Chapter Text
Should I keep going from here?
That is the question running through Rumi’s mind as she works at the small desk shoved against the wall of an apartment that somehow looks even more worn out than she does.
The desk isn’t even really a desk. It’s an old wooden table she found abandoned beside the dumpsters behind the building and dragged upstairs because buying actual furniture was apparently a luxury she couldn’t afford anymore. One of its legs is slightly shorter than the others, so every time she puts too much pressure on the screwdriver in her hand, the entire thing rocks beneath her elbows. There are scratches covering its surface, a burn mark near one corner, and enough wires, screws, circuit boards, half-empty coffee cups, tools, and dismantled pieces of technology scattered across it that whatever dignity the table might have once possessed is long gone.
The apartment surrounding it isn’t doing much better: the paint is peeling near the ceiling; one of the kitchen cabinet doors doesn’t close unless she kicks it; the heater makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like someone dying whenever it turns on; and Rumi has learned that if she wants hot water for longer than seven minutes, she has to negotiate with the shower like it’s a hostage situation.
But still, It’s hers, or, well, hers as long as she keeps paying rent.
That thought almost makes her laugh.
You know, life isn’t simple for anyone. Rumi knows that. She isn’t stupid enough to believe the universe singled her out personally, looked at every living person on the planet, pointed directly at her and went, Oh, yeah, I want to fuck that one so bad without lube.
Although sometimes she really does wonder, because after everything that has happened to her, Rumi thinks she should have earned at least a little bit of peace by now. She isn’t asking for a mansion or millions of dollars or some perfect happily-ever-after where every problem magically disappears. She would settle for being able to wake up one morning without immediately remembering at least six different reasons why her life is completely fucked, but apparently, even that is asking for too much.
Things have never been easy for her. They weren’t when she was a child, they weren’t when she was a teenager, and they sure as hell aren’t now. At some point, she stopped expecting them to become easier. It’s probably healthier that way, she has enough disappointment in her life as it is.
For starters, Seoul’s beloved superhero is actually nothing more and nothing less than a demon.
Urgh, okay, fine.
Half-demon, if she wants to be technical about it, but she has always hated that distinction, since being only half of something has never made the consequences feel like half as much.
Half-demon doesn’t make the patterns crawling over her skin any less demonic. It doesn’t make the things she can do less unnatural, and it certainly didn’t make the fear of someone finding out any smaller when she was growing up. She could say half as many times as she wanted, but the word demon was always the part people heard.
And because apparently being half-demon wasn’t enough supernatural bullshit for one person, Rumi also got bitten by a radioactive spider during a school trip.
She still remembers staring at the tiny bite afterward, irritated more than worried, completely unaware that the universe had apparently decided her genetics weren’t complicated enough already, and then in the next day she was sticking to things, hearing sounds from even more ridiculous distances, accidentally crushing objects in her hands, moving faster than she should have been physically capable of moving, and discovering that gravity had become more of a suggestion than a rule.
Being half-demon wasn’t enough, she had to become something even more wrong.
There probably should be some kind of cosmic rule against that. I mean, someone who is already half-demon shouldn’t also be allowed to develop spider powers. Those two things shouldn’t even belong in the same sentence, much less inside the same person, and yet here we are.
Rumi tightens another tiny screw into the casing of the web-shooter resting between her fingers, narrowing her eyes when one of the internal wires refuses to sit where she wants it. She nudges it back into place with the tip of a pair of tweezers, her movements careful and practiced.
After the bite from that stupid spider, her life, which had already been built on enough lies to collapse under its own weight, became an even bigger one.
Long before there was a Spider-Woman, there was simply a little girl with purple hair who learned far too early that some parts of herself were safer when nobody could see them.
Her demonic patterns had always been the biggest issue she always hid from others, though her adoptive mother, Celine, had always known what Rumi was.
There had never really been a way for Celine not to know about it, especially when Rumi was young and didn’t have the knowledge she has now, but knowing and accepting are two completely different things, and children are much better at noticing those differences than adults like to believe.
The point is that Rumi noticed the way Celine’s expression changed whenever the demonic patterns spread too far across her skin, or the tiny hesitation before she touched her, or the tension in her face, or the way her eyes sometimes lingered on the markings for just a second too long before looking back at Rumi’s face.
Maybe Celine didn’t even realize she was doing it, but Rumi did, and when you’re young, you don’t need someone to sit you down and explain that there is something wrong with you. Sometimes all it takes is a look.
So Rumi learned how to cover her patterns. She learned which clothes hid them best, and how to excuse herself before anyone noticed something strange.
More importantly, she learned that people loved her more easily when they didn’t have to see everything she was.
By the time the spider bit her, lying was already second nature, so she did what she knew how to do; she hid that too. Only this time, Celine didn't know about it.
At first, Rumi told herself it was temporary. She just needed time to understand what was happening, then she needed time to control it, and then she needed time to figure out what the hell she was supposed to say.
Hey, Mom. Remember how I'm secretly half-demon? Funny story. I'm also some kind of spider-mutant now!
That conversation never exactly found the right moment.
Eventually, days became weeks, weeks became months, and the secret simply became another thing she carried alone.
Sometimes Rumi wonders whether keeping it from Celine was the right decision, but then she remembers the gun.
Her fingers stop moving. The screwdriver remains pressed against the tiny screw in the web-shooter, but she doesn’t turn it.
For a moment, the apartment disappears.
She remembers the moment Celine finally cornered Spider-Woman after years of trying to arrest her. Rumi had still been wearing the mask then, still refusing to cooperate even with nowhere left to run, because apparently making reasonable decisions when backed into a corner has never been one of her strongest qualities. She remembers Celine ordering her to stand down, and how she didn't listen, and then… the gunshot.
Even now, remembering it makes something inside her chest tighten. It had been a warning shot, she knows that. She has reminded herself of that fact more times than she can count. Celine hadn't known it was her. She hadn't looked at her daughter and decided to pull the trigger. As far as Celine knew, the person standing in front of her was the vigilante she'd spent years trying to arrest, refusing to surrender even after finally being cornered.
Unfortunately, Rumi's brain has never been particularly interested in important differences.
The bullet had struck close enough that Rumi remembered the sound of it cutting through the air, close enough that her spider-sense had screamed through her skull before Celine even pulled the trigger. Close enough that, for one horrible second, Rumi hadn't seen her mother standing in front of her. She had seen someone holding a gun and thought she was dangerous.
And Rumi, cornered and desperate, terrified that she might actually end up dying at her own mother's hands, decided to take off her mask and let Celine see that the vigilante she'd spent so long criticizing for interfering with police work was really just her daughter trying to help.
The change in Celine face when she finally realized who Spider-Woman was, the disbelief first, followed by something much harder to look at, like anger, betrayal, and maybe even horror, was exactly the kind of expression that made Rumi wish she could put the mask back on and pretend the reveal had never happened. The questions came faster than she could answer them, as if every explanation only created more things she had apparently done wrong.
Funny how quickly nineteen years of calling someone Mom could disappear when there was a barrel pointed in your direction, and you were secretly a superhero for about three years.
Rumi lets out a slow breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and finally pulls the screwdriver away from the web-shooter. She sets it down beside the scattered screws, leaning back in her chair until it gives an unpleasant creak beneath her weight.
Her eyes stay fixed on the device in front of her without really seeing it, because as painful as that day was, as much as Rumi wishes she could rip the memory out of her head and throw it somewhere she would never have to look at it again, nothing Celine said and nothing she did could compare to what happened… afterward.
You know, despite being as fucked up, secretive, and emotionally unavailable as she was, Rumi had still managed to keep two genuinely valuable friendships in her life, Mira and Zoey.
Although calling them just friendships wouldn’t exactly be accurate.
For a long time, Rumi had refused to think too deeply about whatever the hell she felt whenever she was around them. She simply knew that she wanted to be close to them. If Mira and Zoey were going somewhere, Rumi wanted to go too. If they were sitting together, she somehow always ended up nearby. If something happened during patrol, they were the first people she wanted to tell. If she found something funny, her mind immediately went to Zoey because she already knew Zoey would laugh too loudly at it. If somebody pissed her off, she wanted to complain to Mira because Mira would either agree with her completely or somehow make fun of Rumi until she forgot what she had been angry about in the first place.
She liked listening to Zoey talk about absolutely nothing for twenty minutes straight, especially when she got excited and started throwing random facts into conversations that had nothing to do with whatever they had originally been discussing. Rumi knew more about turtles than any normal human being should ever need to know because of her.
Mira was different, because she liked pushing her buttons, and Rumi liked pushing back.
Their conversations could turn into competitions over absolutely anything. Who could finish something faster, who could win a fight, who had the better idea, who could annoy the other first. Mira had a particular talent for looking at Rumi with that irritating little expression that immediately made her want to prove something, and Rumi had an equally impressive talent for saying exactly the right thing to make Mira roll her eyes.
They were comfortable, and that was the dangerous part, because Rumi had spent most of her life believing closeness came with an expiration date. People could love the version of her they were allowed to see, sure, but there was always something hidden underneath.
With Mira and Zoey, though, she had slowly started letting herself believe that maybe she could have something good without waiting for the exact moment it would be taken away.
And somewhere along the way, Rumi realized she had a crush on both of them, which was just fucking fantastic, since apparently her life wasn’t complicated enough. The issue wasn’t exactly that she had a crush, that’s a perfectly normal thing for a teenager. No, the issue was that she somehow managed not only to fall for two people at the same time, but also for two people who were already dating each other.
Well, at least Rumi had enough common sense not to say anything.
Mira and Zoey were happy together. Rumi could see that much. She saw it in the casual touches between them, in the way Zoey naturally leaned into Mira, in the way Mira’s expression softened around her when she thought nobody was paying attention. They loved each other, and Rumi wasn’t going to be the asshole who got between that, so she swallowed it.
She convinced herself that being their friend was enough. She could stand beside them and tease them and fight alongside them and listen to Zoey’s stupid turtle facts and argue with Mira until one of them threatened to throw the other off a building.
That had to be enough, because even if they weren’t dating, why the hell would either of them want Rumi anyway?
There were people who came with baggage, and then there was Rumi, who arrived carrying an entire fucking airport.
Half-demon. Secret superhero. Pathological liar by necessity. Emotionally constipated. Terrible at talking about her feelings. Doesn't know her father. Lost her biological mother. Has enough unresolved issues with her adoptive mother to keep a therapist employed for the next decade. Regularly disappears in the middle of the night to get punched, stabbed, thrown through walls, or some delightful combination of the three.
Such girlfriend material, huh?
What I'm trying to say is that when Mira and Zoey eventually confessed that they liked her too and they wanted to date her, Rumi genuinely thought they were messing with her at first. She even waited for Zoey or Mira to start laughing, but neither of them did, and for once in her life, Rumi allowed herself to be naive and happy.
For the first time, she let herself imagine what it could be like being with them without having to pretend that the way she looked at them meant nothing. She could wake up beside them, or come home after patrol and have somewhere and someone to return to. She could listen to Zoey ramble while Mira complained about both of them, or kiss Mira just to shut her up during an argument and probably getting punched in the shoulder afterward. She could have movie nights to inevitably fall asleep halfway through, and then find both of them asleep against her shoulder.
Just normal things.
Things Rumi had never realized she wanted so badly until someone finally told her she was allowed to have them.
For a few hours, she had girlfriends.
Yes, for a few hours, Rumi had been allowed to think that maybe the universe had finally gotten tired of fucking with her.
But then Gwi-ma showed up, because apparently happiness has a fucking timer attached to it.
And when he finally lost, when Rumi finally thought it was over, he made sure she lost too.
His final act wasn’t another army, or another attack, or even an attempt to kill her. Instead, Gwi-ma cursed her.
Honestly, she wishes he had just killed her, since that would have been simpler.
He designed a curse with such specific cruelty that Rumi sometimes wonders whether he had been planning it long before their final confrontation, or whether he had looked into her life, seen exactly what mattered most to her, and decided death would have been far too merciful.
Everyone would remember Spider-Woman as if nothing had happened, but Ryu Rumi would disappear. Not die, or go missing, simply cease to exist.
And one year later, Rumi is still trying to figure out how the hell someone is supposed to recover from that, because losing her home destroyed her.
Not having somewhere familiar to return to after everything was over destroyed her. Not having Zoey beside her anymore, laughing so hard at her own jokes that she could barely finish telling them, destroyed her. Not having Mira beside her destroyed her too. No more Mira looking at her like she was simultaneously the most irritating person alive and someone she would still choose to stand beside anyway. No more challenges. No more teasing. No more tiny moments where their shoulders touched and Rumi pretended she hadn’t noticed.
No more them.
And Celine… Well, that one is a little bit more complicated.
Rumi could spend hours listing every way their relationship had hurt her, even though she knows Celine never meant to hurt her. The older woman just wanted to protect her, since they both knew how others would react if they found out that Rumi was a demon, but knowing that doesn't make the memories of every lesson, every warning, and every look she received from her caretaker any less painful.
However, she can also remember Celine’s hugs.
She can remember the way Celine held her when she was younger. The way she would braid Rumi’s hair, or the way her voice changed when Rumi was genuinely hurt, or the lectures that came from fear even when Rumi hated hearing them, or the way she could walk into a room after doing something catastrophically stupid and immediately know from Celine’s expression that she was about to hear about it for the next hour.
Rumi would give almost anything to hear one of those lectures again.
She would happily sit there while Celine yelled at her for being reckless and in the end she would let her hug her.
But Celine doesn’t know who she is anymore.
Neither does Zoey and Mira.
Sometimes she wishes that all of them could be dead, because that would be easier to understand and maybe easier for Rumi to move on, but they are somewhere out there right now, breathing and talking and laughing and continuing with their lives, not knowing that Rumi was ever part of them.
That definitely is the cruelest part of all, because every day, Rumi has to wake up knowing that the people she loves still exist in a world where she doesn’t.
So, basically, she spends every day trying not to lose her fucking mind.
And every day, sooner or later, the same thought comes back.
Should I keep going from here?
Sometimes it happens when she wakes up, or when she’s sitting alone in the apartment, or when she’s bleeding after patrol, staring at the city from the edge of some rooftop while Seoul moves beneath her like nothing ever happened.
But most of the time it feels like it has been screaming inside her head for hours, because giving up is easier.
She knows that because... she's tried to die before. Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes intentionally.
There are nights when she thinks about how incredibly simple it would be to stop trying and pretending there is some reason she needs to keep dragging herself through another day when everything that once made those days worth living has already been taken from her.
What exactly is she rebuilding toward?
There is no cure, or breaking the curse, or whatever.
She knows that now.
She spent months refusing to believe it. Months searching for anything that could undo what Gwi-ma had done. Magic, demonic rituals, ancient texts, technology, loopholes, theories so desperate she would have laughed at herself for considering them before, but nothing worked, and Ryu Rumi is nothing more than a ghost of herself.
Except even ghosts have the dignity of being remembered, and they would still have their things. Meanwhile, Spider-woman didn't have clothes, shoes, or pictures. No little pieces of herself scattered around the apartment she used to share with her girls that would prove she had lived there with them
She also lost her documents: there was no identification under her name, or birth certificate. As far as every official system was concerned, Ryu Rumi had never been born.
Her bank account also didn’t exist. Her money was gone. Her phone records were gone. Actually, her phone itself was gone after the curse.
Anything registered under her name had disappeared with it.
It's funny how Rumi had spent years hiding pieces of herself from everyone else, and then Gwi-ma had apparently decided to finish the job.
After everything was erased, Rumi was left with exactly two things: the Spider-Woman suit she had been wearing, and the mask. At least Gwi-ma was a kind, understanding soul who didn't automatically leave her butt-naked in the middle of the end of the fight. That would've really been the cherry on top.
So, yeah, the last year has been fucking impossible.
There really isn’t a prettier way to put it.
But Rumi has been trying to survive on her own anyway, because apparently when the universe erases you from existence, it doesn’t come with a helpful little instruction manual explaining what the fuck you’re supposed to do afterward.
Her first brilliant idea had been getting her documents back.
Well, getting them back wasn’t exactly possible considering there was technically nothing to recover. There were no missing records buried somewhere in a government database, so she had to start over and create a legal existence for herself again, which turned out to be an absolute nightmare when you were a grown woman trying to explain why there was practically no record of you before a certain point.
Still, she managed, and a small, stupid part of her had hoped that putting herself back into the world would somehow force the curse to recognize her again.
If there was an identification card with Ryu Rumi written across it, then Ryu Rumi existed. If she had an address, a phone number, bills, documents, a bank account… if she rebuilt enough evidence that Ryu Rumi was a real person, then maybe the curse would weaken, and someone would look at her and suddenly remember.
Nothing happened.
Obviously.
Turns out demonic magic isn’t particularly intimidated by government bureaucracy.
At least having documents meant she could start doing things normal people needed to do in order to participate in the wonderful experience known as being alive, like paying rent, or buying things without having to find increasingly questionable ways around identification requirements.
The next problem was money.
And holy shit, money has been a problem. Still is, actually, but the point is that the first few months were particularly awful. There had been days when Rumi genuinely had to choose which necessity was going to be slightly less necessary that week. Food, rent, replacement components for her web-shooters, basic toiletries, medicine, transportation… everything cost money in this fucking capitalist world, and unfortunately saving Seoul on a regular basis came with a salary of exactly zero dollars an hour, because apparently superheroes didn’t get benefits either. Who knew?
So she started using one of the few things Gwi-ma couldn’t erase.
Her brain.
Rumi had always been good with technology and engineering. She can take apart a device, understand how it works, figure out what has gone wrong, and usually find some way to make it work again, even when the answer involves parts that technically weren’t designed to go together.
She already built and maintained her own web-shooters, for fuck’s sake, so fixing someone’s broken laptop wasn’t exactly the greatest engineering challenge of her life, which means that eventually Rumi started repairing electronics for money.
At first it was small things like phones with shattered screens, laptops that refused to turn on, computers that people had somehow managed to fill with enough malware to qualify as biological weapons, and then people started coming back, and recommending her to other people. That's how somewhere along the way, she ended up with what could generously be described as her own electronics repair shop.
The only slight problem was that her shop was also her apartment, and her apartment is a fucking disaster. It had been the cheapest apartment she could find that was still technically habitable, but it was cheap enough that the tiny amount of money she made repairing electronics could mostly cover it.
And more importantly, it was hers, since everything in that apartment had been collected after the curse, and that matters more than Rumi likes to admit. Besides, comparing to how things had been at the beginning, she is practically fucking thriving.
Okay, she still occasionally looks at her bank account and decides instant noodles count as a nutritionally complete meal, but that is progress.
With a little more money coming in, Spider-Woman had also slowly started collecting technology again. Most of it wasn’t new, since buying brand-new components is expensive, and Rumi has better things to spend her money on, so she became extremely good at salvaging what other people considered broken.
Piece by piece, she built herself something surprisingly close to a gaming PC, which would have been significantly more exciting if Rumi actually played games. The most gaming that computer has probably ever experienced was when Rumi ran a benchmark on it after replacing the GPU.
Instead, most of its processing power goes toward something far more useful. E.V., her artificial intelligence.
E.V. had started smaller. It was a project born partly out of necessity and partly because Rumi desperately needed something to occupy her brain during the nights when sleeping meant lying in bed thinking about everything she had lost.
Eventually, though, she kept improving it, until E.V. became less like a program and more like a presence permanently woven through the little technological ecosystem Rumi had built around herself.
The PC became E.V.’s main system, but Rumi also heavily modified her phone to communicate with it remotely. Calling the thing in her pocket a normal cellphone at this point would be an insult to normal cellphones, because she had replaced hardware, rewritten parts of the operating system, expanded its capabilities, encrypted the living shit out of it, and connected it to systems she definitely did not legally have permission to access.
E.V. helped more than she expected it to, and not just with Spider-Woman, but with everything. The repair business. Research. Managing information. Monitoring the systems Rumi had connected to. Keeping track of things her exhausted brain inevitably forgot. Running diagnostics on her equipment. Helping analyze whatever new problem Rumi had decided to create for herself at three in the morning.
And, occasionally, just talking.
Rumi doesn’t like thinking too hard about that part, given the fact that creating an artificial intelligence because you’re lonely sounds significantly more pathetic when you actually say it out loud, so she doesn’t. E.V. is practical, that’s all.
Absolutely nothing emotionally concerning happening here.
Ahem, anyway…
All of that doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that Spider-Woman has never been more active than she has been during this past year.
Videos of her appear online constantly now. Blurry footage of her swinging between buildings. Security-camera recordings of her dropping into alleys. Phone videos of her stopping crimes, helping civilians, and pulling people out of wrecked cars.
People have theories about why, and the most popular one is actually kind of sweet, which somehow makes Rumi hate it even more.
They think she is happy.
Yeah, you are allowed to laugh.
They think defeating Gwi-ma changed something in her, that after defeating the monster she had been fighting for so long, that now she is free and happy about it.
They could not be more fucking wrong.
If anything, Spider-Woman has been more active because Rumi has absolutely no idea what else she is supposed to do with herself.
She keeps climbing out of her apartment window and disappearing between the buildings because, somehow, swinging through Seoul at three in the morning feels easier than sitting alone in her apartment with nothing but her own thoughts.
And she keeps doing her.. job?
Rumi’s fingers pause over the web-shooter.
No.
Not really. Jobs pay you.
Obligation?
That sounds worse.
Responsibility? Duty?
None of those words feel right either.
There is one particular phrase Rumi remembers hearing from Celine years ago.
With great power comes great responsibility.
At the time, Celine obviously wasn’t talking about radioactive spiders, superheroes, demons, secret identities, or any of the other ridiculous bullshit that would eventually become Rumi’s life. She had been talking about her own position as a police captain, about authority and the responsibility that came with having the power to make decisions that could affect other people. Rumi doesn’t even remember the entire conversation anymore. She remembers where Celine had been standing, vaguely remembers the serious expression on her face, and remembers thinking that it sounded exactly like the kind of dramatic wisdom a mother would give her daughter and expect her to carry around for the rest of her life.
Unfortunately, Rumi did exactly that, considering that the phrase stuck.
And after the spider bite, after she realized what she could do and eventually decided to become Spider-Woman, those words came back to her with an entirely different meaning.
With great power comes great responsibility.
It became one of the stupid little things she repeated to herself whenever being Spider-Woman became too difficult, or when she was exhausted, hurt, or when she started to wonder why the hell she was risking her life for strangers who didn’t even know her name. Rumi had power that most people didn’t. She could lift things no normal person could lift, move faster than them, survive things that should kill them, sense danger before it happened. She could climb walls and swing across Seoul and reach someone trapped ten stories above the ground when nobody else could.
So if she could help, shouldn’t she?
If she had the power to stop something terrible from happening and chose not to, isn’t some part of that on her?
Those stupid words kept her going more times than Celine would ever know.
But, respectfully…
Holy fucking shit, can somebody please take the responsibility back?
God, Buddha, Jesus, the universe, some random cosmic entity Rumi has never heard of, literally whoever is currently accepting complaints, because she would like to formally resign.
For starters, she never fucking asked for these powers!
It wasn’t like some radioactive spider showed up with a contract and health insurance and asked, Hey, Rumi, would you like superhuman abilities accompanied by severe psychological damage and a dramatically shortened life expectancy? Sign here.
The little bastard just bit her!
And she was already a half-demon, for fucks sake!
Did that not count as her lifetime supernatural bullshit quota?!
Why does having the ability to throw a car suddenly mean she has a moral obligation to spend the rest of her life preventing other people from being crushed by cars?! Why is that her problem?! Why can’t she use her powers for something normal and selfish for once?! Like, i dont know, maybe never needing a ladder again?! Or carrying all the grocery bags upstairs in one trip?
Why does everything have to be about fucking responsibility?!
.
.
.
Ahem.
Mental breakdown aside…
When Rumi is out being Spider-Woman, particularly during quieter nights when Seoul has apparently decided to behave itself for longer than twenty consecutive minutes, she has developed another habit.
She checks on her... people. Her loved ones. Her former loved ones? The people she loves who no longer know they love her?
Well, there really isn’t a pleasant word for that.
Technically, what she does could probably be described as stalking, but saying Rumi likes to stalk on her former girlfriends and adoptive mother from rooftops makes her sound significantly creepier than she would prefer, so she chooses not to phrase it that way.
She checks on them.
That sounds better.
She doesn’t follow them every second of every day. She isn’t sitting outside their windows for eight hours watching them eat breakfast or something equally fucking insane. She has patrols. She has her repair work. She has equipment to maintain, E.V. to improve, bills to pay, and approximately seventeen different illegal systems to access.
She just… likes knowing they’re okay.
At least, that’s what it became.
In the beginning, there had been another reason: hope.
For the first few weeks after Gwi-ma’s curse, Rumi watched Mira, Zoey, and Celine constantly because she was searching for anything, like a hesitation, a strange expression, a moment of confusion… Basically some tiny crack in the curse that would tell her Ryu Rumi was still somewhere inside their memories. She wanted to see Mira walk into a room and stop because something felt wrong. She wanted Zoey to look at an empty space beside her and wonder why it felt like someone should be sitting there. She wanted Celine to find herself setting an extra plate at the table without understanding why.
Anything would have been enough.
And the worst part is that, for a while, Rumi thought she found it.
There were nights when she would return to the apartment she had once shared with Mira and Zoey… Uh, okay, not return, technically. She didn’t live there anymore, but in her head, some part of it would probably always be their apartment. She still remembered the way the place looked when all three of them were there. She remembers where she used to leave her shoes, where Mira liked to sit, and the places Zoey would abandon random things and then accuse everyone else of moving them. She remembered waking up there, falling asleep there, eating there, laughing there.
Loving them there.
So sometimes, during patrol, Spider-Woman would end up on a rooftop nearby, and watch, that was when she startt to notice how Mira and Zoey sometimes would cry out of nowhere, and it would not be dramatic sobbing, just quiet tears. The kind that somehow hurt worse to watch.
Rumi froze when she saw that, because for one incredible, terrifying second, she thought that part of them remembered.
Sometimes they would even cry together, and those moments almost destroyed her, because she was seeing the two women she loved hold each other while tears ran down their faces, and she would have to physically stop herself from going to them.
Every instinct she had screamed at her to move, to go through the window, take off the mask, and tell everything to them.
And for a while, those moments gave her hope, because why else would they be crying?
Maybe memories could be erased without feelings disappearing completely, or maybe the curse could remove Rumi’s face and name but couldn’t remove the space she had occupied, or love is buried deeper than memory… Or, at least, that's what Rumi wanted to believe.
Now, Celine was harder to read, since Rumi never saw her cry, which isn’t particularly surprising. Celine had never exactly been the kind of woman to collapse where someone could see her. If she cried, Rumi imagined she would do it behind a locked door, clean herself up afterward, and walk out looking like nothing had happened.
But there was something different about her too, or Rumi thought there was. It was something like a heaviness in the way the older woman moved through the day. The way she sometimes seemed to stop and stare at nothing for longer than necessary. The exhaustion around her eyes. The occasional distant expression that Rumi knew too well from years of watching her.
There were moments when Rumi became completely convinced that Celine felt it. That somewhere inside her was the knowledge that she had a daughter. Maybe she couldn’t remember her name or her face, but surely some part of her knew.
Surely you couldn’t raise someone and then simply lose them without leaving some kind of fucking scar behind.
That belief kept Rumi going for longer than she wants to admit. Until eventually… It stopped.
I mean, there wasn’t one specific morning where Mira, Zoey, and Celine woke up magically fine. It happened slowly since Zoey and Mira stopped crying as often, and the heaviness she thought she saw in Celine became harder and harder to find.
Days became weeks. Weeks became months, and… their lives continued.
The world adapted around the hole where Rumi used to be until eventually it stopped looking like a hole at all.
And now Rumi doesn’t know what the fuck she actually saw back then.
Maybe she had been right.
Maybe some part of them had known something was missing and the curse simply needed time to settle completely into their minds, slowly smoothing over every inconsistency until their brains stopped fighting against it, or maybe Rumi had imagined the entire thing from the very beginning, because Zoey could have been crying about something completely unrelated.
And maybe the heaviness in Celine’s expression had existed because the entire fucking world had just survived Gwi-ma and everyone was traumatized.
Maybe Rumi had been so desperate for proof that she mattered that she turned completely normal grief into evidence of something that wasn’t there.
She doesn’t know which theory is the right one. All she knows is that now, one year later, nothing seems wrong to them anymore.
And Rumi is the only person left who can mourn someone nobody else remembers existed, which brings her to another thing she has become particularly talented at over the last year: blaming herself.
Deep down, Rumi knows telling them the truth immediately after the curse probably wouldn’t have changed anything, because the curse isn’t some misunderstanding she can clear up with a conversation.
She couldn’t exactly knock on their door and go, Hey, funny story, I'm actually your girlfriend who got erased from existence by the Demon King. Here are some pictures that no longer exist as evidence.
What was she supposed to show them? Everything proving their relationship had been erased, and everything proving she was Celine’s daughter had been erased.
Even if Rumi told them things only she could know, Gwi-ma’s curse might be powerful enough to rewrite reality itself. There is no guarantee their minds would accept any of it.
Maybe they would think she was lying, or think Spider-Woman had become obsessed with them, and Celine would see her as a threat again.
There are literally a thousand reasons why telling them probably wouldn’t have worked, but… what if it would have?
What if the curse needed to be challenged? What if hearing the truth while the loss was still fresh would have created a crack? What if those nights when Mira and Zoey were crying had been her chance? What if the reason they were crying was because some tiny part of them was fighting Gwi-ma’s magic, waiting for someone to give them the missing piece?
Rumi fucking hates what if. There is no answer to it, and there never will be. Maybe telling them would have changed everything, or would have changed absolutely nothing, but she didn’t even try.
She had been terrified, confused, homeless, and broke. Basically barely functioning and still trying to understand what Gwi-ma had actually done to her. She told herself she needed evidence first, that she needed to understand the curse, and that approaching them without knowing what might happen could make everything worse.
And while she waited, whatever grief she thought she saw in them slowly disappeared.
Now it has been a year.
Now Mira and Zoey have built a life in which Rumi was never their girlfriend, and Celine has built a life in which Rumi was never her daughter.
They adjusted and moved forward. Meanwhile Rumi is still standing exactly where Gwi-ma left her.
So yeah, deep down, she knows it probably wouldn’t have made a difference.
She knows blaming herself is pointless. She knows she made the best decisions she could while her entire fucking existence was collapsing around her, but knowing something and believing it are two very different things.
It’s too late now, anyway.
However, just so nobody can say Rumi spent the entire first year after the curse being a completely useless coward, she would like it officially stated that she did, in fact, gather enough courage to stand face-to-face with Celine at least once.
Actually, more than once eventually, but the first time is the one that counts.
Rumi thinks she deserves some credit for that one, because walking into Celine’s office after Gwi-ma’s curse had been one of the most terrifying things she had done in a very long time, which is saying something considering Rumi regularly throws herself off buildings for transportation.
The problem wasn’t that Celine was particularly terrifying by herself.
Urgh, okay, that’s a lie. Celine can absolutely be terrifying, since she had mastered that very specific look mothers somehow developed where they didn’t need to raise their voice or even say anything. One glance was enough to make you mentally review everything you had done in the last forty-eight hours and start wondering which crime she had discovered.
But Rumi had dealt with that Celine her entire life. That was different, because the woman sitting inside that office wasn’t Rumi’s mother anymore. The person behind the Spider-Woman mask didn't matter anymore.
If Celine decided Spider-Woman was dangerous, Rumi couldn’t pull off the mask and stop everything like she did before the curse. She couldn't call her mom like she did before.
Oh, well, technically, she could, but that would probably result in an incredibly awkward conversation followed by a psychiatric evaluation.
The truth was that if Celine wanted to point a gun at Spider-Woman again, there was nothing Rumi could reveal underneath the mask that would make her lower it.
So when Rumi first climbed through the window of Celine’s office after the curse, she had been approximately two seconds away from throwing herself right back out of it.
She remembers landing quietly inside and immediately thinking: This is a terrible fucking idea. I should go back–
But then Celine looked up, and Rumi had frozen. For a second, neither of them said anything.
Rumi had stared at the woman who raised her, searching automatically for some sign of recognition even though she already knew she wouldn’t find one, and Celine looked at her exactly the way a police captain would look at a masked vigilante who had just entered her office through a window without permission: suspicion, annoyance, and a little bit of what the fuck are you doing here?
Still, Rumi didn’t run, which, again, deserves recognition.
Instead, Spider-Woman straightened herself up and told Captain Celine that she had evidence of drug trafficking and corrupt officers. Names, locations, transactions, dates, connections between people who really didn’t want those connections becoming public knowledge.
Rumi had spent weeks gathering everything. Partly through patrol, partly through information E.V. helped her organize, and partly through methods that would make any discussion about whether evidence had been legally obtained extremely inconvenient.
So they simply didn’t discuss that part. Celine didn’t need to know exactly how Spider-Woman had gotten everything.
Plausible deniability was a beautiful thing, and surprisingly, Celine reacted… elatively well.
Like, she didn’t shoot her or ordered her out of the officer either, which is an excellent start.
The captain got suspicious obviously, Celine was still Celine even without Rumi in her memories, but in the end, she listened, took the documents, and asked questions. Spider-Woman answered them while desperately trying not to think about how fucking strange and painful the entire interaction was.
There was something almost cruel about standing in front of her mother and speaking to her professionally.
And yet Rumi stood there in the Spider-Woman suit, hiding behind the mask while Celine treated her like exactly what she appeared to be: a superhero bringing information to the police. A stranger.
Still, for once in her fucking life, something good actually came out of one of Rumi’s terrible decisions, because that meeting became another, and then another.
Not immediately, though. Celine wasn’t suddenly Spider-Woman’s best friend because she had dropped some useful paperwork on her desk, but over the following months, Spider-Woman continued helping with police cases whenever she could.
Somewhere between the arrests, investigations, rescues, evidence, paperwork, and Spider-Woman repeatedly proving that she wasn’t there to make the police department’s life harder… Celine softened.
Her posture stopped becoming quite so defensive whenever Spider-Woman appeared.
She stopped looking at the vigilante like she expected her to create another problem every time she entered the room.
Sometimes she even seemed almost… comfortable. Not completely, she's not that delusional yet, but it was enough that a few months after that first meeting, something happened that Rumi had never expected.
Celine agreed to take Spider-Woman’s phone number.
Technically, it was for professional reasons, given the fact that there were situations where Spider-Woman had information Celine needed. There were cases where the police might benefit from contacting her directly. It was significantly more practical than waiting for a masked woman to randomly appear outside the station whenever she felt like it.
Completely professional reasons, except that Rumi nearly cried.
She had gone home afterward and stared at Celine’s contact information on her modified phone for an embarrassingly long amount of time.
It wasn’t Mom, she couldn’t bring herself to put that. It would hurt too much, so the contact said Captain Celine, which somehow hurt in an entirely different way, but all that mattered is that Celine had her number again.
Rumi had learned over the last year that sometimes you took whatever the universe is willing to give you and shut the fuck up before it changed its mind.
And then Celine called her for the first time, and Rumi almost dropped the phone.
She had been working at her desk when E.V. notified her of the incoming call, and seeing the name appear on the screen made every thought disappear from her brain.
Eventually she managed to press the button.
“Spider-Woman?” Celine’s voice came through the speaker, and Rumi had to close her eyes, because fuck.
She hadn’t realized how much she missed hearing Celine call her, even if it wasn’t her name, even if the conversation that followed was entirely about police business. Even if Celine had no idea that the woman on the other end of the phone had spent years hearing that same voice telling her to wake up, come eat, be careful, stop doing something stupid, go to sleep, answer her phone, clean something, explain herself, or listen to yet another lecture.
Rumi still got to hear her. So now, whenever Celine calls, Spider-Woman tries very, very hard not to get emotional. She usually succeeds.
There was one time she had to mute herself for a few seconds because Celine said, Be careful, before Rumi went after someone.
That one was unfair.
Celine had probably meant it in the generic please don’t get yourself killed before the police arrive kind of way, but Rumi heard her mother.
She spent the next ten minutes swinging across Seoul with suspiciously watery eyes while insisting to E.V. that the wind was responsible.
Ah, and of course there is Bobby.
Rumi cannot discuss her slowly improving relationship with the police without mentioning Bobby, because Bobby might genuinely be the nicest fucking police officer she has ever met.
She also strongly suspects he deserves at least partial credit for Celine becoming less hostile toward Spider-Woman, because Bobby is a fan. It’s impossible not to know, since the man’s entire face lights up whenever Spider-Woman shows up.
Rumi has watched fully grown adults meet celebrities with less excitement than Bobby displays when he spots her sitting on top of a police car after dropping off some criminal. His eyes always sparkle like he didn’t see her one day ago.
And Rumi, likes the way he gets when he sees her, although she makes jokes or tease him, but there is something painfully nice about having someone genuinely happy to see her. Even if, once again, he is happy to see Spider-Woman.
Bobby talks to her like she is a person instead of some strange masked creature that occasionally delivers handcuffed criminals to the police station. He asks how she’s doing. He tells her about cases. He complains. He jokes with her.
And most importantly, the man gives her donuts.
Bobby has absolutely no idea how many times he accidentally fed a starving woman.
There were days after the curse when Rumi barely had enough money for food. Rent came first because homelessness had already been close enough for her liking. Equipment repairs sometimes had to come second because broken web-shooters were a little inconvenient when your transportation method involved throwing yourself between skyscrapers.
Food occasionally ended up somewhere further down the list than it should have.
So whenever Bobby casually offered her a donut from whatever box had been brought into the station that day, Rumi accepted it like he was handing her the fucking Holy Grail.
Bobby probably thought Spider-Woman just really liked donuts. Little does he know.
And if Bobby occasionally talked about how helpful Spider-Woman was around Celine, or defended her whenever another officer complained about vigilantes, or enthusiastically pointed out all the cases she had helped them solve… Well, she isn’t saying that’s why Celine eventually lowered her guard, but she isn’t not saying it either.
Somehow, against every expectation Rumi had when this nightmare started, Spider-Woman’s reputation has become better than ever.
The irony is fucking incredible, because Ryu Rumi has never been doing worse and Spider-Woman has never been doing better.
Kids wear cheap versions of her mask. People record her swinging overhead. She spends most of her days stopping crimes, rescuing people, helping the police, gathering information, fixing problems, and generally making herself useful enough that Seoul has apparently decided its strange purple-haired spider-themed vigilante is pretty cool.
She still has haters, obviously. Some people think she’s dangerous, thinking that nobody with that much power should be running around without government oversight, and some people hate vigilantes on principle.
But honestly, who the fuck doesn’t have haters these days?
If anything, Rumi thinks having strangers passionately arguing online about whether Spider-Woman is a hero or a menace might be the most normal part of her life.
And besides, for every person calling her a dangerous vigilante, there is a Bobby somewhere holding out a donut. She will take that trade.
Rumi lets out a long sigh in the middle of her work… or almost-work, considering that she's currently upgrading her web-shooter and, unfortunately, isn't getting paid a single cent for any of it. Unless headaches count as compensation, in which case she's being paid extremely well.
She stops what she is doing for a moment when another dull pulse of pain spreads behind her eyes, slowly putting the screwdriver down before bringing two fingers to her temple.
“Fuck…”
She closes her eyes and massages the spot in small circles, as if pressing hard enough against her own skull might somehow convince the headache to leave her alone.
The headaches have been happening more frequently over the last few months. Rumi has noticed that much, even if she has been doing a fantastic job of pretending she hasn’t. They aren’t always terrible, sometimes it is just an annoying pressure sitting behind her eyes for a couple of hours. Other times it turns into something sharper, something that makes every light in the apartment feel too bright and every sound slightly too loud.
She could probably figure out why if she bothered thinking about it for longer than thirty seconds.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she barely sleeps anymore. Or the fact that she sometimes forgets food is something human beings are supposed to consume multiple times a day, and that her steady diet of instant noodles, granola bars, and cheap coffee probably isn't doing her any favors. She'd happily add meat to that list if meat didn't have the unfortunate habit of costing actual money.
Or the fact that she spends most nights throwing herself between buildings at ridiculous speeds, fighting criminals and hit in the head significantly more often than any doctor would recommend, only to come back here and spend another several hours hunched over electronics instead of going to fucking bed.
There are several excellent candidates, and yet Rumi chooses to blame none of them, because that would require acknowledging that she needs to take care of herself, and unfortunately she doesn’t have time for that.
Which, ironically, is exactly why she is currently upgrading her web-shooters.
What does one have to do with the other?
Well, first of all, Spider-Woman doesn’t actually need web-shooters, ever since that radioactive little asshole decided to bite her all those years ago, Rumi’s body has been capable of producing webs naturally. They come directly from her wrists, something she remains eternally grateful for because after eventually learning how actual spiders produce silk, Rumi had spent an uncomfortable amount of time staring into the distance and thanking every divine entity she could think of that whatever fucked-up radioactive mutation happened inside her body had chosen her wrists instead of her ass.
That means the universe had shown her exactly one mercy in life and allowed the webs to come from her wrists. They are strong, incredibly adhesive when she wants them to be, flexible enough to swing from, and her body replenishes them naturally… under normal circumstances.
There is one rather inconvenient detail nobody mentioned when Rumi first discovered she could shoot webs out of her body, producing them requires energy. Turns out matter doesn’t simply appear from nowhere because a radioactive spider decided biology was optional, her body needs resources to produce web fluid: calories, protein, water, rest… Basically all those extremely boring things doctors keep insisting people need in order to remain alive and functional, and everything Rumi has been absolutely fucking terrible at doing since Gwi-ma was defeated and the Honmoon turned golden.
Before the curse, it had rarely been a serious problem. She had always burned through food faster than most people because of her metabolism, and after particularly long patrols she could eat an amount that occasionally made Celine, and eventually Zoey and Mira stare at her like they were witnessing a wild animal feeding.
But before, she had food, sleep, and most importantly, she had people who would notice when she wasn’t taking care of herself.
Now there is nobody waiting at home to ask whether she ate, or complaining because she came back at four in the morning, or nobody noticing that she has been awake for almost a week, but her body, unfortunately, does notice.
The first time her organic webbing failed during a swing, Rumi almost fucking died.
She remembers it with humiliating clarity. She had been several stories above the street, moving quickly enough that stopping was not exactly an option, when she flicked her wrist toward the next building… and then nothing came out.
Rumi had stared at her wrist for approximately half a second, then gravity reminded her that it existed: she dropped fast. She hit something on the way down, bounced off it, and eventually managed to catch herself before becoming a very unpleasant stain on the pavement.
That should have been enough to teach her a lesson.
It wasn’t.
The second time, however, made the message significantly clearer.
Apparently nearly dying from fall damage twice was what it took for Rumi to finally admit that perhaps relying exclusively on a biological resource her exhausted, underfed body occasionally stopped producing was not the greatest idea she had ever had, so she built the web-shooters.
The concept wasn’t particularly difficult for someone who had spent years understanding her own webs and technology. The harder part had been creating an artificial fluid capable of behaving similarly enough to her organic webbing while remaining compact enough to carry around her wrists.
Eventually, she got them working. At first they were only supposed to be backups like emergency web-shooters if her body failed her again. Then Rumi realized how much easier patrol became when she wasn’t forcing her own body to produce every single web she used, so the emergency backup slowly became her primary system.
Her headache finally fades enough that opening her eyes no longer feels like an act of personal betrayal.
Rumi exhales through her nose and lowers her hand.
“Okay,” she mutters. “Where the fuck was I?”
The half-disassembled web-shooter waits innocently on the table in front of her.
Right.
She picks up the screwdriver again and for the next several minutes, she disappears back into the project. Tiny adjustments. Reconnecting wires. Testing the pressure mechanism. Adjusting the nozzle. Checking the cartridge seal. She turns the device over between her fingers, examining every piece underneath the bright desk lamp before finally securing the casing again.
There.
The purple-haired girl leans back slightly and straps the web-shooter around her left wrist, tightening it until it sits comfortably against her skin.
She flexes her fingers twice and the internal mechanism responds. Good.
She raises her left arm toward the nearest wall, aiming at a small mark near the upper corner, and then a strand of artificial webbing shoots across the apartment and sticks to the wall.
Rumi’s lips immediately flatten into a thin line.
She stares at it, then at the spot she had actually been aiming for, then back at the web. It missed by several centimeters, although not enough to matter if she were simply attaching a line to the side of a building during a normal swing, but enough to matter if she were trying to grab something small, or disarm someone, or catch a person falling from a building.
She clicks her tongue and tries again.
Still wrong.
Her eyebrows pull together.
“E.V.,” Rumi says, lowering her arm to inspect the web-shooter again. “Can you check the targeting calibration on my left web-shooter? Something feels off.”
There is barely a delay before the artificial intelligence responds through the speakers beside her computer.
“Beginning calibration analysis.”
“Thanks.”
Rumi pulls the web-shooter off again and places it on the desk, already reaching toward the drawer beneath it. If the problem is what she thinks it is, she’ll need to adjust the alignment between the targeting sensor and the firing mechanism, or maybe the nozzle is slightly misaligned, or--
Her fingers close around something cylindrical, making her frown. She doesn't remember having a tool in that shape.
She pulls it out to see what it is, just to find an old coffee cup.
For a second, she simply stares at it.
The disposable cup is empty, its cardboard slightly dented around the sides from having been shoved into the back of the drawer for who knows how long. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it. It looks exactly like the dozens of other coffee cups Rumi has accumulated and thrown away over the last year, except this one isn’t trash.
Her expression changes the moment she recognizes it.
The slight irritation caused by the missing tool disappears. Her fingers, which had been holding the cup carelessly a second ago, suddenly become much more deliberate around it.
There is a folded piece of paper inside, and she doesn’t need to take it out to know that. She knows exactly what is sitting at the bottom of that cup.
For a few seconds, the sounds of E.V. running its analysis continues quietly from the computer in front of her, accompanied by the faint hum of electronics filling the apartment, but Rumi isn’t paying attention to any of it anymore.
Her eyes remain fixed on the cup, whatever concentration she had managed to maintain while working on the web-shooter is gone now.
Rumi leans back in her chair, still holding the cup, her thumb brushing absentmindedly across one of the creases along its side. For something so light, it suddenly feels strangely heavy in her hand.
She brings it closer to herself, her gaze dropping toward the folded piece of paper resting inside.
“Uh…” Her voice comes out quieter than it had a moment ago. She clears her throat. “E.V., take five.”
There is barely a pause before the artificial intelligence responds.
“Standing by.”
The moment her technology goes quiet, Rumi looks back down at the old coffee cup in her hands.
Then, with considerably more care than anyone should reasonably use when handling a disposable cup, Spider-Woman pulls the paper off.
The paper is folded and slightly creased from how many times it has been opened, read, folded again, and shoved back into the same stupid cup.
It is a letter, she wrote every single word on that page. She knows exactly what it says. Hell, at this point she could probably recite most of it from memory considering how many times she has taken it out, stared at it, convinced herself that this time she would finally do something with it… and then put it right back.
The woman starts to unfold the paper with a quiet rustle in the otherwise silent apartment.
She already knows the first words waiting for her.
Still, she reads them.
Hi, Mira and Zoey.
Yeah, okay, I know you’re probably freaked out wondering why this strange woman knows your names, but it’s not anything weird, okay? I mean, it is a little weird and crazy, but I swear it’s not on the level of me being some psychopathic stalker.
I’m going to stop stalling and just say it...
We used to know each other.
Don’t crumple the letter yet. I swear I’m not messing with you.
My name is Ryu Rumi.
Neither of you remembers me, but I know you’ll be able to tell that I’m telling the truth because you two were always really good at knowing when I was lying... Or at least Mira was. (Sorry, Zoey, but it’s true.)
Anyway, what I’m trying to say with all of this is that we didn’t just know each other. We were... best friends. We used to live together, and we even... started dating.
Yeah. The three of us. Together.
But something bad happened, and it made you forget me. Not just you two, actually. Everyone who ever knew me forgot me.
Why?
Because I’m not just Ryu Rumi.
I’m Spider-Woman.
And sometimes Spider-Woman has to do what’s difficult, even when it breaks Ryu Rumi’s heart.
Anyway, maybe this is just my fate: living alone with the truth.
But the actual truth is that... I love you both.
I love you, Mira.
I love you, Zoey.
I don’t think I’m ever going to stop loving either of you.
And honestly? I hope that somewhere deep inside, you know something is wrong. I hope there’s some part of you that still remembers me. Some tiny part that knows someone is missing, even if you don’t know who.
And maybe this is selfish, but I hope that part of you still loves me too.
But until then?
Well... I guess I’ll just keep being Spider-Woman.
It’s all I have left, after all.
Rumi reaches the end, and another long sigh escapes her, except this one has very little to do with exhaustion or the headache still faintly throbbing behind her eyes. This one is just sad.
She lowers the letter slightly, leaning farther back into her chair while her thumb unconsciously traces one of the folds in the paper.
Rumi has thought about delivering this letter so many times. She has imagined practically every possible version of it by now: Leaving it outside their apartment; sliding it underneath the door; putting it somewhere she knows Mira would find it; giving it directly to Zoey; giving it directly to Mira, or leaving it somewhere and immediately swinging three neighborhoods away so she wouldn’t have to watch them read it.
Once, she even made it all the way to their building with the letter tucked underneath her suit, she stood on the roof for almost forty minutes, and then she went home.
Pathetic.
She used to fight demons. She throws herself off buildings every single day and trusts a thin strand of artificial webbing to prevent gravity from turning her into street decoration. She walks into situations involving armed criminals with the confidence of someone who has apparently forgotten that bullets are still extremely unpleasant.
And yet handing two women a fucking piece of paper? Absolutely terrifying.
Isn’t that hilarious?
Spider-Woman is apparently brave enough to fight the King of Demons but not brave enough to give a letter to her former girlfriends.
The same thing applies to Celine, except Rumi hasn’t even managed to write her a letter, even though she has tried several times, but every attempt ended with Rumi staring at a blank page because how the fuck is she supposed to begin that one?
Hi, Captain. Fun fact, you raised me.
Hey, remember that daughter you don't remember having? No? Oh, well, surprise!
At least Rumi has something with Celine now, something painfully small and completely different from what they used to have, but something nonetheless.
Mira and Zoey barely even have that, and maybe that is exactly why this letter never leaves the apartment.
She tells herself she is protecting them, sometimes she even believes that, because why should she destroy the lives they rebuilt just because she is miserable?
What right does she have to walk into their apartment and drop the weight of an entire erased relationship onto their shoulders? Mira and Zoey still have each other. They are living. They are functioning. They seem happy.
Maybe Rumi should leave that alone, maybe Spider-Woman really does have to do the difficult thing, and maybe loving them now means staying away.
That explanation sounds noble enough, but the uglier truth is that Rumi is fucking terrified.
Because underneath the mask, underneath the jokes, underneath all the heroic bullshit about protecting them from the truth, Rumi’s heart is still fragile. Broken in several places and held together by what is apparently an endless supply of stupid fucking hope, and that hope would not survive if they start laughing or mocking, or dont remember her at all.
Or one of them giving the letter back and saying the words Rumi has imagined so many times that she can practically hear them already.
I’m sorry, but I don’t love you anymore.
That would be it.
Rumi knows logically that it wouldn’t really mean they had never loved her.
The curse erased her, but It wouldn’t erase the nights they spent together. It wouldn’t erase the confession. It wouldn’t erase Mira’s touches or Zoey’s laughter or the fact that, for those few precious hours before Gwi-ma destroyed everything, Rumi had been allowed to call them hers.
But her heart doesn’t give a fuck about logic.
All Rumi would hear is I don't love you.
And what could she even say after that?
Well, you used to?
Trust me?
Please, love me again?
Jesus Christ.
She would sound insane.
From Mira and Zoey’s perspective, Spider-Woman would be some stranger who somehow knows an alarming amount of private information about them, appears out of nowhere claiming she used to live with them, says she was secretly their girlfriend, insists a demonic curse erased her from existence, and then announces that she is still in love with both of them.
Best-case scenario, they believe her. Worst-case scenario, they think Seoul’s beloved superhero desperately needs antipsychotics.
And maybe there is another possibility that scares Rumi even more than either of those.
What if they believe her… and still don't love her?
What if Mira accepts that everything in the letter is true but whatever she once felt for Rumi simply isn't there anymore?
What if Zoey understands that someone was stolen from her life and still looks at Rumi without feeling anything?
What if memories can be explained but love can't be restored?
What if--
Spider-Woman’s increasingly rapid train of thought is abruptly cut off by the soft ding of a notification from her phone.
At first, Rumi doesn’t even bother looking.
Her eyes remain on the old coffee cup in her hands, the letter now folded back inside exactly where it has spent the last several months collecting dust and silently judging her complete lack of courage. Her phone gets notifications all the time anyway. Messages from customers asking if their laptop is ready. E.V. sending automated reports. Alerts from one of the many systems she definitely has completely legal access to. Some stupid app begging for her attention because apparently she hasn’t opened it in three days.
Whatever it is can wait.
Then the corner of her eye catches the notification preview.
@turtles4everr_ofc posted a new video.
Rumi’s head turns immediately.
So much for pretending she doesn’t care.
The coffee cup is forgotten almost instantly as she grabs her phone from the desk, her thumb already unlocking the modified device before she can even pretend to have enough dignity to hesitate. That username belongs to Zoey.
Rumi is actually a little surprised to see that Zoey posted anything at all right now, especially on TikTok. Zoey has an account on practically every social-media platform ever created, but she generally spends significantly more time on Twitter than anywhere else, usually posting whatever thought happens to enter her brain with absolutely no consideration for whether another human being needs to hear it.
Rumi taps the notification.
As the app opens, she tries very hard not to listen to the increasingly familiar voice in the back of her mind telling her how fucking stupid this is.
She isn’t doing anything wrong, technically. Zoey’s account is public, and so is Mira’s.
Rumi isn’t hacking into their private messages. She isn’t accessing their cameras, or reading conversations she isn’t supposed to see. Everything she looks at is something they willingly put online for other people to see.
That distinction should make her feel better. It usually doesn’t, because there is something about the way she does it that makes her feel... dirty.
It is the same feeling she gets whenever she watches them from a nearby rooftop. That uncomfortable awareness that she is standing outside their lives looking in, seeing moments that once would have included her, and the social-media thing might somehow be even more pathetic.
Rumi has notifications turned on for everything, and sometimes she hates herself for how quickly she checks.
She can be in the middle of working on something, hear the notification, see one of their names and suddenly whatever incredibly important task she was doing can apparently go fuck itself, because this is the only way Rumi can still feel remotely close to them without actually stepping back into their lives.
And unfortunately, Celine is completely fucking useless when it comes to social media. Rumi isn’t even sure the woman understands half of what people do online, getting regular updates about Celine through her own accounts would require Celine to actually post something, and apparently that is asking for too much.
Thankfully, Bobby exists. Once in a while, Bobby posts something from work and Celine appears somewhere in the background. Sometimes it is barely anything like half her body walking past the camera, or her voice somewhere outside the frame. Once, Rumi got approximately three seconds of Celine drinking coffee while Bobby was talking about something completely unrelated. Rumi watched those three seconds an embarrassing number of times. But hey, you take what you can get.
The TikTok video finally loads.
Zoey’s face immediately fills the screen.
“Woohoo!” she practically screams into the camera. “Guess who just officially started her college break?!”
Rumi’s mouth twitches before she can stop it.
The video quality is terrible, not because Zoey’s phone is bad. Rumi knows for a fact her phone has a perfectly decent camera. The problem is that Zoey apparently does not give a single fuck about cinematography right now.
The entire screen is shaking so violently that Rumi can barely focus on her face, and judging from the constant movement of the background, Zoey appears to be dancing while recording herself.
The youngest looks happy while her hair moves around her face as she bounces, and her grin is so wide and familiar that something inside Rumi’s chest immediately aches.
Then someone appears in the background.
Rumi recognizes Mira before her face is even completely visible.
Her heart does that stupid little thing again.
Mira approaches with the exact same calm demeanor she always has, looking almost comically composed compared to the human earthquake currently filming herself in front of her.
“Why are you celebrating?” Mira asks casually. “You spend your time doing fuck-all anyway.”
Rumi’s lips twitch harder.
Zoey freezes, and slowly, dramatically, she turns toward Mira. The camera moves with her, giving the viewer a brief and completely unnecessary shot of the ceiling before Zoey manages to point it in the correct direction again.
Her expression is one of absolute betrayal, and Mira’s mouth curls into that familiar little mischievous smile that Rumi misses so much.
“How dare you?!” Zoey demands, making the pink-haired woman laugh.
Rumi ends up laughing as well. It escapes before she can stop it. It's barely more than a breath, but unmistakably a laugh.
She goes still, her eyes widening slightly as if someone else made the sound.
For a moment, she genuinely looks around the apartment, then she realizes how fucking stupid that is. It was her.
That shouldn’t be remarkable, laughing shouldn’t be something strange enough that she needs to stop and analyze it afterward, but it is, because Rumi hasn’t had many reasons to laugh genuinely this past year.
Yes, Spider-Woman laughs and jokes all the fucking time.
When she is swinging through Seoul, when she is fighting criminals, when she is saving someone, when some idiot points a gun at her and somehow believes that is going to end well for him, joking is easy. She talks shit, makes stupid comments, insults people’s terrible criminal decisions… She lets that childish part of herself come out because for a few minutes she can forget everything else.
There is something almost freeing about fighting, which probably isn’t healthy either, but when someone is trying to punch her in the face, Rumi doesn’t have time to think about Mira, Zoey, Celine, the letter, or whatever.
There is only movement, dodge, hit, web, jump, move, think, survive, and save whoever needs saving meanwhile making some stupid joke while doing it. For a few minutes, she gets to be the version of herself everyone thinks Spider-Woman is: fun, confident, annoying, and alive.
Then the fight ends, and eventually she has to come home. That is when reality catches up.
The truth is that every day Rumi feels a little more exhausted by this routine, and not physically exhausted.
Uh, ok, she is physically exhausted too. After all, her current headache is doing a fantastic job of reminding her of that, but sleep can theoretically fix physical exhaustion. She could eat something decent, drink water, sleep for ten hours, and then maybe wake up feeling slightly less like death.
The exhaustion she feels everyday is different than that, it's like something deeper. It sits inside her chest instead of her muscles, and Rumi doesn’t know how to sleep that away.
Sometimes she thinks she could sleep for an entire week and wake up feeling exactly the same. Sometimes she thinks she could stop being Spider-Woman, close the repair shop, throw her phone out the window, sleep for a month, and still wake up tired.
And on the particularly bad nights, an uglier thought slips in. That even if she died, somehow she would still be fucking exhausted afterward, like death itself wouldn’t be enough rest.
Rumi hates that thought, because it's one of the reasons why she hasn't killed herself yet.
So she usually does what she does with every other thought she doesn’t know how to handle: she ignores it.
On the screen, Zoey is still arguing dramatically with Mira, although Rumi barely hears what they say afterward, since she is too busy looking how they look happy and alive together.
The screen suddenly changes, making her blink.
For a second she simply stares at the next video that starts playing automatically without actually processing it, then her thumb moves downward, intending to go back. Instead, she accidentally refreshes the page. Zoey’s video disappears from the screen.
Something about this tiny, completely meaningless action breaks whatever fragile control Rumi had managed to maintain, and she immediately locks the phone a little too hard. The device lands on the desk with a sharper clack than necessary.
Rumi pulls her hand away while her jaw tightens.
There are too many emotions moving through her at once now. Happiness because she got to see them. Relief because they look okay. Warmth because she heard Mira laugh, and because Zoey is still Zoey. Because somehow, for a few seconds, watching them interact made Rumi laugh too.
Then there is grief, jealousy, loneliness, and then guilt for feeling jealous, guilt for watching, guilt for missing them. Anger. Love.
So much fucking love that it physically hurts sometimes.
Her eyes start to burn.
Oh, no. Absolutely not.
She blinks rapidly and looks toward the ceiling.
“Come on,” she mutters, her voice sounding suspiciously unsteady.
It has been a year. There is no reason for her to still be doing this. There is no reason to cry anymore. She already cried.
Heaven knows how much she cried.
She cried during those first nights when she had nowhere to go. She cried when she realized her documents were gone. She cried when she had to sleep on the streets during those first few days. She has literally cried from hunger before, because her stomach was so empty it didn't even growl anymore, it just hurt like hell. She cried when she went back to places that should have contained pieces of her and found nothing. She cried because Zoey and Mira didn’t know her. She cried because Celine didn’t remember raising her.
She cried enough.
And what did it fix?
Nothing.
Did crying break the curse?
No.
Did it make Mira remember her?
No.
Did it make Zoey run back into her arms?
No.
Did Celine suddenly wake up one morning remembering she had a daughter?
No.
Did Gwi-ma rise from the dead, apologize for being a massive fucking asshole, and politely reverse the curse?
Unfortunately, no.
So what is the point?
Rumi squeezes her eyes shut, and just swallows it. That is easier. Swallow the tears, the grief, the loneliness… Swallow every stupid fucking emotion that keeps crawling back up no matter how many times she buries it.
Crying has never fixed a problem in Rumi’s life, and it sure as hell isn’t going to start now.
So she breathes in slowly through her nose, holds it, and then breathes out. She repeats it again, ignoring how her throat hurts, how her chest feels tight, how her eyes still burn, but no tears fall.
Somewhere in the middle of Rumi’s extremely successful attempt at not crying she fails to notice the two small residents of her shitty apartment beginning to approach her.
Ok, residents might be a strong word.
Rumi doesn’t actually know if they live here. She doesn’t know where the hell they came from, where they go when they disappear for a few days, whether they technically belong to someone else, or why they apparently decided that the broke, emotionally unstable superhero living in one of the worst apartments in Seoul was worth repeatedly visiting, but they keep coming back.
And right now, one of them decides subtlety is completely unnecessary, since something heavy suddenly lands on Rumi’s lap.
“Holy fucking--”
Her entire body jolts, spider-sense giving a brief and completely useless warning about half a second too late as Rumi looks down to find a massive pile of fur has made itself comfortable across her thighs.
The cat looks up at her, and Rumi stares back.
“Oh. It’s you.”
The cat does not appear particularly impressed by her greeting.
He, or she; Rumi has honestly never bothered checking, looks suspiciously like a Maine Coon. Or at least Rumi assumes that is what the cat is. Big body, ridiculously thick fur, tufted ears, enormous paws, and enough weight to make Rumi wonder whether the animal has secretly been eating better than she has for the past year.
The cat turns around once on her lap before settling down with the absolute confidence of an animal that has never once asked permission for anything in its life.
Only then does Rumi notice the second visitor. The magpie stands on the edge of her desk a short distance away, head slightly tilted as it watches her.
Unlike the cat, the bird has never been particularly interested in physical affection. It tolerates Rumi touching it occasionally, but only when it decides such a privilege has been earned. Sometimes it lands on her shoulder and stays there while she works or moves around the apartment, which Rumi has decided counts as affection even if the bird probably has an entirely different explanation.
Right now, however, the magpie seems determined to maintain a respectable distance, maybe it is having an emo moment, or maybe it simply doesn’t want to get too close to Rumi, which is… fair.
Rumi subtly sniffs her own shoulder, and her face automatically twists.
“Okay, fuck you. I’ve been busy.”
She doesn't remember the last time she showered, but as she said, she has been busy.
These two animals are among the only things currently standing between Rumi and completely losing her fucking mind and beginning to have meaningful conversations with the walls. There was one time she actually did that. It was around four in the morning after almost a week without sleep, and in her defense, the wall had been an excellent listener.
The point is that these two strange animals are currently the closest thing Rumi has to actual friendship after Gwi-ma’s defeat, which sounds significantly worse when she puts it like that.
The cat shifts in her lap, pushing its head underneath her hand with absolutely no respect for Rumi’s thoughts.
She sighs and slowly scratches behind one of the cat’s ears while looking toward the magpie again. The bird remains on her desk, watching her with an expression Rumi has somehow convinced herself is judgment despite knowing perfectly well that projecting complicated human emotions onto a bird is probably another sign that she needs more social interaction.
She decides to ignore that too.
The cat and magpie first started appearing months ago when everything was a total mess for Rumi. Although, they disappear sometimes for a day, two days, or occasionally longer.
The first few times it happened, Rumi assumed they were gone permanently, but then they came back.
They always come back.
That is why Rumi never bothered following them, even though she could, given the fact that following a cat around Seoul wouldn’t exactly be the most difficult investigative work Spider-Woman has ever done. She could probably put a tracker on either of them without much trouble. Find out where they sleep, where they get food, or whether some other person thinks they own them.
More importantly, they always seem to show up when she needs them most.
She tries not to think too deeply about it because the moment she starts wondering whether two random animals are somehow sensing her emotional state is probably the moment she needs to reevaluate several things about her life, but there have been nights when Rumi was barely holding herself together, sitting somewhere in her apartment with tears running down her face and the terrifying realization that, for once, the thought of dying didn't feel distant or hypothetical anymore. Nights when she'd gotten dangerously close to convincing herself that she was done, that she couldn't keep doing this, and that maybe it would be easier to just make everything stop… and then she would feel something warm pressing against her side.
The cat.
Sometimes the magpie would simply sit nearby.
No magic, or miracle, or profound solution to her problems. Just presence, and somehow, that helped.
The cat’s purring gave her something to listen to besides her own heartbeat and thoughts. The warmth of its body gave her something physical to focus on. The feeling of fur beneath her fingers reminded her where she was, even the stupid bird standing nearby and staring at her helped.
But the memory that always gets her is from the beginning, back when she had almost nothing, when food was a genuine problem.
Rumi had always needed more food than the average person because of her powers, and suddenly she could barely afford what a normal person needed.
Maybe the cat knew that somehow because it started bringing her food. Sometimes it was something half-eaten, sometimes scraps. Once it brought her something Rumi couldn’t even confidently identify and decided hunger had not yet defeated enough of her standards to investigate further, but other times it brought something usable.
And every single time, Rumi cried, not because the food was particularly impressive, but because something had noticed she was hungry. That was what destroyed her. The entire world had forgotten Ryu Rumi existed, and somehow this random enormous stray cat looked at her and apparently went, Yeah, this idiot is starving. Then brought her food.
Rumi cried while eating it more than once. She cried because she was hungry. She cried because she was grateful. She cried because it was humiliating that an animal was feeding her. She cried because something was taking care of her when nobody else even remembered she needed to be taken care of.
Even thinking about it now makes her eyes start burning again.
Rumi immediately frowns.
Nope.
Absolutely fucking not.
We are changing subjects.
Her fingers move more deliberately through the cat’s fur, concentrating on the sensation instead, and the purring vibrates faintly against her thighs. She decides to focus on that, which is better.
Her exhausted brain grabs onto the first harmless thought it can find.
Is it weird that she never named them?
Probably, because that is what people do with pets, right? You find an animal, and you name it.
Except they aren’t Rumi’s pets. She doesn’t own them. They don’t even technically live here.
They just show up whenever they want, eat whatever she has available, occupy whatever part of the apartment they feel entitled to, demand absolutely nothing from her emotionally, disappear without explanation, and eventually come back like nothing happened.
Maybe she should name them.
She could probably ask E.V. for suggestions once--
Her phone vibrates against the desk, Rumi immediately looks at it.
For one stupid, hopeful second, she thinks it might be Zoey again, or maybe Mira posted something, but when she grabs her phone, her expression drops, because It is an alert.
More specifically, it is her alert.
Months ago, Rumi had gotten tired of relying entirely on chance, police sirens, social media, and whatever crimes happened to occur directly within earshot while she was patrolling. Seoul is fucking enormous, and even with enhanced senses, Spider-Woman cannot be everywhere at once.
So Rumi did what Rumi does best when something inconveniences her. She overengineered the shit out of a solution.
What started as a simple program monitoring publicly available emergency reports had slowly turned into a custom crime and emergency detection system connected directly to her phone and E.V.
The program constantly gathers information from practically every useful source Rumi managed to connect it to: police, emergency dispatch channels, public reports, traffic monitoring systems, city infrastructure, security cameras, fire alerts, and other available networks spread throughout Seoul.
And then there are the sources Rumi is technically not supposed to have like restricted police feeds, private surveillance networks, and traffic cameras that definitely were not designed for Spider-Woman to access remotely.
Look, the ethics get complicated.
The important part is that Rumi doesn’t sit around manually watching thousands of cameras like some caffeine-addicted Batman. The system does all the boring parts.
The system sends an alert directly to her phone, and to her Spider-Woman mask.
Rumi can open it manually, pull up whatever information is available, access nearby camera feeds, track an ongoing incident, follow police movement, or search for additional information while already on her way there.
Honestly, it is one of the best things she has ever built. Right now, she fucking hates it, because apparently criminals cannot give her five minutes to have an emotional crisis with her cat.
Rumi lets her head fall backward with a long, exhausted breath.
The cat continues purring peacefully in her lap, completely unaware of the concept of civic responsibility. Lucky bastard.
For several seconds, Rumi genuinely considers ignoring the alert.
Someone else can deal with it.
As people say the police exist for one reason, right? And she is tired, her head hurts, her web-shooter is still fucking miscalibrated, she hasn’t showered, she has no idea when she last ate. And for once, she would really like to sit here with a giant cat on her lap and a judgmental bird on her desk and do absolutely nothing.
The phone vibrates again.
Rumi closes her eyes.
With great power comes great responsibility.
“Fuck you, Celine.”
The cat looks up.
“Not you.” She explains while reluctantly sliding both hands underneath the enormous animal. “Sorry, big guy.”
The cat gives a small noise of protest as she lifts it from her lap and places it gently on the floor.
Immediately, Rumi misses the warmth, but she stands anyway.
The magpie watches her from the desk.
“Yeah, yeah. I know.”
Rumi grabs her mask, then looks down at the web-shooter she had been trying to repair before approximately seventeen different emotional problems interrupted her.
She straps it around her wrist anyway.
She flexes her fingers once and glances at the robbery alert still glowing on her phone before slipping the device away.
“Yeah,” she mutters, reaching for the rest of her gear, and especially going after her mask. “Apparently I’m gonna have to make do with a miscalibrated web-shooter. Let's survive another day.”