey and Mira's gaze snaps up in unison. "No, he's still alive. I just saw him, and — I mean. I've been in communication with him."
"The demon realm has cellphones?" Zoey asks.
"Not like that." And she knows it's going to sound crazy, but their lives are crazy. Everything that's happened since the day she was conceived has been nothing but madness, and so she has to believe this brand of madness really matters. "We've been interacting through our dreams. At first it was tricky to get right, but now it's pretty easy to find him. He even finds me, sometimes. We just have to both be sleeping for it to work."
Which is easy enough for him, because she thinks he may very well sleep more than anything else.
A solemn thought, but the most logical one. If she were in his place, she'd want nothing more to retreat to kinder worlds, even if they are false creations.
"How can you be so sure it's really him?" Mira asks. "You feel awful about what happened to him, so it would make sense if he was a common presence in your dreams lately."
"No, I'm sure. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it's like… something has connected us. Maybe it's the Honmoon, or it's something else. Something I don't understand. I don't know. But the more I find him in my sleep, the more I know it's really happening."
She's sure she's forgotten some of the earliest dreams they'd shared together, but there are so many now that are still as clear in her mind as the memory of him on those rooftops. Memories of fluttering autographed photos and ribbon billowing on the trees of Jeju Island… The embarrassing meeting in a bathhouse tub, or the lovely field of flowers across hilltops — it was all genuine. Strange and otherworldly and not quite tangible, but no less compelling than the day she'd sang with him.
"He's in this… pit right now," she murmurs, fingers with freshly painted fingernails curling in on her bicep. "He told me it's some form of punishment Gwi-Ma uses sometimes. They're left down deep in the earth until he sees fit to take them out. That's where he's been since the night we sealed the Honmoon… and these dreams… they're how we find each other. That and — and singing. When we both sing together, even realms apart… the Honmoon lights up. It reacts."
It's then that Zoey gasps, hands flying to her mouth as the dots connect in her head.
"The other night! That was him!" At Mira's confused stare, she's quick to explain. "I woke up and heard Rumi singing in the middle of the night! Or at least I think it was the middle of the night. She was singing um — a love song? Or it felt like one. And I could kinda make out another voice, but I thought it was just in my imagination."
"A love song?" Mira questions. Rumi freezes, her patterns fluttering with a soft light before she pulls her blanket in tight. Her heart begins to hammer in her chest as Mira turns away from Zoey and toward her. "Rumi, are you… in love with him?"
As the two girls wait for a progressively obvious answer, Rumi goes still, fingers shifting to find the end of her braid that had slipped into her lap. Her eyes can't meet theirs, not yet, so she looks to the teddy bears and choo-choo trains that decorate her bent legs.
She thinks of his arms around her, hiding her secret under a checkered towel; thinks of the glow of their shared patterns as his fingers nearly graze her neck; thinks of his great uncertainty when she laughs at him, at the little hat and the bird that takes it; thinks of his hand slipping into hers as they find the words they want to say in song; thinks of his thinning figure as he leads her through a dream neither wants to wake up from; thinks of the desperation in his voice as he presses her hand to his cheek, begging her to say it all over again — that she never meant for his suffering to endure, that she never wanted him to go away; she thinks of flowers; of a field of flowers that they run through together, panting and giggling and lost youthful delight-
("For what it's worth," he'd told her, "I don't think you're a mistake."
That, she thinks, is where she had began to unfurl. Despite every warning sign, every quiet voice telling her this could be a trap, all she needed was someone — anyone — to voice the value of her existence.
The moment those words leave his lips, she is defanged.)
Sitting there in the company of her best friends, combing through phantom flowers in her bedraggled braid, she can only bow her head.
Breathlessly, she says, "I think so."
Before any of the three can break the following silence, the sound of Bobby's startled scream from the adjoining room sends painful shock waves of tension up their spines. The doughnuts and drinks and blankets go flying as they use the backrest of the couch as a launching point, hands snapping shut just as their weapons materialize between their outstretched fingers.
Bobby is just as fast as they are, much to their surprise. The doors burst open and he comes rushing in, tripping on his own feet and tumbling to the ground with a belly-smack and an undignified "oof!" as the air pistons out of his lungs.
"Bobby!" the three cry out together as he flips over, scrambling backward on the ground and pointing toward the parted doors.
"D-d-demon!"
If there were ever a word to completely turn her blood to ice right now, Rumi imagines it'd be that. She doesn't have time to process the dozens of questions that would have followed such a thing, not when their intruder offers a pleased chuff. Rumi peers into the dimly lit hall beyond the doorway and excitement hits her like a shot of adrenaline. Just as Zoey and Mira prepare to leap into action, Rumi stops them with an outstretched arm.
"Wait! That's not a demon!"
In the half-lit gloom there are two large glowing eyes, vibrant like pulsing liquid magma —
Eyes that seem to be looking in wildly different directions.
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