Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The last thing Rumi remembers is that there was a swarm of demons, a wall of bodies and claws and snarling mouths crashing on on her from all sides like a tidal wave, and then, cutting through the waves upon waves of demon, was Zoey and Mira, hacking and slashing their way towards her, calling out her name, and she was running towards them, calling out to them, and then, just before that bright, blinding light, they threw themselves at her almost like they meant to tackle her and only when that bright, blinding light exploded in her eyes that she realized they were shielding her from it, as if their bodies would be enough, and then—

Silence.

Rumi thinks she might be dead. Her soul feels like it’d been knocked loose out of her body, but she’s still, somehow, able to think she’s dead, which means maybe she isn’t as dead as she thinks she is. It’s not like Rumi’s ever been dead before so she doesn’t have a benchmark to work with here.

Rumi?

Zoey’s voice, or maybe Mira’s. They’re here too, she can feel it. Maybe—and somehow, she finds this worse than the possibility of her own death—they’re dead too, with her. They did throw themselves in the line of fire for her. Tried to shield her from the inevitable. She feels an ache all around her, not quite where her chest would have been. Her heart.

Rumi?

She feels a little bad about it, but it still does come as a comfort to Rumi, knowing that they’re still with her now. It’s probably not the most ideal set-up, but she’d been convinced and had even started to make peace with the fact that she’d die alone, if not by Celine’s hands then by Gwi-ma’s, so this is a far better bargain than she ever dared to hope for.

It comforts her to know that, in their last moment, despite everything, they still chose her.

“Rumi!”

Rumi jolts upright, gasping.

She thrashes for a second, and her heart—her heart, it’s there, it’s right where it should be in her chest, locked behind her ribs, and muscle, and skin, and it’s pounding thunderously in her ears and her limbs. The world spins, and she blinks hard, struggling to gather her bearings, still unsure if this is actually real and not just another one of Gwi-ma’s vile, unfair tricks, and then there are two pairs of hands on her shoulders, her arms, her face, that same voice—voices—calling out, “Rumi, Rumi, hey,” and then the world finally comes into focus.

The trees, the night sky. Zoey, and Mira, crouched down beside her, holding her steady. Grounding her.

They’re here. They’re real.

They’re alive, all three of them.

“Rumi,” Zoey says, wide-eyed, and Rumi makes this desperately relieved and grateful noise in the back of her throat and throws her arms around the both of them. It’s a tangle of limbs from there, and at some point, someone—Mira, probably—knocks all three of them down against the soft, wet grass, and then they just lie there, piled up on each other, holding each other as hard as they possibly can. Mira buries her face in Rumi’s neck, and Zoey clutches at both of them, trembling just a little, her breath hitching like she’s seconds away from crying. No one says anything right away. They just hold each other like if they let go, the world might come undone again.

When they finally disentangle from each other, Mira pulls back and blurts out, “We thought you—”, only to choke on her words and on the tears she’s just barely managing to hold back.

Suddenly Rumi’s throat is tight too. “Yeah,” she breathes out, shaky. “I know. I thought…” She shakes her head, stopping herself before she ends up bawling her eyes out too. Instead, she says, “I-I’m just glad you’re here.”

Mira and Zoey smile at her softly, until Zoey asks, “So is it… over?”

“And how did we even get here?” Mira adds, looking around, brows furrowed.

They help each other get up on their feet. Rumi pats herself down, getting all the grass off of her clothes. She looks around, and there’s no doubt about where they are: the Hunters’ village. They’ve found themselves somewhere along the path that leads to her mother’s grave.

But that still begs the question of how they ended up here.

“Maybe Gwi-ma dropped us here after we kicked his ass into oblivion?” Zoey supplies hopefully.

“He’s a demon lord, Zoey,” Mira sighs, exasperated but also begrudgingly fond, “not an Uber.”

Rumi would really like to believe that somehow, they actually did defeat Gwi-ma, but… “It’s not adding up,” she says, frowning. Mira and Zoey exchange glances, and then turn to look at her at the same time. “Just think about it. What was the last thing either of you remember, before we woke up here?”

They rack their brains, and then Mira answers, “Well, I remember we were all there, at the Saja Boys’ concert, and then there were demons, lots of them, and then you were there, and—”

“There was this blinding light,” Zoey continues for her, face screwed in concentration, “kind of like, you know, an explosion, then—”

“We wound up here,” Rumi finishes. She purses her lips, hands on her hips. “I don’t know how or why we’re here, but… I don’t think we actually defeated Gwi-ma. I—I don’t think we did much of anything to him.”

It’s quiet again for a moment, Rumi’s words hanging heavy in the air. She looks at Zoey and Mira, at their crestfallen expression, and is about to say maybe it’s not all that bad, maybe they can just waltz right back to the stadium and finish what they started, even if that’s too optimistic even for Rumi, but Zoey pipes up and says, “Maybe we are dead after all.”

“Zoey!” Rumi chides at the same time Mira groans, “Don’t be fucking morbid, Zoey.”

“What?” Zoey pouts. “How else can we explain what’s going on here? If we didn’t defeat Gwi-ma, then what else is there?”

Yeah, Rumi thinks, solemn, confused. What else is there?

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she says in the end, already dreading where this is going, “but we’re here now, so we might as well try to get some help figuring it out.”

Mira and Zoey exchange glances again, then they nod at Rumi.

They set off together, following the familiar footpath that winds through the trees and into the heart of the village. The air is cool, and quiet in this almost eerie way, like everything is just too still for this to actually be real, but Rumi brushes that thought aside for now. Their footsteps are soft against the dirt, and no one says much as they walk. There’s still too much they don’t know, but there’s a strange comfort in having some semblance of a plan, even if that plan involves—and really is just—Celine.

Rumi’s stomach churns at the thought of seeing Celine again after how they left things off before she ran head-first into Gwi-ma’s not-so-little deathtrap, but she can’t deny that if there’s anyone that can help them make sense of this, it’s Celine. Doesn’t make it any less awkward, though. Heyyy, so I know I dropped by earlier to ask you to kill me and it’s like, super awkward between us right now, but could you maybe help us figure out just what the hell is happening first before you give me another sermon? Kthnxbye. God.

The house comes into view through the trees. Low-built, wooden, familiar in that way that makes her chest ache—the house she grew up in, looking as it always has, quiet and unchanging. She walks up the steps without thinking, the way she always used to, past the gate and across the familiar stone path, and then knocks on the front door.

Nothing. Rumi knocks again.

“Celine,” she calls, and then she hears it. The soft, slow shuffle of footsteps from inside, drawing nearer and nearer, and then, the sound of the lock turning, and—

The door opens, and the woman standing in front of them is not Celine.

If Rumi isn’t actually dead already, her heart stops. “Mom?”

Ryu Miyeong frowns at her. “‘Mom?’”

All Rumi can do is gawk at the woman standing in front of her. The woman who is, unmistakably, Ryu Miyeong, and it’s like she walked out of all of the pictures and newspaper and magazine cut-outs Rumi grew up knowing her from. She looks like she walked out of the cover of the album that won the Sunlight Sisters the Idol Awards in 1997, that Celine lent her as a child and she hasn’t actually given back since, not that Celine’s ever actually asked for it back anyway.

She looks about as old as she must have been when she had Rumi.

This is Ryu Miyeong, live and in the flesh—and it doesn’t make any fucking sense.

“Mom,” she says again, confused, elated, and honestly kind of nauseous because what if Zoey is right and they really are dead? What other explanation would there be for why her dead mother is standing right in front of her now? “Mom, I—”

A sword zips through the air and nearly cleaves her face clean in half before Rumi even gets to finish her sentence. The only reason she gets to keep her entire head intact is that Mira yanks her out of the way, summoning her gok-do. Zoey summons her shin-kal too as the reason for the flying fucking sword steps out, holding another sword, thrumming an almost electric blue, in her hand. She holds out her empty hand and, with barely a twitch of her fingers, summons the sword she just flung at Rumi’s head, a reddish-pink one now, right back in it.

“Celine,” Rumi murmurs.

And it is Celine, but just like Miyeong, it’s like she stepped out of all of those album covers and old photos Rumi grew up adoring. She looks impossibly young, not a hint of grey in her thick, dark hair, and her face is free of the heaviness Rumi’s always known her to carry. There’s no weariness in her eyes, no big, incomprehensible sadness. She is Celine, but not the Celine that Rumi’s known all her life. No, because this Celine doesn’t look like she would have hesitated if Rumi came to her like this, demon patterns bared to the world, and asked her to kill her. This Celine just sent a sword flying at her head, and Rumi should be annoyed by that because who just does that, but the answer is obvious, because the answer is Celine would, if she’d never raised Rumi.

“Who are you,” Celine snarls, taking another step forward, putting herself between Miyeong and Rumi, “and how do you know my name?”

Mira and Zoey step in front of Rumi too, protective.

“Celine,” Zoey tries, “please,” but Celine narrows her eyes at the both of them and spits out, “You’re clearly Hunters too—so what are you doing protecting that demon?”

That lands like a punch straight to the chest. Rumi staggers back, head spinning, the world closing in on her. It’s different, hearing Celine, even if it isn’t really her Celine, say it like that. It suddenly makes Rumi want to cover up, to hide, just like her Celine always told her to when she was growing up, but there’s nowhere to run now.

The only thing that pulls her out of her spiraling thoughts is Mira snapping, “If you would just shut up and give us a second to explain,” at Celine. “Rumi isn’t—”

“Rumi?”

Suddenly, everyone turns to her mother. To Miyeong, who’d been shell-shocked into silence by this strange, unfamiliar girl calling her Mom and by the sudden escalation of events. She takes a step forward now, gently brushing past Celine even though Celine steps forward with her anyway, and then she just—looks at Rumi. Really looks at her, like she’s seeing her for the first time. And for a moment, there’s… something behind her eyes. Not exactly recognition, or even a flicker of familiarity, but like something about the name Rumi snags in her brain and now she’s trying to grope in the dark for a memory that doesn’t exist. Like, now, she sees the girl behind the patterns that curl and wind all over her body, around her limbs and up her neck, her face—Miyeong’s face, with Miyeong’s eyes.

“Rumi,” Miyeong says again, more to herself than anything, breathing the syllables out like she’s trying to get a grasp on the name that sounds a little too suspiciously close to her own. And it’s something, getting to actually hear her mother say her name like this, something that Rumi’s always dreamed of, always imagined—and now, she knows what it sounds like, hearing her name in her mother’s voice. But that happy little bubble bursts the very next second when Miyeong asks, “Why… did you call me that—Mom? Who are you, Rumi?”

Mira and Zoey turn to look at Rumi, their weapons still raised at Celine. Rumi lets out a shaky breath, then steps forward, through the barrier of Mira and Zoey’s bodies. She can practically hear all the warning alarms blaring in Celine’s head as she tries to put herself between Rumi and Miyeong again, but she freezes when Miyeong places a hand on her shoulder and squeezes, like she’s telling her to stand down.

Rumi’s eyes flicker back and forth between them, and it’s dizzying, seeing the both of them like this, but she takes another breath in and tells them—or Celine, mostly—“Just… let me explain, please,” and she flexes her hand, fingers catching on the threads of the Honmoon, which then materialize into her sword.

To say Miyeong and Celine are shocked would be the understatement of the century.

“You’re…” Celine’s face screws up in confusion, and then horror. “You’re a Hunter?”

Rumi swallows down the lump in her throat. “Yes,” she gets out, “and—and a demon. A half-demon,” she corrects quickly. “I’m half-demon.”

Celine voices out the question on everyone’s minds right now: “How?”

“I…” Rumi purses her lips—opens her mouth again, then closes it. How exactly is she supposed to go about this? She has to explain this to Celine and her mother just as much as she has to explain it to Mira and Zoey, who she obviously hasn’t had the chance to actually talk to about all of this since they found out. She can feel their eyes boring into the back of her skull, expectant.

She clears her throat. “Look, I—we—don’t know what’s happening right now, or how we got here, or—or—how you’re here,” she says, gesturing to her mother, who shoots her back a puzzled look, “but we do know that whatever is going on right now, Gwi-ma’s got something to do with it, and I—” Her breath catches in her throat. A beat, then: “I’m your daughter.”

Celine and Miyeong stare back at her, wide-eyed, then turn to look at each other.

It’s obvious that Celine is doing the math in her head because how could someone who looks, at most, five years younger than the both of them be Miyeong’s daughter, and she starts, “Since when did you—,” but Miyeong cuts her off by asking Rumi, “You’re my daughter?”, pointing at herself like she’s trying to make sure Rumi’s got the right person.

“Yes,” Rumi answers, heaving the word out.

Silence, again.

Rumi can feel Mira and Zoey shifting uncomfortably behind her. She keeps her eyes on Celine and Miyeong the entire time, waiting. Finally, it’s Celine who breaks the silence: “So you’re telling me that you’re a half-demon Hunter, and that Miyeong is your mother even though you’re, what, twenty-three? Twenty-four? You do realize how insane that sounds, right? And Miyeong would never—”

Miyeong places a hand on Celine’s arm, as if to stop her.

Celine turns to her, brows furrowed. “Miyeong, this is insane. This is impossible. Why are we even still entertaining these—these—” She waves her hand vaguely at Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, making this frustrated noise. “This is obviously just another one of Gwi-ma’s dirty tricks.”

But Miyeong just purses her lips, like she isn’t convinced.

“Miyeong,” Celine says, exasperated now.

“Rumi isn’t lying!” Zoey says suddenly, defensive. “W-we don’t know how we got here or where here even is, but she isn’t lying or making any of this up. She is your daughter, it’s just—you just don’t know it yet, you know?”

Celine shoots her this unimpressed look, and as much as Rumi appreciates Zoey for sticking up for her, she can’t really blame Celine either.

Before she can accuse them of lying again, though, Miyeong finally speaks up.

“Let’s just… hear them out,” she says to Celine, who inevitably looks like she’s going to explode again. “We don’t know what’s going on, but something is going on, and I don’t think killing them now is going to be very productive for us if we want to figure all of this out.

“They’re Hunters too, Celine,” Miyeong says more gently this time, “and as… strange as the circumstances are, I think we ought to help them.”

Celine tries to argue against it but gets nowhere with it. In the end, she just lets out this frustrated but resigned sort of half-whine, half-groan. She dismisses her swords with a wave of her hands. “Fine. But if I’m right…”

“You won’t be,” Mira says stubbornly, clutching her gok-do tighter, which earns her a glare from Celine. Zoey nudges her and tells her hey, chill under her breath, and then they dismiss their weapons too.

Rumi breathes out a sigh of relief, and so does Miyeong. They just look at each other for a moment, then she beckons for them to follow. “Let’s take this inside—before Celine changes her mind,” she says, and Celine scoffs, already halfway back inside the house.

“I would tell you to make yourselves at home,” Miyeong says as she sets down five cups of tea, one for each of them, “but I don’t think Celine would appreciate that.”

Celine makes a face at her but only just sips on her tea silently.

“So,” Miyeong says, settling down beside Celine, across Rumi, Mira and Zoey. “You say you’re… not from here, right?”

Rumi, Mira and Zoey exchange glances. “Well,” Rumi answers for all three of them, “I guess that’s one way to put it, yeah.” But then Celine narrows her eyes at her, which forces her to swiftly add, “I-It’s just that the last thing we all remember before we wound up here is that we were fighting Gwi-ma—”

“We almost had him too,” Zoey adds helpfully.

“—and then, there was this, like—”

“Explosion,” Mira says this time.

“—yeah, like an explosion of light, not like the place blew up or anything, and then next thing we knew, we woke up here.” Rumi’s eyes bounce back and forth between Celine and Miyeong, who both look a little skeptical of their story. “I know it’s a little hard to believe, and even we’re still having a hard time just… processing it, but we think that Gwi-ma sent us here. Or, at least, that seems to be the only plausible conclusion we can come to right now.”

“The only problem is,” Mira adds, tired, “we don’t really know where or what ‘here’ is, exactly.”

Miyeong purses her lips, mulling over that. Then, she turns to Rumi and says slowly, carefully, “You said you’re half-demon… and that you’re my daughter.”

“Yes,” Rumi answers, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. She isn’t so surprised her mother—Miyeong—would want to address the elephant in the room, but she still feels a little nauseous over it anyway. Even Mira and Zoey sit up straighter, attentive. “I… I don’t really know the full story,” she explains, “but from what, uh”—her eyes flicker towards Celine’s direction—“from what Celine—the one from where we came from—told me, my mom—you—fell in love with a demon and then… had me.”

Miyeong and Celine exchange a quick glance. Almost like she can sense the huge but hanging in the air between them, Celine presses Rumi by asking, “And then what?,” crossing her arms over her chest. It gives Rumi whiplash. Sure, the Celine sitting across from her now is younger, not weighed down by grief, and she doesn’t even know who Rumi is, but she’s looking at her the way she always does when she doesn’t buy Rumi’s excuses or the stories she makes up whenever she tries to get herself out of trouble. “You said you were surprised to see Miyeong here—why?”

Rumi hesitates.

It’s one thing to tell totally random strangers that her mother died giving birth to her, but it’s another thing to tell her own mother, who is very much alive and breathing and whole and sitting across from her now, waiting for her to explain just what happened to her over there, where Rumi came from. Celine too. She’s watching her—watching them—already on edge, like she’s already bracing for Rumi to say something that will inevitably set her off again.

She drops her eyes to the tea she hasn’t touched. Her fingers tighten around the cup. She could lie, but if there’s anything she’s learned in the past few days, it’s that the truth will always come out eventually. Better to get it out and done with herself than to wait for the universe to pull the rug out from under her again.

So, she takes a deep breath and, bracing herself, says, “Back where we came from, Miyeong—my mom… She died during childbirth.” A heavy, heavy pause. “I never got to know her. Celine raised me.”

Then: silence, again.

Miyeong doesn’t move. She doesn’t even blink, doesn’t breathe, like Rumi’s words haven’t landed yet, or maybe they landed too hard. There’s no horror or her face, no disbelief, not really. Just… stillness. A stunned, reeling kind of quiet, like she’s mourning something she only ever got to know ever even existed now, through this strange, unfamiliar girl sitting across from her who claims to be her daughter—the girl she dies for, in some other version of this world.

Beside her, Celine goes rigid. Her eyes are wide with shock, and just barely contained anger. That’s familiar too, but it never crossed Rumi’s mind that Celine could ever be like this. That she could burn like this, when Rumi’s only ever known her to be calm and cool, if not distant sometimes, even in her anger or disappointment. Her love.

Finally, Miyeong says, “I… I die? Where you three came from—I die?”

It’s Rumi’s turn to be puzzled. “W-what do you mean?”

Miyeong’s eyes flicker to Celine, then down to her hands. She doesn’t answer right away, just sits there, the question hanging in the air, unanswered. It goes unanswered long enough for Rumi to start putting two and two together, and judging by the looks on Mira and Zoey’s faces, it seems like they’ve reached the same conclusion she has, horrified.

It’s Zoey who speaks up for all three of them in the end. “You mean… Poppy, she—she’s dead?”

Celine glances at Miyeong, working her jaw like she’s unsure if she should entertain that question or not, then she heaves a sigh and answers, “Yes. She died a few months ago.”

Suddenly it’s all starting to make horrible, awful sense.

Rumi had started to think that maybe Gwi-ma had thrown them back in time, back to before Miyeong had her. That would certainly be enough to explain why she has no idea who Rumi is, or that she ever had a daughter in the first place. But she’s starting to see it a little more clearly now:

This is a world where Miyeong gets to live because she never existed, and because someone else had died in her place.

It makes Rumi feel sick in the stomach but what other explanation is there? What else can explain Poppy’s absence?

She looks around the table, at the way everyone has gone quiet as the same realization—understanding—hits them. It seems to hit Miyeong especially hard, though, if the way her face twists in pain is anything to go by.

“Mom,” Rumi says softly, aching for her.

She gets it. Of course she does. Her mother died so she could live—she knows a thing or two about that specific kind of guilt. The guilt of a life exchanged for another.

Celine hasn’t said a word since she confirmed Poppy’s death, but now, her voice cuts through the silence, low and tight. “You do understand how this looks, don’t you? I’m not saying I believe in cosmic trade-offs, necessarily, but you show up here and tell us Miyeong died in your world, or wherever you came from, and now it’s like Poppy died in exchange for her life here. Like Miyeong was never supposed to be alive—keep living—in the first place. But now you’re here, and if she died in your world and you came here… I don’t want to assume the worst, but I’m not taking my chances either.”

Her eyes lock on Rumi pointedly when she says, “It doesn’t help that one of you is half-demon.”

Miyeong bristles at that, like she doesn’t like Celine talking about Rumi—her daughter, even if it obviously still doesn’t make sense to her how Rumi is her daughter—like that, and that’s the only consolation Rumi gets out of this horribly tense exchange.

“So you’re saying that, what? Us being here is some sort of omen or something?” Mira fires back at Celine. Rumi knows she’s really only pissed off at Celine for her sake, at what she’s insinuating. “You can’t be fucking serious, Celine. We didn’t even want to be here.”

Celine’s eyes cut to Mira, her gaze sharp. “I’m saying I don’t like unknown variables walking into my life and dropping this kind of news on us. You three might think you’re just passing through, but what if you’re not? What if something followed you here? You say you’re not from here, so don’t you think that something will inevitably have to change now that you are here? You can’t just walk in here and expect things to stay the same.”

The air between them goes taut. Rumi stays quiet, but she can feel the weight of Celine’s words pressing on her chest. The terrible thing is, Rumi actually does think there’s perfectly calculated logic to what Celine is saying, and it sucks, the way having to admit Celine is right always sucks because she’s right about these sorts of things more often than not.

“Look,” Zoey chimes in, trying her hardest to diffuse the tension between Mira and Celine, “w-we don’t have any intention to stay here longer than we have to”—which Rumi translates in her head as, we don’t plan to stay here long enough for anyone else to die—“but we really need your help getting back, o-or, like, figuring out if we can.”

Celine is about to say something again until Miyeong places a hand on her arm, and then she just turns to Miyeong, curious, and maybe a little confused.

“It’s late,” is what Miyeong says in the end, her hand still on Celine’s arm like she means to hold her down, hold her back, with that alone. It works, though, to Rumi’s fascination. “I think we should all just get some rest first, and then maybe, hopefully, start to figure this all out tomorrow when we’re all a little more… calm,” and she seems to direct this at Celine specifically with the way she squeezes her arm. Celine just huffs. “We have a spare room here." Something shifts in her voice—softer, almost careful—before she continues, "It’s not very big, but—”

“The guest room?” Rumi blurts out.

Miyeong blinks at her, surprised, then smiles sheepishly. Like she just remembered that, in another world, or another life, maybe, Rumi grew up in this house, so she knows it just as well as Miyeong and Celine do. “Yes,” she replies, “I can get it ready for you three. I think we’ve got some clothes you can change into as well.”

Celine makes a face at her, like she’s going to complain that she never agreed to letting these strangers stay the night, much less lend them her clothes, but Miyeong just smiles at her, lets her hand slip down Celine’s arm and around Celine’s hand instead, tangling their fingers together. Rumi watches as, just like that, all of the fight leaves Celine’s body, every muscle relaxing with it, and the look she gives Miyeong is one of irritated fondness. Affection. And that’s when it hits Rumi—

“Wait—you’re together?”

Rumi’s head spins. She’s always known Celine and her mother were close, Celine said as much, and Poppy had confirmed it for her too, the couple of times she visited the both of them when Rumi was a kid, had even said that whatever Celine and Miyeong had was “something special,” verbatim, and Rumi knows Celine has spent the rest of her life mourning that. When she was a bit older—old enough to take crushes more seriously, and to realize maybe she liked more than just boys—she started entertaining the idea that maybe Celine had been in love with her mother all along. It seemed like the only explanation for why someone like her would have taken it upon herself to raise Rumi, despite everything. That there must have been something that compelled her to do it, something stronger than just their bond as Hunters and as friends.

She’d never once considered the possibility that her mother might have, or could have, felt the same way. Or that, you know, she could have been into women at all too.

Both Celine and Miyeong have tensed up. Even Mira and Zoey have, too. Then Celine asks defensively, and almost threateningly, “Is there a problem with that?”

“What?” Rumi squawks, a little offended at what Celine is insinuating this time, “Of course not! Why would I—I’m not shocked because of that. I-It’s just, you know… where we come from…” She deflates, gesturing to herself, as if to say, I happened, and so, they never did.

Celine doesn’t say anything. She just looks kind of embarrassed.

Miyeong pats her hand and, addressing everyone, says, “Alright, time for bed.”

Rumi guides Mira and Zoey to the guest room, passing by the room that, back where they're from, would have been her room, seemingly locked shut here, where they wait quietly for Miyeong to come with the pile of fresh clothes she promised them. “I would give you directions to where the bathroom is,” she quips, smiling crookedly, “but I’m sure you already know.” They thank her for the clothes, and just before she leaves, she says, “Rumi,” and Rumi freezes, gripping tightly onto the shirt she’d picked out for herself. Miyeong rubs the back of her neck awkwardly. “I just wanted to apologize for Celine’s… behavior earlier. I would say she isn’t usually like that, but I think you and I both know that isn’t exactly true. I just hope you don’t take it personally.”

Rumi purses her lips, conflicted. How could she tell her mother that she’s been trying not to, ever since she was old enough to internalize that her very existence was a mistake? That she’s always told herself Celine was just scared for her, and that’s why she told her to cover up her entire life, even up to their very last time seeing each other before Rumi wound up here? That she’s spent all her life telling herself it was never anything personal on Celine’s end, even if she could never really be sure?

And anyway, she can’t really blame this Celine for being so hostile towards her, not after everything they’ve already lost.

“I do want to know more about your world,” Miyeong goes on to say, sincere, if not a little nervous, “and—and about me, over there.”

Rumi manages a small smile at her.

“Alright,” Miyeong breathes out, smiling at all three of them now. “I’ll see you three tomorrow.” Then, she’s gone.

When it’s just the three of them again, they strip out of their battered stage outfits and into the clothes Miyeong lent them. Then, wordlessly, they flop down onto the singular bed in the guest room, just barely big enough to hold all three of them, let alone Mira, who takes up most of the space. “Sorry,” she mumbles, as they try to figure out how to make this one-bed situation work.

Eventually they end up huddled against the headboard, with Rumi sandwiched between them. After a long, long day and what may or may not be an interdimensional leap through time and space or whatever, Rumi is—exhausted, and it’s all finally starting to catch up to her. Having the familiar warmth of Mira and Zoey’s bodies pressing in on her from both sides is especially making her drowsy. Mira and Zoey, at least, seem to be on the same page.

“Hey,” Mira says after a while, softly, “I… I’m really sorry about the way we reacted.”

“Me too,” Zoey murmurs.

Rumi squeezes her eyes shut, because she might actually cry otherwise. “It’s fine,” she says. “I don’t think I would have reacted so differently if I were in your shoes.”

Neither Mira nor Zoey say anything in response to that.

“You showed up for me in the end,” Rumi continues, gentler this time, so they know she isn’t mad at them and probably never really could get herself to be anyway. “That’s all that matters to me.”

Zoey takes Rumi’s hand into hers and squeezes it, like a silent promise being made.

Rumi knows she could leave it at that, and it would be a nice, sweet note to end things on, but she feels compelled to tell them, “Before Gwi-ma… I went back here, to Celine, and I… I asked her to kill me.”

This time, Mira stirs, turning so violently that it almost knocks both Rumi and Zoey off the narrow bed. “What?” she breathes out, stricken, and she looks like she actually wants to cry. “Rumi, why—you mean—”

Even Zoey looks like she’s going to bawl her eyes out any second now, the realization that they almost lost Rumi hitting her just as hard. “Rumi,” she says, and then—there it is: the waterworks—sobs, “Rumi,” and she throws her arms around Rumi. Mira wraps her arms around the both of them, almost pulling the both of them against her body, like that’ll be enough to keep Rumi safe and just hold all of them together.

“Hey,” Rumi says, trying to soothe her friends, “it’s fine. I’m still here, aren’t I?”

Mira pulls back just to glare at her through her tears when she says, “And what if you aren’t? What if she actually did do it? I—I just watched her throw a fucking sword at your head, Rumi.”

Rumi suddenly feels bad for trying to crack a joke at this moment. “Yeah, but…” She furrows her brows, trying to find the right way to explain it, and then just settles on, “Celine wouldn’t have done it,” hoping that they understand what she’s trying to say. That the Celine who did, in fact, hurl a sword at her head isn’t the Celine that raised her.

Mira and Zoey get it, of course. They always do, in the end.

“You know,” Zoey says a beat later, once their emotions have settled back down a little, “I always thought Celine was scary, but this Celine is—” She shudders. “I never imagined she was such a homicidal maniac when she was younger.”

Rumi snorts out a laugh, but then that quickly turns into mortification when Mira adds, “And, like, Celine and your mom, dude,” scandalized.

“Stop,” Rumi groans, embarrassed now, “please, I don’t need to think about how she’s—”

“Fucking your mom?” Mira supplies, gleeful. “Do you think that’s what they were doing before we got here? Maybe that’s why Celine was so grumpy. Maybe we interrupted them.”

“Celine’s always grumpy,” Zoey says, “and also, ew,” but then she’s laughing so hard she almost rolls off the bed.

“Stoooop,” Rumi whines, burying her burning face in her hands. Mira and Zoey only laugh harder.

Zoey’s still giggling under her breath when Rumi yanks the blanket over her head like she can block them both out, muffling a groan. It earns her a light and playful elbow from Mira before Mira tugs the blanket back down and slides in closer, arm draping over Rumi’s waist. Zoey shifts so her forehead rests against Rumi’s shoulder; Mira’s breath fans against the back of her neck. Their teasing fades into the soft rustle of fabric and the creak of the mattress as everyone gets comfortable.

There’s still a lot left between them that they need to discuss, but for now it’s enough that they’re all still together somehow. The rest can come later.

Eventually, Rumi’s eyes drift shut. The last thing she registers before sleep takes her is the weight of Mira’s arm tightening just slightly around her, and Zoey’s quiet, steady breathing against her skin, like they mean to hold her there, and won’t let go.

Rumi wakes up and, for just a second, hopes against all hope that whatever happened last night had all been a strange, overly elaborate dream, and that they’d actually defeated Gwi-ma. But then she peels her eyes open and finds that she’s still cramped in the small bed in the guest room and then, as if on cue, Miyeong pops her head in and greets her with, “Good morning. I hope you guys slept okay,” smiling apologetically at the way they look like a trio of unevenly-sized sardines packed in a very, very tiny can.

Mira and Zoey stir awake too, and Rumi manages to grab ahold of Zoey before she almost rolls off the bed again. “Hey, uh—” Rumi furrows her brows, unsure if she should call Miyeong Mom again or not, but also uncomfortable with the idea of just referring to her by her name. She scraps it entirely and just answers, “Yeah, um, we’re fine.”

Miyeong gives her this unplaceable kind of look at her hesitation to call her Mom again, but then she quickly smooths over that with a smile and tells them, “Breakfast is ready, by the way,” then ducks out of the guest room right after.

They take turns showering then follow the warm, savory smell wafting through the hall. It leads them to the kitchen, where they find Celine standing at the stove, patiently guarding over the mackerel sizzling in the pan while steam curls up from a pot of soup beside it. For the first time since they got here, she looks totally at peace.

Rumi is still taking that in when Miyeong comes up behind Celine and wordlessly rests a hand against the small of her back. Celine tilts her head slightly, just enough to acknowledge Miyeong’s presence, and Miyeong leans in to murmur something Rumi can’t hear. Celine chuckles softly, then Miyeong’s arms slip loosely around her waist as she leans in again to kiss her, this time.

A heavy feeling settles in Rumi’s chest.

Her mother is happy here. Celine is happy. Maybe it’s no coincidence that she doesn’t exist in this world, after all.

Miyeong glances up and finally notices the three of them standing in the doorway. When she catches Rumi staring, she blushes like she’s embarrassed or something. Celine turns to look at them too—at Rumi, specifically—and she kind of just half-frowns at her before she turns all of her attention back to the food she’s preparing.

“Um,” Mira says awkwardly, and Miyeong slips away from Celine’s side to set the table. “Come,” she says, gesturing for them to take their places, “sit down.” One by one, she sets down bowls of rice and then an array of side dishes—neatly plated kimchi, stir-fried vegetables, seaweed, the works—while Celine ladles generous portions of the soup into five bowls, which she then passes to Miyeong. The fish is done too.

They settle into their seats, and without a word or hesitation. Miyeong takes one of the fillets of mackerel and places it on Rumi’s plate first. Rumi blinks down at her plate, the gesture landing heavier than she wants to admit, but then Miyeong’s already moving on to serve Mira and Zoey like it didn’t mean anything at all to her, saying, “Go on, dig in,” smiling warmly at them. They mumble their thank you’s and get to eating.

It isn’t until Rumi’s got a mouthful of rice, soup, and mackerel that she realizes just how hungry she is. It’s probably been almost a whole day now since Rumi’s last meal. She’s tempted to just shovel all the food into her mouth and risk the humiliation of choking or, later on, indigestion, but she manages to get a hold of herself, slowing down to savor the food—to savor the taste of home.

Rumi grew up on Celine’s cooking. When Rumi was finally of age and she insisted that she wanted to spend her birthday drunk out of her mind—it would just be at home anyway with Zoey, who wasn’t of age and had to spend the evening sipping on soda instead, moping about it the entire time, and Mira, who was also of age, so she spent the evening drinking Rumi under the table—Celine had the haejangguk ready and waiting for her the very next morning, as well as a lightly-served sermon on drinking responsibly. So, even if things are tense with this Celine, this is still the food she knows and loves so well, prepared the exact same way by the exact same hands. She didn’t think she could ever miss Celine like this, especially not after how they left things off before Gwi-ma dropped them here—but she does. She misses Celine, even if—well—Celine is sitting right across from her.

She doesn’t realize she’d been staring at Celine until Celine cocks a perfectly arched brow at her. Rumi drops her gaze and shovels some more rice, soup, and mackerel into her mouth to keep herself from saying something stupid.

Not much talking is done over breakfast. Mira and Zoey are just as ravenous as Rumi, meanwhile Celine and Miyeong just watch them tear through the side dishes and several bowls of rice and soup in quiet, almost horrified fascination. At one point Celine stands up to fry up some eggs, nice and simple sunny-side-up, and shoves the entire plate at the three of them and then sits back to just watch them again, faintly more amused this time.

“You guys are hungry, huh,” Miyeong remarks eventually, which makes Rumi, Mira, and Zoey freeze, embarrassed at how they must look like a bunch of hungry little slobs right now. Miyeong picks up on that, of course, and just laughs, light and easy. “No, no, it’s okay. I understand. You've been through a lot in the past couple hours. Just eat as much as you want.”

Celine shoots her one of those looks again, one of those silent complaints, like STOP DRAGGING ME INTO THIS, I AM NOT THEIR PERSONAL CHEF, but just as Rumi’s observed all it takes is a light touch and a small smile to make her acquiesce.

“Actually,” Zoey says shyly, with an equally sheepish smile to match as she holds her empty bowl up, “could I maybe have a little more of the soup? It’s really, really good.”

Rumi catches the faint curl of pride tugging at Celine’s mouth before she schools her expression back into something neutral.

When the last of the fish and side dishes are gone and every bowl has been scraped clean one last time, they help clear the table. The clatter of dishes fades into the background as fresh mugs of tea and coffee are set down on the table, steam curling into the air between them. Miyeong takes her seat again, folds her hands on the table, and with a glance at Celine, says, “Alright, I suppose there’s no time better than now to pick up where we left off last night.” She looks at Celine again. “Celine?”

“You have to tell us everything,” Celine instructs Rumi, Mira and Zoey. “Before you fought Gwi-ma, when you were fighting Gwi-ma, and then just before you wound up here. Before the explosion of light that you mentioned. Spare no details and try not to be so vague this time. We won’t be able to piece together how this was possible or how to send you back to where you came from otherwise.”

Miyeong nods, then adds more gently, “We understand that this is all a lot to take in right now, but we really need you to try your best to remember any- and everything that could potentially help us help you. We have to work our way backwards.”

Rumi, Mira and Zoey exchange glances, then Mira and Zoey nod at Rumi. She nods back at them then, taking in a deep breath, says, “Okay, so—”

She does her best to tell them everything, just like Celine said, start to finish. She tells them about the Saja Boys, and both Celine and Miyeong, but especially Celine, are distressed when she tells them specifically about Jinu. Celine looks like she’s already planning a manhunt, and Miyeong looks like she’s ready to join her, weirdly kind of protective, and Rumi just tries to barrel on with an, “Anyway,” that her voice cracks around, only for them to look even more distressed as soon as she tells them that she and Jinu had come to an agreement to help each other, or at least she thought he was going to actually honor his promise to let the Saja Boys lose during the Idol Awards. She decides to leave out the not-so-minor detail of her asking the Celine from their world to kill her because she thinks she’s done enough irreversible damage to this Celine’s blood pressure for one morning.

“Which brings us here,” Rumi says, a little breathless from how much and how long she’d been talking. “It’s exactly as we said: we were fighting Gwi-ma and his hordes of demons, and just when we thought we had it, there was this explosion of light and then next thing we knew, we were all here already.”

“So,” Zoey chimes in, hopeful, “what do you think?”

Celine and Miyeong exchange a look, another one of those private nonverbal conversations they have with their eyes and eyes alone, then Celine turns back to Rumi, Mira and Zoey and simply says, “Follow me.” She’s up and out the door the next second, in a few quick strides.

Miyeong and Rumi look at each other for a moment, then Miyeong is up on her feet too. Rumi, Mira and Zoey follow her lead.

Celine leads them out the back of the house, across a stone path slick with morning dew. The shed sits at the edge of the property, tucked between two tall persimmon trees, plain enough to be ignored—except for the heavy steel door and the keypad lock bolted to the front. Rumi recognizes it from all of the times Celine’s asked her to fetch some gardening tool or other, back in her world, but she’s never actually let Rumi inside the shed. There never seemed to be any reason for her to, until now.

They watch as Celine punches in the code, and then, the mechanism clicks. The door swings inward, revealing a narrow stairwell lit by bare bulbs, like something ripped straight out of a horror movie, but they follow her down the narrow stairwell all the same, the air becoming cooler and drier as they descend.

The steps go on longer than Rumi expects, long enough that the sound of their footfalls seems to sink into the walls. She swears she sees faded talismans pasted at intervals, their paper brittle and their ink long since bled into the plaster. When they reach the bottom, Celine palms another lock, this one set into a reinforced door with intricate carvings around the frame. It swings open on silent hinges.

“Whoa,” Rumi murmurs, as the space beyond swallows them.

Underground, it’s vast, far wider than the footprint of the shed above. A sprawling archive, with wooden shelves that stretch high toward the vaulted ceiling, lined with scrolls bound in silk cords, and then thick leatherbound tomes, and stacks of weathered manuscripts. The faint smell of incense clings to the air, threaded through with the dry scent of paper older than everyone in the room combined.

“This,” Celine says, stepping forward, “is where we keep everything.”

“Damn,” Mira says, walking up to one of the shelves and just eyeing all of the volumes neatly arranged on the shelves. She turns to look at Rumi and Zoey over her shoulder and asks, “Did you know we even had this? Because I sure as hell didn’t.”

At that, Celine raises a brow at Rumi, who shakes her head and explains, “Celine—uh, our Celine, the one from our world—never let us in here.”

“She wouldn’t even let us go near it, honestly,” Zoey adds, hopping over to where Mira is. She drags her fingers along the spines of the bounded volumes and attempts to pluck out one, only for half the row to come sliding forward in a slow, unstoppable cascade. The books drop to the floor with embarrassingly loud thuds, and both Mira and Zoey turn to look at Celine with sheepish, mildly terrified smiles on their faces. “Oops…?”

Celine, thankfully, doesn’t throw a sword at anyone’s head this time but she does grumble, “I can see why.” When they scramble to pick up the books and rearrange them on the shelves, Celine sighs and says, “Leave it. At this point, you might only make it worse,” and then turns her back to them.

Miyeong beckons for everyone to gather around Celine when she comes back from one of the shelves—one of the older ones, by the looks of it, if not the oldest one—with a scroll that looks so ancient that it’s any wonder how it hasn’t actually disintegrated yet. She lays it carefully across the nearest table, weighing down its curling edges with smooth river stones.

In the center of the parchment, painted in fading but still vivid ink, is a tree. Its sprawling roots are drawn in looping coils that seem to sink deep into the earth, while its branches reach impossibly high, vanishing into a halo of gold leaf. Even through the haze of age, Rumi, Mira, and Zoey recognize it instantly.

“That’s—” Rumi starts, but Celine is already nodding.

“The shinmok,” she says, gaze sweeping over them. “When the first Hunters created the Honmoon, they bound its magic here, to the shinmok. Its primary purpose was to serve as a shield to protect this world from Gwi-ma and his demons, yes, but the magic itself that holds the Honmoon together is also what holds this world apart from others.” She taps at the painted tree. “This is the keystone that holds it all together. It’s what connects your world—or, I suppose, more accurately, your reality—to ours.”

Zoey frowns. “So it’s like… some kind of magic battery?”

“Something like that, but it’s also more than that,” Miyeong answers. “It’s more than just the thing we, as Hunters, tap into to keep the Honmoon intact, and from which all of our own powers flow. Think of it as the point where everything meets, or… Or like a marker for the border between your reality and ours. Like Celine said, the magic itself that holds the Honmoon together is also what holds that border together, so our worlds don’t collide or bleed into each other, so to speak.”

“Wait,” Mira pipes up, crossing her arms over her chest as she tries to make sense of everything they’d just been told. “If this—this—multiverse or alternate realities whatever-the-fuck existed all this time, then why wouldn’t we have been taught about it? Sure, we know what the Honmoon is for, we know why we’re fighting as hard as we are for it, but not once did Celine mention any of this.”

Mira’s words hang in the air for a moment. Celine and Miyeong exchange a glance, like they’re telepathically arguing about who should take one for the team and answer. It doesn’t come as a surprise to Rumi when Celine inevitably crumbles under Miyeong’s gaze.

“We didn’t know either,” Celine answers finally, “at least, not until recently. After Poppy died, the Honmoon had started to weaken significantly. But it wasn’t just the Honmoon, it was—”

“The shinmok,” Miyeong says now, brows furrowed. “Or, more specifically, the magic that comes from it. It wasn’t just that the Honmoon had weakened because one of us was gone, it was the magic itself, the very thing keeping it together. Keeping this world together. It was affecting not only the Honmoon, but our abilities too, to a degree.”

“So, we came down here,” Celine goes on. “We went through everything. Scrolls, bound volumes, anything at all that might tell us what was happening, and why. That’s when we found it.”

She nods at Miyeong, who plucks one of the bound volumes from a nearby shelf and comes back with it, setting it down on the table. She flips through it until she finds the pages relevant to their discussion now.

“This,” Celine continues, gesturing to the book, “was written a few centuries after the scroll. Whoever wrote it theorized that other worlds, or realities, existed, and that the shinmok are, like Miyeong said, simultaneously the throughline between those different realities and the borders between those different realities themselves.”

“So, like in Thor or something?” Zoey asks, confused but also kind of excited. When Miyeong and Celine, particularly, look at her like she’s talking absolute nonsense, she says, “You know, the movie? The one with Chris Hemsworth? Norse god with the hammer? And there’s a massive, magical tree?”

“I don’t know who that is,” Celine deadpans, “or what that movie is.”

“There’s no Thor yet here, remember?” Mira tells Zoey gently. “We’ve been blasted to an alternate reality that’s also somehow simultaneously stuck in the past.”

“Oh,” Zoey says, crestfallen. “Right.”

Miyeong looks a little amused by their segue, like she’s trying to imagine what this Thor person is like, but Celine just sighs, tired. "You are onto something with that, though. The theory essentially is built on the foundation of the concept of the world tree—something where the divine energy from the spiritual realm flows into the physical, and something that connects all of the different realities or worlds together.

“But, that’s all it is. Theory.” Celine smiles wryly. “Honestly, I didn’t even believe it was possible myself until you three showed up here. I doubt my counterpart where you came from would have any reason to know about it… or, if she did, then she had no reason to believe in such a thing either. Either way, there’s centuries’ worth of texts in this room alone—what are the odds she came across this piece of information too?”

Rumi’s head kind of hurts, honestly, but she thinks it’s all starting to make a little more sense to her too at least. Still, that leaves one more question unanswered: “How exactly was Gwi-ma able to, I don’t know, tear a hole through the fabric of reality, though?”

“You mentioned that the Honmoon where you came from had been de-stabilized,” Celine says. “I’m not offering this as a concrete answer or anything, it’s purely theory the way I thought all of this”—she gestures to the dusty old book in front of them—“was theory, but when it weakened, so did the boundary between our realities. The magic that flows from the shinmok doesn’t just feed into the Honmoon. It works the other way around too, creating a perfectly symbiotic relationship—and so, a perfectly dependent relationship. When one weakens, so does the other. With yours unstable and ours under constant strain, it might have given Gwi-ma the perfect opportunity to tear a hole through the fabric of reality, just as you said. He might not have been able to, normally, but the circumstances were aligned to his favor. He only had to find the seam, and then push.”

The room goes silent.

After a while, it’s Rumi who breaks the silence by saying, “Okay, so theoretically, we should be able to do that too, right? Just—just find the seam and then rip it right open?”

Celine purses her lips. “I… don’t know,” she says. “As far as I can tell, no one—Hunter or not—has actually attempted such a thing.”

“It doesn’t seem like anyone’s ever really had the reason to,” Miyeong murmurs.

“Until now,” Rumi finishes, dread crawling up the back of her throat.

Great. So not only are they stuck in an alternate reality, but now they have to put together a way back to their reality from scratch.

Great. Just—great.

Rumi’s about to dig herself a hole to crawl in right here and now when Zoey, ever the optimist, says, “Okay, but there’s, like, a bajillion books and scrolls and stuff in here. I doubt you’ve actually read every single one of them, which means that maybe, just maybe, what we need is somewhere in here.”

There’s a look of fierce pride and affection in Mira’s eyes. “Yeah,” she says, “and now that there’s five of us here, we could go through everything here until we find what we’re looking for together.”

Celine frowns, but for once, it doesn’t seem like she’s frowning because she disagrees or thinks they’re annoying or stupid or whatever. It looks more like she hates that it actually makes some sense. Before she gets to say anything, though, her head snaps toward the direction of the door. Rumi feels it a split second later: the prickle along her skin, the way the air seems to thicken—a ripple through the Honmoon that signals the arrival of demons.

They all rise at once, and they’re up and out the door in seconds.

Celine and Miyeong lead the way, summoning their weapons as they run towards the direction of the graveyard. She’s familiar with Celine’s weapons (which has nothing to do with whether they get flung at her head or not), but is amazed, despite the urgency and gravity of their current situation, at the sight of her mother’s greatbow, thrumming and glowing with the energy from the Honmoon. Even Mira and Zoey can’t seem to help but admire it. The beauty of it, and the strength. Suddenly, Rumi is excited to hack her way through a horde of demons, if only for the chance to see her mother put that greatbow to work.

And there’s a horde of them, alright, slinking between the headstones, claws scraping, and fangs flashing in the cold light of day. Rumi lets her eyes sweep over them and comes to the conclusion that they’re all headed towards the shinmok, the massive zelkova tree dabsmack in the middle of the graveyard. That’s when she notices it: the ribbons hanging from its branches stir weakly, not from wind but from some flicker of energy that seems to stutter like a dying candle, and its leaves are less vibrant than they should be, edges curling and darkening. A heavy feeling settles in her chest.

This place is sick, just like Celine and her mother said.

This place is dying.

Celine tears through the horde, swinging her twin blades with all the ferocity and murderous intent she showed them the night before, cutting down anything that gets within reach. Miyeong hangs back just far enough for a clean shot, her bow drawn in smooth, practiced motions. The magical energy strung between her fingers hums before she looses each arrow, and every single one finds its mark, exploding in a burst of magic on impact.

Rumi, Zoey, and Mira move together without thinking, the old rhythm kicking in. They’ve fought as a unit long enough to know the space between each other’s swings. Mira’s gok-do cleaves through a demon that charges at them, and Zoey’s shin-kal zip through the air, knocking back several demons at once. Rumi darts in to strike where there’s an opening, swinging her sword down with the same intent and swiftness that Celine drilled into her through hours and hours of training and sparring sessions, many of which Rumi spent getting knocked flat on her back with Celine standing over her, the tip of her practice sword at Rumi’s throat.

From the corner of her eye, she catches Celine watching her with this… look on her face. The stance, the angle of Rumi’s blade, the unflinching drive behind every swing—Celine sees all of it, sees Rumi fighting almost exactly like her, and it’s a moment that feels like it lasts an eternity but, in reality, is more like a blink in time because Celine whips her attention back to the task at hand, to the demons they still have left to get rid of, and hacks her way through them. So Rumi’s eyes drift to her mother instead, catching the arc of her mother’s bowstring as it pulls taut beside Celine. They move around each other with all of the familiar, practiced ease that Rumi, Mira and Zoey have. Fluid, instinctive. It’s a little hypnotic, watching them fight like they’re dancing, that Rumi almost forgets she’s in this fight too—until a demon lunges at her.

Mira steps in and cuts the demon down with her gok-do.

“You good?” Zoey calls, already moving to cover Rumi’s flank.

“Yeah,” Rumi says, shaking off her nerves and gripping her weapon tighter. Together, the three of them pivot, scanning for the next threat.

They make easy work of the last few demons still alive and kicking. Then, just like that, it’s over. Quiet, again. No one dismisses their weapon until they’re a hundred percent sure there isn’t another wave of demons coming.

“They’ve got some nerve,” Celine grumbles, irritated, “coming here in broad daylight.”

“You know what they say,” Mira says drily, “start the morning right.”

“A demon horde a day keeps the doctor away,” Zoey chimes in.

A smile flickers over Celine’s face, and Rumi huffs out a tired laugh before she kind of squeaks in surprise when Miyeong comes over to her and catches her face in one hand, tilting it to check for any cuts or bruises. “Are you okay?” she asks, voice low but urgent.

“I-I’m fine,” Rumi answers, her cheeks burning under Miyeong’s touch. “Thanks.”

Miyeong looks like she’s going to still fuss over Rumi but then seems to decide against it in the end. She just says, “That’s good,” smiling warmly at her.

To be honest, she’s a little giddy about it. She grew up watching other kids’ moms dote over them and always wondered what it would be like to be given that treatment. It isn’t that Celine was cold with her or sparing with her affection or anything, but she’s certainly not doting the way Rumi always imagined her mother would be.

Celine would whack her with a practice sword without hesitation and then get mad at her for letting her guard down again, or for hesitating long enough again to give her an opening. Afterwards, she would pass her an ice pack for her new collection of bruises and then prepare one of Rumi’s favorite dishes for dinner. She cared for Rumi, but never particularly doted on her.

So, naturally, this Celine has to ruin the moment by saying, “Don’t let yourself get distracted next time,” but there’s no heat to it. She’s got this unreadable expression on her face, but she looks away before Rumi can try to make anything more of it.

They gather around the tree. “When you said it was bad,” Mira starts, and Zoey finishes, solemn, “We didn’t think it was this bad.”

Rumi can feel the tree’s weakness pressing in, the way its fading magic leaves the whole place feeling just a little more hollow. “They were going for the shinmok,” she says, voicing her observation from earlier out loud.

Celine hums. “Ever since the Honmoon weakened, we’ve noticed that, more and more lately, the demon appearances have been concentrated here—not just in the village, but here, specifically.”

“Like they know,” Miyeong says gravely.

“You don’t think Gwi-ma is…?” Rumi starts to ponder, only for her voice to taper off unsurely.

“There’s no way to know for sure if this is just the demons in this reality making the most of the Honmoon’s weakened state,” Celine answers, “or if Gwi-ma specifically means to get rid of it so he can cut down your last connection—your only way back—to your reality.”

“All we know now,” Miyeong says, looking around at everyone, eyes lingering on Celine before they land on Rumi, “is that we need your help just as much as you need ours.”

Rumi waits for Celine to bristle at that, or two give one of those I didn’t agree to this frowns she’s become very familiar with in the short few hours they’ve spent together in this reality, but neither come. She just purses her lips and looks at Rumi, Mira and Zoey expectantly.

It seems that they’ve finally come to a truce, of sorts.

“We’d better get to work then,” Rumi says, Mira and Zoey nodding resolutely beside her.

They spend the next few hours holed up in the dusty old archive under the shed.

The objective is simple enough—find literally anything at all in here that could help them figure out a way to get back home—but sorting through centuries’ worth of texts is still a tall order, and there’s the matter of how quickly they can do it too. Rumi doesn’t know how time is even supposed to work anymore, given their predicament. She doesn’t know just how much of it has passed in their reality since they got here, and it seems a little too optimistic to hope that things just got frozen or suspended in time over there, as if Gwi-ma would ever be considerate enough to wait for them to come back. She’s sure that he wouldn’t have thrown them here in the first place if he knew it was going to be easy for them to find their way back.

“Maybe we can start from the oldest stuff in here and work our way up,” Rumi had suggested, so that’s what they’re doing now.

They’ve split into two groups: Celine and Miyeong on one end of the archive, methodically pulling down scrolls and stacking them into neat piles, and then Rumi, Mira and Zoey on the other end, grabbing as many as they can carry in their arms and choking and coughing on all the dust that come with them. Every so often, Celine glances over at them. Not in suspicion, exactly, but with that razor-sharp watchfulness that makes the three of them slow down and handle the brittle scrolls like they’ll actually disintegrate if they aren’t careful enough.

The hours pass with the steady rustle of parchment and the occasional creak of the wooden shelves. They only take a break when Rumi, Mira and Zoey’s stomachs grumble so loud at the same time that the sound of it echoes in the quiet, cavernous archive. Miyeong covers her mouth like she’s trying not to laugh, while Celine just gives them this only mildly irritated look before she says, “Come on,” and is up on her feet the very next second. They don’t have time to really whip up anything as put-together as breakfast was, so they make do with the leftover soup and fried rice, and Celine fries some eggs too and two whole cans of Spam, like this time she’s ready to feed the three hungry little gremlins that have barged into her life from another, different life entirely.

They inhale the Spam, just like Celine had anticipated. To thank her and maybe apologize for having her prepare so much food just to keep them up and running, they offer to wash the dishes.

By the time they descend into the archive again, the air feels warmer and heavier, the kind of heat that seeps in from above even without a single window to let the light through. They fall back into rhythm without needing to speak—scrolls eased from shelves, parchment whispering under careful hands, the occasional muttered comment when someone finds something worth passing along. It’s a productive afternoon, all things considered, but by the time they’ve worked through at least two and half shelves of old, dusty scrolls, some so old that they’re faded beyond comprehension, they still have nothing to show for it.

Mira exhales sharply, leaning back on her heels. “We’ve been at this for hours,” she groans, “and all we’ve found is dust and dead bugs.” Zoey glances her way, but doesn’t say anything… mostly because she’s trying not to sneeze on the scroll she’s holding.

Celine doesn’t look up from the scroll in her hands. “Then we just have to keep looking. The book we showed you was written long after any of these scrolls were written, so maybe we won’t find exactly what we’re looking for in any of these, but it’s still worth looking at them. We might find something that will lead us to what we’re searching for now.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mira grumbles, a little embarrassed. She turns away from Celine and leans into Rumi to mumble, “You know, I never thought that we’d end up hopping between dimensions or something, but if I did, I would have hoped it would be a little more exciting than being stuck in a tomb of a library all day long.”

This time, Zoey does sneeze, like she just can’t hold it back anymore. She flashes them, but Celine, particularly, an apologetic smile.

Rumi snorts. “Yeah, I get what you mean. I guess this isn’t exactly my idea of reality-hopping and -bending adventures either.”

It’s quiet again for a moment. Rumi’s got her nose buried in a new scroll when Mira nudges her with her elbow and murmurs, “Your mom and Celine are looking real chummy over there,” nodding towards Celine and Miyeong on the opposite end of the room.

Rumi follows her gaze and finds Miyeong leaning against Celine, almost like she’s slouched against her, and it seems like Celine is more than happy to let her do so. Miyeong has one of her knees drawn up, and Celine leans slightly into her too, a scroll spread open across her lap, and there’s this ease to the way they sit—like the space between them stopped existing a long time ago—that snags at Rumi’s heart a little. She watches as Miyeong says something to Celine, too quiet to carry across the room, and whatever it is makes Celine’s expression soften into something warm and unguarded. She says something back that makes Miyeong laugh, then Miyeong bumps shoulders with Celine playfully.

“Is it weird that I think they’re kind of cute together?” Mira blurts out before she can stop herself.

Rumi frowns at her and says, “Dude,” but Zoey excitedly jumps in on their conversation, putting down her scroll to huddle closer to them and say, “It’s really not weird at all. You know, back in the day, in the forums I was a part of, they were, like, a pretty huge thing.”

“You’re saying people shipped them?” Mira asks incredulously.

Zoey nods her head so hard Rumi worries she’ll give herself a concussion or something.

“Did you ship them?”

“Stop,” Rumi groans, before Zoey can even answer. Her face is so hot you could fry an egg on it. “They’re right there, you know. I don’t want them to hear us talking about their legion of fans who ship them, or even have to explain what shipping is.”

Mira makes this noise like fair enough. Zoey smiles sheepishly at Rumi then, more seriously, asks, “Hey, back where we came from—did Celine… or was Celine, you know…?”

“Yeah,” Mira says, serious now too, “I mean, if they’re together in this reality, which is supposed to be some kind of parallel to our own, then wouldn’t that mean that they maybe had something between them there too? Before you were born?”

Rumi would rather not admit that they’re making some sense, but they are. So far, everything has followed the rule of cause and effect perfectly. There is no Rumi here, so Miyeong is alive, and someone else died in her place. There is no Rumi, so it must mean Rumi’s dad either doesn’t exist in this version of reality or Miyeong just never met him, never fell in love with him, which is why she’s with Celine instead.

It makes sense, but she still kind of hates it because the one thing tying it all together is there is no Rumi.

“I… don’t know,” is all she says in the end, in response to Mira and Zoey. “Celine’s never talked about it. To be fair, I’ve never asked either, but, like—what even is a good time to ask, oh, hey, just wanted to know if you were actually in love with my mom?”

Mira makes that fair enough noise again.

“Is it, like, weird for you?” Zoey asks Rumi gently. “Seeing them together here, I mean.”

Rumi has to think a little about that. “No,” she finally answers. “Or at least, not really. They’re clearly happy with each other, and it’s not like I think there’s anything wrong with them being with each other, specifically. It’s just, I guess I keep thinking—”

The both of them are happier without me, is what she was going to say, but then she sees the looks on Mira and Zoey’s faces, like they’re already preparing to throw themselves at her and reassure her so hard it’ll sound like they’re sermoning her instead, so she scraps it and just says, “It’s just taking me some getting used to, that’s all.”

Mira and Zoey exchange a glance then just nod at Rumi.

They get back to work after that. Rumi throws herself into another scroll, trying to smother the dark thought from earlier, but it lingers stubbornly, wedged in the back of her mind, until it finally drags her gaze back to where her mother and Celine are again.

She’s surprised to find Miyeong looking at her too. She tenses up, guilty even if she hasn't even actually done anything to be guilty about, but then Miyeong smiles her way and she relaxes almost immediately. She returns the smile with one of her own, hoping her mother doesn’t see the sadness lingering at the edges of it.

By the time they finally call it for the day, the light outside has dimmed into that hazy, in–between glow that comes just before night settles in. The stacks of scrolls they’ve worked through are taller than they were this morning, but they still don’t have a solid lead.

Celine makes a beeline for the kitchen. She’s already grabbing pots and pans and a variety of ingredients to prepare dinner. Rumi, Mira and Zoey offer to help her but she briskly says, “No,” and leaves it at that.

“Don’t take it personally,” Miyeong assures them with a soft laugh. “She doesn’t even let me help.”

“That’s only because the last time you did, you nearly burned down the kitchen,” Celine says without looking up from the cutting board.

“That was three years ago! Why do you still keep holding that against me?” Miyeong makes a show of looking wounded, which only earns her the faintest twitch at the corner of Celine’s mouth.

The meal is simple—freshly cooked rice, a bubbling stew that fills the air with the sharp comfort of gochujang and garlic, an array of side dishes, and then some tea—but it’s all prepared meticulously and to perfection, and it’s exactly what they all need. Warm, filling. No one talks much, because they’re all too tired to, and because the only thing on everyone’s mind is how the hell are we going to fix this reality-hopping equation, and no one is really in the mood to still talk about that right now, not after a whole day spent in the archive.

They clear the table after dinner. “I can do the dishes,” Rumi offers, stacking plates.

Mira and Zoey open their mouths as if to say they’ll join her, but then Miyeong beats them to it, saying, “I’ll help,” gathering the rest of the dishes. Mira and Zoey exchange a glance with each other first then with Rumi, then they mumble something about showers or resting and then get up and slip out, leaving them alone.

Celine, on the other hand, stays put, brows knitting like she’s not quite following this part of the plan—until Miyeong catches her eye.

“Go,” Miyeong tells her, placing the bowls and utensils in the sink. “You said you wanted to continue checking the archive anyway, right? You can leave this to us.”

Celine still won’t budge, though. She just frowns, crossing her arms over her chest, like she doesn’t trust Miyeong around Rumi or something. Rumi watches as they engage in another one of those nonverbal conversations they always have, until Miyeong seems to give up, sighing, and walks over to where Celine is hovering.

She takes Celine’s face in her hands and says, “There’s no cooking involved, so you don’t have to worry about either of us burning the house down.”

Celine huffs, looking like she’s trying to fight back a smile. “Knowing you,” she replies tiredly, but also fondly, “you’ll probably find some way to do it anyway.”

Miyeong frowns at her, like she’s going to give her a real talking-to now, but she just presses a kiss to her lips instead and then shoos her away with a wave of her hand. This time, Celine does smile, just a little, enough for Rumi to catch before she catches Rumi watching, and then she finally turns to leave.

They wash the dishes together in companionable silence. Miyeong scrubs the dishes clean while Rumi rinses and sets them aside, but they end up tagteaming a particularly stubborn pot. They’re both wiping sweat from their brows by the time they get rid of all of the stuff stuck at the bottom.

Rumi thinks they’re going to spend the rest of their time together in total silence, which she isn’t entirely opposed to—just getting to be around her mother is enough for her, given their circumstances—but then, out of nowhere, Miyeong goes, “You know, Rumi, I’ve been thinking.”

Rumi turns to her. “You’ve been thinking…?”

“Did I really name you that? ‘Rumi’?” Miyeong asks, so dead serious about it that it kind of just circles back into not being serious at all. “I’m just imagining myself using my last, dying breath to say, ‘Name her Rumi,’ and I just keep thinking, wow, that’s pretty self-absorbed of me.”

It’s such a morbid thought that it punches a disbelieving, kind of shocked laugh out of Rumi.

“Sorry,” Miyeong says sheepishly, like she just realized how insane it was to say that to her daughter, “that was…” Then she’s laughing too in that what the fuck sort of way.

“It’s fine,” Rumi says, wiping her hands dry with a paper towel. “And, um… as far as I know… Celine was the one who picked it out.”

Miyeong’s smile doesn’t fade, but there’s a shift in her expression—something quiet and unnameable, as if she’s thinking about that other life Rumi came from, the one where she never got to meet her at all. It isn’t sadness or grief, not exactly, but it carries the same weight, and Rumi can feel the gravity of it pressing down on Miyeong.

“Back there, where you came from,” Miyeong says softly this time, “how is she?”

Rumi bites the inside of her cheek. She knows she has to be very careful of how she goes about this. She doesn’t want to give Miyeong anything more to worry about, knowing that she’s with Celine in this version of reality. The whole daughter reveal is enough of a bomb to drop on someone, but she doesn’t want to lie to her mother either. She doesn’t know how long they’ll have together here like this. She can’t waste any second with her, even if it means saying the sad, unhappy truth.

“She’s okay,” Rumi answers in the end, heart aching with it, “for the most part. She’s… older, and she… misses you. She misses you a lot.” She pauses a beat just to gauge Miyeong’s reaction and it’s—devastated, is the only way she can think to describe it. Quietly devastated. “She never really says as much, but I can tell. I could always tell. But she—she’s tried, she really has, for the both of us, it’s just that things aren’t always so… nice between me and her either. Honestly, we left things off on a pretty, um, bad and awkward note, before I wound up here.”

Miyeong doesn’t say anything for a while. It’s like she’s letting it just… sink in, how her absence has defined this girl’s entire existence, down to the relationship with the woman who did raise her—the woman who, in this reality, she is in love with. That there might always be a bruise or an ache in the shape of her in both these women’s lives.

Eventually, she reaches out to touch Rumi’s face, tracing her patterns with her fingertips. “It must have been hard for you,” she says softly.

Rumi’s breath catches before she can stop it. It hits her hard—too hard—and it makes her want to look away, to flinch. To protect herself from the sharp ache that swells in her chest. But she doesn’t, not when it’s her mother holding her now, giving her the one thing she didn’t even know she needed: the quiet acknowledgement of how hard it’s been, being who she is, and being what she is. How much she’s had to carry by herself for so long. How hard she’s tried to fix things and fix herself, just so she would never have to hide anymore.

She wants to cry. She wants to curl into her mother and just cry… but she somehow manages to keep it together. She swallows down the lump in her throat and says, “Yeah, I—I guess it hasn’t always been so easy. I thought… I thought Celine was right, and that the only way to get by was to just keep my head down and hide my patterns—who I am—from everyone, even from Mira and Zoey, but it just—it sucked. If Celine couldn’t love me, all of me, then who could, you know?”

“Mira and Zoey do,” Miyeong says gently, tucking a strand of Rumi’s hair behind her ear. “I’ve seen how they are with you. They’d give Celine a run for her money when it comes to being protective.”

Rumi laughs shyly, then says more morosely, “Yeah, well, you should have seen the look on their faces when they found out I was half-demon.” A beat. “I… I thought I’d lost them forever, then. I thought they hated me and—and it’s one thing to have the rest of the world hate you, and I almost felt prepared for that, but with them it’s—” Her voice catches. “It’s different, when it’s them. I don’t know how I’d live with myself if they hated me.”

Miyeong is quiet for a moment, just observing Rumi, then she asks, “How long?”

“What do you mean?” Rumi asks back, blinking.

Miyeong raises her brows at her like, really?

“O-oh,” Rumi mumbles, blushing now. She rubs the back of her neck sheepishly, trying hard to avoid her mother’s gaze. “Well, um… I guess, a really long time now? Probably, like—forever.”

“And which one?” Miyeong probes. “Or is it both of them?”

A beat. “Both.”

“And there’s this boy… the demon… Jinu, in the mix too?”

“I—well. I mean, kind of?” She wouldn’t really call a four-hundred-year-old demon a boy, but sure.

“Seems complicated,” Miyeong remarks sagely, and it ends up making the both of them laugh.

“Yeah,” Rumi concedes, sighing, “I guess it is, huh?”

Miyeong smiles at her sympathetically, like she knows a thing or two about complicated herself. “Have you ever told Mira and Zoey?”

“In so many words,” Rumi mumbles, but then she sees the puzzled and skeptical look on Miyeong’s face, and feels compelled to explain, “I-It’s just—it’s been hard, just like you said. I’ve had to keep the fact I’m half-demon from them a secret, and there was always the possibility that they would hate me for it—if not the fact I’m half-demon, then just the fact I’d been lying to them this whole time—a-and obviously that’s going to make the fact I’ve kind of been in love with the both of them since forever really, really complicated. Even if sometimes it’s like they’re just waiting for me to make the move already, but—god—you know, they’ve always sort of, kind of been a thing too, Mira and Zoey, and it feels like if I tried to wedge myself into that, between them, half-demon or not… It’s just weird, you know? I kept wondering if I should just say something already but the timing is never right, and I still hadn’t even told them about the bigger issue right now—which is that I’m half of the very thing we were taught to kill and destroy—and then there’s just the group in general to think about and I—” She breathes in, deep, hard, and exhales it all back out in a heavy sigh. “I just don’t want to be the one who screws it all up because I couldn’t keep my feelings to myself.”

She sees the stunned look on her mother’s face and her face burns even hotter. “I-I’m sorry, that was—” But then Miyeong smiles, and it makes Rumi stop in her tracks again. Shyly, she asks, “What?”

“Nothing,” Miyeong answers, still smiling. “You just sound a lot like her.”

It’s not rocket science: Rumi knows Miyeong is referring to Celine.

“We seriously wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if I hadn’t taken matters into my own hands,” Miyeong tells Rumi, laughing now. “The one piece of advice I can give you, Rumi, is to just go for it. Maybe you guys are still in a strange, tentative spot right now, and the reality-hopping of it all is probably just taking away precious time you could be using to sort out everything you need to sort out with each other—but just go for it anyway. I’ve seen how they are with you,” she repeats pointedly, “and I think, whatever it is you’re afraid of, you don’t have to be anymore.”

“You really think so?” Rumi asks earnestly.

“You said so yourself,” Miyeong answers gently. “You’ve been told to keep everything in all your life. To hide, and to cover up. Maybe Celine meant well, and she was… just trying her hardest to make sense of things, of you, but… if you’re really my daughter…” She smiles here, a little sadly. “I’ve never been in the habit of holding myself back—at least, not when it comes to the things that matter to me. Celine always gives me grief over it, saying I let my emotions cloud my judgment more often than not, but I think at the end of the day, you just have to trust your gut—your heart—and go for it, whatever it is.”

Rumi doesn’t say anything for a while, taking a long and quiet moment to just absorb everything her mother had said. Then, she stands up a little straighter and says, “I understand,” followed, more shyly, by, “Thanks, Mom.” A beat, then: “I—um, it’s, like, cool if I call you that, right?”

“Yes,” Miyeong replies, laughing softly under her breath. “It’s cool.”

They wrap things up in the kitchen and Miyeong walks with Rumi to the guest room. They stop in front of the door and Rumi has this urge to throw her arms around her and pull her into a hug, but she doesn’t. She just waits, because it seems like her mother has one last thing to say to her—and she does, but it isn’t anything she could have ever expected.

“I know it might be a little strange to say this,” Miyeong says, shifting unsurely, “but I feel compelled to say it all the same, so—I’m… I’m sorry, Rumi.”

Rumi would ask what for, but she already knows. Or, at least, she can surmise that what her mother really means by it is, I’m sorry I never got to watch you grow up, or I’m sorry I never got to be with you, or even, I’m sorry I wasn’t there—even if it’s in another life—to protect you. Or, maybe: I’m sorry we never got to know each other.

It sits heavy in Rumi’s chest. “I know,” is all she can think to say.

Miyeong offers her one last, sad little smile before she turns to leave.

“How did it go?” Zoey asks as soon as Rumi steps into the room. She’s tucked in front of Mira, who has one arm wrapped lazily around her middle. Their legs are tangled in the narrow space of the bed, Mira’s knees hooked behind Zoey’s. Mira tilts her head just enough to glance at Rumi too, but she doesn’t shift otherwise, her chin still resting in the curve of Zoey’s shoulder, her hand idly tracing shapes against the fabric of her hoodie.

They always did fit together so easily. So… perfectly.

Rumi pushes down that funny, insecure little feeling that’s trying to niggle at her. She clears her throat and walks towards the bed, easing herself into the only bit of free space left on it, then says, “It was… pretty good, actually. I’ve spent all my life wondering what my mom would be like, and what it would be like to just talk to her, and she’s everything I expected, and also just… nothing at all like I expected, in some ways. But it was pretty good.”

Mira and Zoey smile at her warmly.

“We’re really happy for you, Rumi,” Zoey says, pulling herself out of Mira’s hold just so she can crawl over to Rumi and give her a big, warm, hard hug. “Things are, like, seriously weird right now but at least you got to meet her, and I’m really, really glad you got that.”

Mira hums in agreement, her gaze soft on Rumi. “Whatever else happens, at least you’ll always have this part.”

“Yeah,” Rumi murmurs, already feeling that familiar tightness in the back of her throat, and that familiar pressure behind her eyes. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Neither Zoey nor Mira say anything after that, like they’re giving Rumi the space she needs to just be in her feelings for as long as she needs to be, knowing just how important this is to her. And Rumi appreciates that, of course, and yeah, maybe she does need to just keep her mouth shut for a bit, otherwise she might actually cry.

When she feels that ache—that tenderness—finally subside, she takes a deep breath and, squeezing her eyes shut, tells Mira and Zoey, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.” She hears rather than sees Mira and Zoey sit up straighter, alert, now.

“What is it, Rumi?” Mira asks carefully.

There’s a split second where Rumi starts second-guessing herself. Starts considering telling them it’s nothing, or that she completely forgot what it was she wanted to talk to them about, or just that she’s changed her mind and they can talk about it some other time. But then she hears her mother’s voice in her head, loud and clear in her ears, telling her to just go for it, and even if Miyeong isn’t in the room with her right now, she doesn’t want to disappoint her.

I’ve never been in the habit of holding myself back—at least, not when it comes to the things that matter to me.

And this matters. It does, to Rumi.

So, taking another deep breath, she peels her eyes open and turns to look at Mira and Zoey, then, finally, says, “It’s about… us.”

Rumi swallows, then before she can stop herself or chicken out, she blurts out in one breathless ramble, “I—I like you. Both of you. I really, really like both of you a-and I know you probably already knew that anyway, or guessed, or whatever, but I—I just didn’t want to make things weird between us, or to mess things up, and w-with everything else going on, it always felt like the worst possible time to tell you or to do anything at all about it, and then there’s the whole oh by the way, I’m half-fucking-demon of it all and I—god, I really didn’t want you to find out like that, or just, honestly, at all, and now—now I’m back to square one, but maybe worse off for it, and like, how could I possibly even follow any of that up with, ‘so I know the world is ending and you maybe, probably hate me but I still feel that way about you, I still really like you, and I’m maybe, kind of in love with you’ and—” She lets out a winded laugh that sounds more delirious than anything. “I-I just felt—stupid, or selfish. Or both.”

“Rumi,” Mira says softly.

“And I just,” Rumi goes on, glancing between Mira and Zoey, eyes wide, like she’s waiting for one of them to tell her to shut up, “I-I just didn’t want you to feel like I was trying to force myself into what you two already have with each other, and I—”

“Rumi,” Mira says again, a little more firmly this time.

“—I didn’t want you to feel like you had to pick or change or… god, I don’t know. I just didn’t want to ruin it.”

“Rumi.”

“I didn’t want to ruin you, or—or the group, or us.”

“Rumi.”

“I didn’t want to ruin any of it—”

Zoey suddenly grabs her by the face, and it all happens so fast that it takes Rumi what feels like an eternity to register that Zoey’s lips are pressed against her. That Zoey is kissing her. She tenses up, then slowly just—melts into it, into Zoey, and her mind just goes totally, completely blank.

When Zoey pulls away, Rumi says very intelligently, “Uh.”

“Well,” Mira says, stunned but still laughing, “I guess that’s one way to shut her up.”

Zoey, at least, tries not to look too pleased with herself. “Hey,” she says to Rumi gently, “relax, Rumi.”

“Y-yeah.” Rumi lets out a shaky breath. Her face is still burning, her head still spinning. When she decided to finally have the talk with Mira and Zoey, the last thing she expected was for that to happen, as much as she’s been dying for it to. “Yeah, I—Sorry.”

Mira scoots closer to them, until her shoulder is pressed up against Rumi’s. “I’ll admit,” she says, shockingly vulnerable now, “it was… really hard for us, finding out you were half-demon. Not just because of the whole Hunter thing, but because we—”

“We really, really like you too, Rumi,” Zoey says, taking both of Rumi’s hands into hers and squeezing gently. “We always have.”

Zoey’s thumb brushes gently over the back of her hand. “Back then… when we first found out, it wasn’t that we didn’t want you anymore, Rumi. It was—” She exhales, like she’s still trying to find the right words. “I mean, it’s not every day you find out that someone you care about, that someone you love, is… you know.”

Mira purses her lips. “It was a lot,” she says, voice quiet but steady, “and I-I hate that the first thing you saw from us was… that. I hate that we made you think we didn’t love you anymore, or that we hated you just because you were half-demon.” She pauses, eyes searching Rumi’s face. “I know I already said it but… I’m really sorry, Rumi. I’m sorry we made you feel like you couldn’t be safe with us. But—we were scared too. Not of you, just… Just of what it would mean for you, and for all of us.”

Zoey nods. “We didn’t know how to help you, or what this would do to you, and yeah, maybe we did freak out and yeah, it—it did hurt, that you kept that from us, but we never stopped caring about you. Not for a second.”

Mira’s hand comes up to cup Rumi’s cheek, her touch light, almost tentative. “If anything, I think we cared too much, and we let the fear of losing you get in the way of just… showing you we cared.”

Rumi swallows hard, blinking a few times, because she doesn’t trust her voice not to crack. “You guys…” She laughs a little, quiet and shaky, like she’s trying to keep it light but failing. “I don’t… I don’t even know what to say to that. But… thank you, and I—” she glances between them, the corners of her mouth twitching upward, “—I really like you. So much. More than I can even—” She cuts herself off with a tiny huff, shaking her head, because there’s no point in rambling again. “Just… yeah. I really do.”

Mira and Zoey smile at her, every bit as shy and giddy, and for a moment it’s all just… perfect. Yeah, they’re still stuck in this alternate reality, and yeah, they have no clue yet how they’re going to find their way back home, but at this moment, none of that really matters so much. For now, it’s enough to just be here with each other, their knees and shoulders pressed together, the air between them warm and steady.

Rumi would be more than happy to just leave things at that, to cuddle up with Mira and Zoey like she knows they’re dying to do as well, but there’s just one more thing she needs to get off her chest.

“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about too, actually,” she says, and she can feel the mood shift instantly, Mira and Zoey’s eyes sharpening on her. She braces herself. “It’s about Jinu.”

Just like she anticipated, the mention of him bursts their happy little bubble. Mira’s frowning so hard Rumi can already hear their dermatologist having a heart attack over it, the wrinkles, oh Mira-nim, oh dear, and Zoey’s grip on her hands loosens, just slightly.

Rumi powers on before she can lose her nerve. “J-just hear me out, okay? I still want to help him. If there’s even a chance of it… I want to try, when we get back.” She sees the protest forming on Zoey’s lips, the flash of warning in Mira’s eyes, and barrels through it anyway. “This doesn’t change the way I feel about you, okay? Nothing ever will, you have to know that. You have to—to trust me on that, please. But it’s just… I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I really do think that he’s a good person deep down, and that that person is still somewhere in there. He made a mistake, yeah”—she hesitates, grimaces—“a really big one, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be saved, or that he can’t come back from it. And he… He’s helped me too. He’s helped me accept who I am, and what I am, and as complicated as things are, I want to return the favor. I want to help him, like I promised him I would.”

Mira exhales sharply, running a hand over her face. “Rumi, you can’t just—after everything he did—”

“I know,” Rumi cuts in, her voice steady now, her chin lifting just slightly. “I know what he did. I know what it cost you, and what it almost cost us—but this matters to me, and I-I can’t just walk away from it, not when I could do something about it.”

Mira’s jaw works for a moment before she says, quietly, “Where does that leave us, then? If you can save him. If he sticks around.”

“It leaves us right here,” Rumi says without hesitation, “with me still wanting you. That’s not changing. I want you—and I want to help him, too. I know it’s asking a lot, but… I’m asking anyway, because I… I think it’s the right thing to do, and I don’t think I can do it all alone.”

For a long moment, no one speaks. Mira and Zoey just look at each other, scarily reminiscent of the way Celine and Miyeong look at each other when they speak to each other with their eyes alone, and then finally Mira sighs, rubbing at the back of her neck before looking back at Rumi.

“You’re impossible,” Mira tells Rumi, more resigned than angry, really, “you know that?”

Rumi blinks at her, then at Zoey. “So does that mean…?”

“Yes,” Zoey sighs, shaking her head with a faint smile. “We’ll help you help him.”

“Trust me, we really don’t want to,” Mira grumbles, like she’s just remembered she has to pretend to be mad or something, only for her expression and her voice to soften again when she says, “but if this is really important to you, then… Fine.”

Rumi lets out a relieved, honestly just touched breath. “Thank you,” she says, emotional again.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mira says, smiling at her tenderly, “you big baby.”

“Wait, I just need to know,” Zoey says, cutting their sweet little moment short, “did you… or do you… you know, like him too?”

Rumi freezes at Zoey’s question. She could just pretend, or at least be vague enough that it won’t have to mean anything at all for them, but after her conversation with her mother, she finds that option less and less appealing with every second that she hesitates to answer.

So, in the end, she admits, “…I mean—yeah, kind of,” wincing as soon as the words are out, and then swiftly adding, “Not the same way I like you, not even close, but… I do care about him, a-and I guess I did start to kind of like him in his own stupid, annoying way, but he’s—he’s not you. He’s never going to be you.” She pauses, just to gauge Mira and Zoey’s reactions, and she’s relieved to see they’re relieved too, hearing that. “But I can’t pretend that he didn’t—doesn’t—matter to me, because he does, and if I can do something to help him break free from Gwi-ma’s control over him, anything at all, then I want to. That’s all.”

Mira and Zoey nod, like that’s enough for them.

“Hey,” Zoey says, squeezing Rumi’s hands. “We love you.”

Rumi can’t help the big, goofy smile that lights up her face. “I love you too,” she says, without hesitation.

“Just one more thing,” Mira says suddenly, and the next thing Rumi knows, her face is in Mira’s hand and Mira’s lips are on hers. When she pulls away, Mira smiles at her crookedly, which is usually the sign that she’s really happy about something, like her own face can barely contain it, and says, “There. Now Zoey and I are even.”

“It was never a competition, you know,” Zoey tells Mira, shoving lightly at her shoulder before she pulls her in for a quick kiss too.

The three of them don’t say anything after that, and they don’t really need to. Mira and Zoey keep Rumi sandwiched between them, their shoulders and arms and legs pressing against Rumi’s, and the air between them has gone soft and warm again now that they’ve stumbled over the hard parts already. Rumi lets herself lean in, her head tipping until it rests lightly against Mira’s, and she can feel Zoey’s thumb drawing slow, absent-minded circles over the back of her hand.

Like this, warm and safe between the two people she loves the most, Rumi is glad she listened to her mother.

As full as Rumi’s heart is, she can’t sleep. If she weren’t stuck in the middle of the cuddle pile with Mira and Zoey, she would be tossing and turning right now. She wiggles her way out eventually, so she can go to the bathroom, but when she’s done with that, she finds herself drawn to the shed out back instead. She pops her head in the guest room just to check in on Mira and Zoey, make sure she didn’t ruin their sleep, and then she makes her way out.

She wraps her arms around herself as she steps out into the chilly night. Her slippers scuff quietly over the damp grass, the world so still she can hear the soft hum of insects and the faint rustle of leaves in the wind. The shed’s door is still open, light spilling out in a warm, narrow beam that cuts through the darkness. She descends the stairwell, and finds Celine standing over a spread of scrolls and thick, old volumes laid out in front of her on the table, shadows polling under her eyes.

“You’re still here?” Rumi asks, not at all surprised.

Celine looks up at her and says, “And you’re still up,” not sounding the least bit surprised herself.

Rumi walks over to Celine, skimming over all of the ancient texts laid out in front of them. “Find anything?”

Celine makes this low, grumble-y sound in the back of her throat, which Rumi takes as a no. She crosses her arms over her chest, after, and just sighs. “I don’t think any of the Hunters before us anticipated that something like this would happen, or that Gwi-ma would even be capable of it.”

“There’s a first for everything,” Rumi blurts out, sardonic, and she’s about to apologize for cracking a joke now but then she catches the smile that flickers over Celine’s face and decides maybe an apology isn’t necessary after all. “So, uh… where’s—”

Calling Miyeong ‘Mom’ to her face is one thing, but she isn’t sure if Celine is entirely comfortable with it. Hell, she isn’t entirely comfortable with Rumi.

Celine doesn’t make a fuss over it, though. She just gives Rumi this look, then replies, “Miyeong is asleep.” She looks down at one of the books, thick and leatherbound and covered in enough dust to suffocate a person, then back up at Rumi. “Since you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful.”

Rather than be offended, Rumi just nods and walks over to the nearby shelf, plucking out a few texts to go over herself.

They work together in silence for a while. It’s a little awkward at first, being all alone with this Celine, the same woman who, barely a day ago, had tried to behead her and who, until now, is clearly still wary about her. But the quiet between them settles into something less jagged as the minutes pass, and Rumi gets used to Celine’s presence soon enough, to the way her shadow shifts over the table when she leans in to read, and to the sound of her steady, even breathing between page turns. If Celine minds that she’s here, she doesn’t show it. There’s at least none of that sharp, defensive edge Rumi’s gotten used to from her in the short time they’ve been here.

Rumi is starting to get quite comfortable with this set-up of theirs when Celine breaks the silence, finally, without looking up from the book in front of her. “How are things with you and the other two?”

Rumi looks up from the book in her hands and turns to gawk at Celine. “What? How’d you—”

Celine makes a small, disgruntled sound and turns a page. “Miyeong wouldn’t shut up about it.”

Rumi doesn’t know which is more embarrassing: that Celine knows, or that her mother, as mothers probably do, spent all her time down here with Celine telling her about her daughter-from-another-reality’s romantic woes instead of helping Celine find the key to sending said daughter-from-another-reality back to where she belongs.

“I… um…” A blush burns across her cheeks. “We, uh, sorted it out earlier. Kind of.”

When Celine doesn’t say anything in response to that, and still doesn’t look up from the book she’s skimming over, Rumi takes it as encouragement to keep talking.

“I really couldn’t have done it—or wouldn’t have done it, is more like it—without her help,” she tells Celine. This time, Celine turns to look at her, interest piqued. “She told me to, you know, go for it, so I… did.”

Celine scoffs, smiling a little, before she turns her attention back to the page in front of her. “Yeah. That does sound like her.”

She thinks that that’s the end of this very awkward and very strange interaction, or at least she hopes it is, but just as she turns her attention back to what she was reading, Celine says, “Rumi.”

Rumi turns to her again, a little stunned to hear her actually address her by her name.

Celine doesn’t say anything right away, her eyes still glued to the yellowing, dusty pages in front of her, but it’s obvious enough to Rumi that she isn’t actually reading a word on them this time. She places her hands down along the edges of the table, almost hunching over the texts spread out in front of her, then she tilts her head ever so slightly towards Rumi’s direction and says, “You said that, in your reality, Miyeong fell in love with a demon, and then she had you.”

“Yes,” Rumi murmurs, trying not to shift uncomfortably in her seat.

“Did you ever meet him? After…”

After Miyeong died hangs in the air between them, heavy, suffocating. Rumi gets it. It must be strange, or harrowing, or devastating, even, talking about Miyeong like that when Miyeong is so very alive here. Talking about her like she’s lost her already. Lost her here too.

“No,” Rumi answers softly, wringing her hands on her lap. “I honestly don’t know what happened to him after I was born, or where he went. You—I mean, Celine—never told me much about him, just that he was a demon, and that’s why I—” She gestures to the patterns on her face, her arms. “That’s why I have these.”

Celine looks at her, at the patterns all over her exposed skin, but there’s no judgment or hatred to it this time. She just… looks at her. Then, with a soft huff, asks, “And what about me?” Her tone is even, almost too even, but there’s something in it that makes Rumi think the question isn’t as casual as she’s trying to make it sound. “What was—am—I like there?”

She doesn’t ask how she is, the way Miyeong had asked. It’s almost like she knows already, like the answer to living a life and an entire world without Miyeong is as obvious as it gets for her.

Rumi purses her lips, thinking carefully of how to answer that. In the end, she says, “Well, you’re a little less angry, I guess,” which earns her this half-annoyed, half-amused scoff from Celine, and maybe a tiny hint of a smile like, cheeky little shit, almost affectionate, then Rumi goes on to say, “You… looked out for me. You took care of me, and you made sure I was safe.” A beat, then: “You tried, for me.”

It’s strange, saying this to Celine even if it isn’t really Celine. Even if this Celine will never have to bear the burden of raising Rumi. Or protecting her, like she promised Miyeong she would, in a different life. It’s probably just because their present circumstances have made it impossible to really still dwell on it, but there’s still a part of Rumi that’s angry with Celine. There always will be, until she actually gets to see her again and they settle this properly.

She’s angry—but Rumi still loves her too, despite everything, and that love naturally extends to this Celine, who never got to know Rumi.

Celine is quiet for a while, like she’s letting it all sink in. Imagining this other life she had, this child she had in that life. Then, she says, smiling sadly, “I’m guessing I messed it up with you, didn’t I.”

“I—I mean,” Rumi stutters, shifting awkwardly, “I, um, wouldn’t put it that way…”

“It’s okay,” Celine tells her. “I can tell, anyway.”

It’s quiet again for a while between them. Rumi stares down at her hands, unsure of what to do with them, or where to put them. Eventually, Celine speaks again, and this time, she says, “I’ll be honest with you, Rumi. I’m still wary of you, and your presence here. That Miyeong cares about you, against all odds, isn’t going to change the fact that you—all three of you—are still an anomaly here, and your presence in this reality could potentially lead to its ruin. You’ve seen for yourself that we’re halfway there already. But…” She purses her lips, brows furrowing. “But Miyeong—the one where you come from—chose you. She gave up her life for you, and despite everything and despite how little sense it makes even to me, I feel personally responsible for you too.”

She looks Rumi in the eye when she says, solemn, “You said I raised you.” A beat, and Celine exhales shakily. “I can’t just let you die here.”

Rumi blinks at her, startled by the tremor in her voice. It slips past all the steel and caution she’s been used to hearing from Celine since they met, landing somewhere deep in her chest before she can brace for it. Her throat feels tight, and she has to clear it before she can manage, “Thank you.” Then, she adds, “I promise we’ll do anything and everything we can to help you too. We’ll help you fix it, whatever is wrong with the Honmoon here. Whatever it takes.”

For a moment, she thinks she sees something flicker in Celine’s expression, too quick to name or put a finger on, before she nods and turns back to the open books in front of her, like the safest thing is to bury herself in work before she says something they can’t take back.

Rumi doesn’t mind. If anything, she expected as much.

She’s about to get back to work when Celine asks, like she can’t help herself, “Did I teach you how to fight too?”

Rumi nods.

Celine hums, then mumbles, “Apparently I didn’t teach you well enough if you’re letting yourself get distracted in the middle of battle,” then she tilts her head again, just enough for Rumi to see the small, almost self-deprecating smile on her face.

Rumi feels a smile tugging at her own lips, but she turns away before Celine can see it, eyes dropping to the page in front of her. Celine does the same, the rustle of paper filling the space between them once more.

Rumi was ten when she first summoned her sword. It was, surprisingly, a lot harder to do than Celine made it look, but she assured Rumi that it took them—that is, Miyeong, Poppy, and herself—a while to get the hang of it too, making something materialize from what looked like a whole lot of nothing. But, one afternoon, through sheer will and determination, she was able to, feeling the threads of the Honmoon materialize into something hefty and something real in her hands. She ran to the garden after, where she knew Celine would be, tending to the flowers there, and she proudly showed off her sword, or at least she tried to. She couldn’t really carry it given how heavy it was for her then, so she was dragging it around instead, but it was all worth it for the look of surprise and then unmistakable pride on Celine’s face. And Celine had just laughed, low and warm, when Rumi complained that it wasn’t fair Celine got two swords while she only got one, and she said, Rumi-ya, tenderly, brushing her fingers through Rumi’s unruly, sweaty hair.

That same sword is in her hands now as she offers it to Celine, begging her to kill her, to do what she should have done a long time ago, to end it all, end Rumi’s misery, DO IT—

Rumi wakes with a start, cheek stuck to the page she’d fallen asleep on. Her neck protests the angle, and she rubs at it with one hand, blinking blearily as she tries to get her bearings.

She can’t remember the exact moment she’d nodded off. The last thing she remembers was that she and Celine had been working steadily through the night, and through all of the written records they could get their hands on in the archive, cross-referencing notes until all of the words started blurring together. And now, it’s morning—how she knows it’s morning is a bit of a mystery, but her body can sort of just tell that it is.

She sits up, and then feels something shifting around her shoulders. That’s when she notices it: the jacket of Celine’s samue is draped around her shoulders, the fabric still warm and smelling faintly of her.

“You’re awake,” Celine says, drawing Rumi’s attention to where she’s standing on the far end of the long table, dressed down to her white tank top and pants. Standing beside her is Miyeong, holding two mugs of piping hot coffee. Neither of them are looking at her, though. They’re both bent over the book in Celine’s hand, speaking quietly as Celine points out something in the open pages between them.

Rumi pushes to her feet, tugging the jacket closer. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—What time is it?”

“Rumi,” Miyeong says.

Rumi freezes, looking up at them.

Her gaze shifts from her mother to Celine, pulse picking up. Celine holds her gaze, then:

“We found something.”