Archive of Our Own

“Was there anything you wanted to be growing up, before you decided to be idols?”

The three of them are on stage, perched side by side on a sofa.  Opposite is the interviewer's chair, tactfully positioned so that he can address both the interviewees and the audience with equal ease.

Zoey is the first to answer.

“A basketball player.” She grins and the crowd roars at the absurdity of it.

“What changed your mind?”

“Height restrictions.” She whines with a pout and the crowd eat it up, booing and awing. Zoey can control a mob of people like a sledger controls a pack of Alaskan malamutes and she throws them a wink for their good behaviour.

Mira is next.

“A hacker.” She deadpans.

“Whitehat, right?” The interviewer laughs, a little nervously. Mira is always bit of a wild card to have on live TV.

She shrugs. “I was undecided.”

“Let me guess: changed your mind for ethical reasons?”

It’s a valiant effort to give her another sensible out, but Mira brushes it aside. “Actually, I found out I was terrible at math.”

The crowd is hysterical.

“I’m not joking.” Mira turns to face them directly but this only further fuels their laughter.

“And how about you Rumi?”

All eyes are on her now, she can feel them on her skin like pinpricks.

It’s an interesting interview question – one of the more original ones they’ve had recently.

Was there anything she wanted to be before she wanted to be an idol- a hunter?

Loved.

Some treacherous part of her brain supplies.

Who was that? She thinks, dumbly.

Because she gets thoughts like this sometimes. Thoughts that don't quite feel like her own, that tell her cruel and often untrue things. She’s gotten better at pinpointing them over the years. There is often a sort of menacing static to them. Sometimes they sound a little like Celine.

Except this one just sounds like her own voice, plain and simple and honest, and somehow that is so much worse.

Despite the white-hot stage lights overhead, Rumi feels her whole body break out in goosebumps. Snow is gathering at the corners of her vision.

“Rumi?” There’s a pressure at the top of her arm. Mira keeps her voice cool, calm and casual for the cameras but Rumi hears the silent question in the squeeze of her shoulder.

“Yes, sorry.” Rumi clears her throat and forces out a too-light laugh, “Got lost in my thoughts.”

The interviewer laughs and some of the crowd titter along but it’s nervous and uncertain. She is freezing on stage and she needs to fix it. Now.

Focus.

Tell the truth.

“To answer your question, no. I always knew what my destiny was.”

It’s a hit. The interviewer coos, the audience erupts in whistling and applause, and off-stage Bobby punches the air in triumph, already plotting how to turn the inevitable swarm of edits into a marketing scheme.

It wasn’t a lie. She’s trying not to do that anymore. But she can still feel the weight of Mira and Zoey’s eyes on her and as she keeps her own fixed straight ahead, it feels almost like lying anyway.

**

When Rumi is too young to understand the severity of her patterns and too reckless to be trusted to keep them properly covered, Celine moves them to a remote farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. They are largely self-sufficient and the nearest houses are all several miles away – both necessities for keeping Rumi as hidden as possible.

Rumi doesn’t remember much of it but she does remember that they had a cow, which they periodically bred with a neighbouring bull for milk; once the calf was weaned, it was sold off and the winnings split.

She doesn’t remember whether the cow had a name but she does remember that it wore a bell and the feel of its hot breath on her face. They used the manure to fertilise the allotment, drank fresh milk every morning and, in the winter, Celine made hot cocoa over the stove to warm their hands and lips. Anything they didn’t grow themselves – chicken eggs, certain vegetables – they traded for with the neighbouring farms.

She remembers the day the cow dies. It dies birthing. It is a long and painful labour and the cow is dead before Celine pulls the calf from its womb. Rumi can tell there is something wrong with it even before Celine puts it down. It is the wrong shape and making the wrong sort of sound. It has black fur, slick with its mother’s insides, and tiny horns poking out of the top of its head. From the neck down the calf’s spine is twisted into a corkscrew shape and it groans, low and gargling, softer than any calf Rumi has heard before.

Celine snaps its neck.

It must sense her intentions because as she gets closer the moaning changes to a climbing squeal that makes Rumi’s hairs stand on end. It is the sound of utter fear. It chills her that something that has been alive for mere minutes has the ability to recognise such malintent.

The calf is born in the night and dies in the night. It never feels the love of its mother, who lies cold and stiff besides it. In its entire short life, it knows only pain and fear.

Why did you kill it?

It was in pain. It was mercy.

How was it mercy?

It had no mother. It was deformed. It wouldn’t have survived on its own.

It would have been with us. Rumi does not say this because she knows the answer already:

It could provide no milk. It could bear no calves. It would be a burden until the day it died. For that reason, they killed it.

They bury the cow and its calf at the end of the field and do not replace it. Without a cow, they are hungrier in the mornings and colder at night but Celine says that it is not worth the effort. Even at this age, Rumi understands that this is the same reason that they killed the calf, but it is not until a lot later that she learns the correct vocabulary:

The profit does not outweigh the cost. It is not deemed useful enough to keep around.

**

The first of Zoey’s birthdays that they spend together, her brother sends her a book from America. Inside the cover, in large, sprawling handwriting, it reads:

Happy Birthday Ugly

Saw this and thought of you

Call me if you need help with some of the bigger words

It’s a children’s book, far below Zoey’s reading comprehension level, and the title – ‘The Twits’ – is apparently an insult in some English-speaking parts of the world.

Rumi is horrified but Zoey cackles with laughter. Even after Zoey explains, Rumi cannot make sense of it. How could something so insulting be funny?

Zoey is nothing but patient and kind in her explanation but Rumi begins to get the vague feeling that the fact she cannot understand this is something to be ashamed of.

So, she lies. “Oh, I get it.”

“I don’t.” Mira very rarely lies, “Why would you be mean to someone you like?”

“I guess it’s a sibling thing.” Zoey muses but she speaks without thinking – something she is particularly prone to doing at this age.

They fall silent.

Because of course Mira has a brother too.

“It’s not because you’re siblings.” Mira says, eventually – too flippant, “It’s because you love each other.” Then she stands, brushes the dirt from her trousers and strolls off with her hands in her pockets.

Mira receives nothing from her family, even though, unlike Zoey, they are still in the same country. She plays it off like she doesn’t care but neither Rumi nor Zoey miss the way her eyes flick to the letterbox on her birthday or the telephone at Christmas.

By the end of the day, though, they have recovered from the faux-pas and Zoey reads the story to them over the course of the next few nights.

“What, so the message is be nice or you’ll get a crooked nose and a bad haircut?” Mira scoffs, “That’s dumb.”

Zoey laughs, “I think it means if you’re ugly on the inside, it will show on the outside.”

“Then why is Celine so hot?”

“Mira.” Zoey scolds, torn between biting back a smile and glancing worriedly towards Rumi.

“Sorry, Rumi.” Mira doesn’t really mean it. She doesn’t like Celine very much – it will be years before she is fully able to understand why – and Mira doesn’t hide when she doesn’t like someone.

“It’s fine.” Rumi is never sure how to take these jabs at the woman who raised her. They usually give rise to a complicated mixture of feelings but right now they are the furthest thing from her mind.

She is thinking of the odd watercolour lady in the book; of how her figure had become more and more grotesque; of how her back had bowed and bent in on itself. She is thinking of the patterns curling around her own shoulders, growing and growing.

**

It’s a rare Sunday off and the three of them are sprawled across the sofa in the penthouse watching a documentary about a man free climbing a wall of ice. Zoey is curled up in Mira’s lap, watching through her fingers. Mira is completely transfixed, occasionally reaching blindly into the bowl on Rumi’s lap to shove handfuls of popcorn in her mouth. Rumi is on the other side of Mira, on near-equal occasion reaching in the opposite direction to pick bits of popcorn out of Zoey’s hair.

One of the climber’s crampons slips and Zoey buries herself further into Mira with a squeak. The movement jostles them both so that Mira’s shoulder bumps against Rumi’s.

The climber is one hundred feet up a completely vertical ice sheet with no safety ropes. If he makes one mistake, one poor judgement call, he will fall and lose everything. The tip of his nose is black with cold.

Then, he regains his footing.

Zoey breathes out a sigh of relief and Mira, wide-eyed, comments in earnest awe, “Sick.”

“I had frostbite once.” Rumi says, without really thinking.

Both Zoey and Mira’s attention is on her immediately.

“When?”

Zoey sits up in Mira’s lap. Her hair is sticking up on the side that has been pressed against Mira and she is frowning as if she is remembering. Rumi allows herself to imagine there is a little shelf in Zoey’s mind where she keeps all the memories she has of her and Rumi.

“It was before we knew each other.”

Mira’s shoulders straighten. It’s slight, maybe imperceptible to most, but Rumi has learned that Mira is actually incredibly easy to read if you spend a little time watching her. For example, Rumi knows Mira lies with her voice but never with her actions. So even though her tone is light and casual when she asks–

“How did that happen?”

–the way she is staring at Rumi very carefully tells her it is masking a not-so-secret distaste for the way Rumi was raised.

“I…”

Fell in a lake. The memory of Celine’s voice comes sudden and unexpected. She fell into a lake.

It would be the easier, safer answer.

It would also be a lie.

And Mira is watching her patiently and Rumi can still feel the spot on her skin where their shoulders had touched. And Zoey is frowning, like she doesn’t like the idea of a time before they knew each other. And Rumi so desperately doesn't want to lie to them.

“I put my hand in a frozen lake.”

“Why?”

Rumi pauses.

“To see how it felt.”

It’s not a lie.

It’s not a lie but it’s also not the whole truth either. The whole truth feels too much like jamming a pick into the wrong piece of ice, one hundred feet in the air. The whole truth is entirely too shameful to bear.

So, Rumi does not tell them that she used to numb one of her hands in cold water just to imagine what it felt like to hold someone’s hand. 

She does not tell them about the way the whole lake froze over into a sheet of white that seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon. Or how the black the water looked through the fist-size hole in the ice. Or how she would keep her hand there until it lost enough feeling that she could pretend it belonged to someone else.

Nor does she tell them how before your hand goes numb, it hurts – it hurts like no other pain she has ever felt before. Or how nerves, like living creatures, scream as they die. Or how your skin blackens and blisters in the following weeks or the way flesh smells as it rots right off the bone.

She doesn’t tell them that her fingers had turned the same purple colour as her patterns. Or the way Celine’s nails dug into her shoulders so hard it bruised as the doctor said phrases like “dead tissue” and “nerve damage” and all Rumi could think was she’s touching me she’s touching me she’s touching me she’s touching me

**

Rumi ends up with acute nerve damage in her left hand.

She tells Celine that it doesn’t feel any different than before then she spends night after night training to keep up with the lie. She learns to grip with her palm instead of her fingers; throws knives with her left hand over and over; practices combat drills with her right hand tied behind her back. Anything that to work around the numbness at the top of her fingers.

Even when the skin there prickles and pain whistles down her bones, she works and works and works, spurred on by a voice in the back of her mind telling her that if she just works hard enough, the defect will disappear.

And the voice is right. The inconsistencies are smoothed out, the imperfections concealed and Celine never mentions Rumi’s hand again.

(Still, years later, when she pulls her weapon – a one-handed weapon – from the Honmoon, Rumi involuntarily throws up behind the shed and feels purged in a way that has nothing to do with her stomach.)

The only way it ever really manifests itself is in the odd display of clumsiness in day-to-day life: dropping things, knocking things over, the occasional slip up with a kitchen knife.

She never tells Zoey and Mira about it but they notice anyway. They put it down to her being naturally a little accident-prone and call her clumsy or klutz, rolling their eyes and tutting at every inevitable new incident. It might have stung if it weren't also for the wordless accommodation: carrying things for her, moving delicate items from table edges, taking over chopping duty during meal prep.

Every year the birthday gag with Zoey’s brother continues–

I hope you get hit by a train, love from Grandma

You may not be my favourite sister, but you are the most talented

–and every year Zoey explains the joke: the card isn’t actually from their grandma; Zoey is his only sister; it’s funny because it’s mean. 

Slowly, cautiously, Rumi begins to think she understands.

It comes in two parts. The first is that the cruelty is so ridiculous it couldn’t possibly be true. Zoey’s brother is somebody who she is so sure would never say something to truly hurt her that the idea of it is comical. 

In this same way, Rumi finds the words clumsy and klutz prod between her ribs in a manner that tickles rather than cuts. So long as they come from Zoey or Mira’s mouth, they seem to mean amusing more than liability and register with fond exasperation rather than any real annoyance.

The second part is a little more subtle, but if you look harder, you see that there are sentiments hidden within the sentiments: saw this and thought of you; call me; love from; you are the most talented. Once you pop open the first layer – the humour – it’s a set of Russian dolls of affection. 

Similarly, Rumi notices that the more they roll their eyes, the less frequent her bouts of hand cramp; and the more they tut, the slower the supply of band-aids in the first-aid kit depletes.

**

On their first world tour, after a third and final night in Paris, they have a day off. Mira drives them to a quiet town a few hours outside the city where they are unlikely to be recognised. It’s old and charming, full of narrow, cafe-lined streets on either side of a flat, green river.

They wander into a museum and, while Zoey splits off to take some sketches, Mira and Rumi drift absentmindedly through the artwork.

Rumi stops without thinking in front of a particular piece. It’s a heavy block of wood hanging in the centre of the wall with hundreds and hundreds of lines carved into it. Up close it reminds her of Honmoon but as she steps back an image emerges.

There’s a creature at the centre of a cave, surrounded by dripping stalactites and piles of wilting bodies. It is a huge, mangled thing with writhing wings and curling horns.

“‘The Vision of Hell’.” Mira observes, “It doesn't look very ye olde fire and brimstone to me.”

The strangest thing about the carving is that the cave floor seems to be mirrored, so that the beast is snarling down at another version of itself.

“The ninth and deepest layer of hell, treachery…” Mira begins to read from the description.

It’s ice, Rumi realises, before Mira has even finished speaking. Everything in the painting - the cave, the stalactites, the floor - it’s all ice. And the creature-

“... where the devil resides upon a frozen lake.”

When they return to the hotel, Rumi finds a dictionary her top drawer and turns to the word ‘treachery’:

Betrayal of trust. Deception.

That night she dreams she is flying over the lake from her childhood, except the ice is smooth as glass. She knows what she will find when she looks down into it; she can feel the weight of the wings on her back and the horns protruding from her head. 

She braces. Waits for the shock, the fear and disgust. But when she looks at the creature staring back at her, she feels nothing but a hollow calm. It takes a moment for it to register as acceptance. As if all her life, in every mirror and photograph and film, this is the image she has been expecting to see.

She wakes up covered in sweat, drying sticky and cold on her skin. The electrics hum in the background and Mira and Zoey’s voices come muffled through the wall.

Rumi lifts a trembling hand to her head where the horns had been and thinks, for the first time in a long time, of the calf with the tiny studs and the twisted spine. Motherless, disfigured and screaming.

She thinks of how Celine killed it.

She thinks why not me?

**

When Rumi’s hand was healing, she had gotten an infection that made her skin red and itchy. The doctor had drawn a line in thick, blue felt tip on her wrist and told Celine that if the rash spread past it, to come back in immediately. That they might have to amputate.

It hadn't, in the end. The sickness eating away at her flesh had stayed behind the line of no return and her hand had healed so that it was almost as if the injury had never happened.

**

Their chart numbers grow, the Honmoon strengthens and her patterns spread. 

As they do, her wardrobe adapts: short-sleeves to long-sleeves to turtlenecks. She doesn't let herself think about what’s next, whether the next wardrobe change will be the one that crosses the felt-tip line.

“I get cold easily.” She tells the public and the fans lap it up. They think she is either tiny and frail or modest and pure.

But the truth is she is wretched and riddled with sin. The kind of sin that gets carved into wood and hung in museums, and painted in watercolour on the front of children's books. The kind of sin that belongs in the dark and the cold and the desolate.

And it’s spreading, inside and out.

**

“What was it like before we got here?” Zoey asks one day in that open and earnest way that makes Rumi ache to be open and earnest in return.

She doesn’t like to think about that time in her life. By the time she was mature enough to move back to Celine’s village, she had begun to take her training seriously. A long, relentless period spent practicing drills and forms and breathing and vocal exercises until they were perfect. Oftentimes that meant well into the night, until her fingers and lips became tinged blue with cold.

She doesn’t like to think about how sometimes it felt like she was being reared rather than raised. Fed, exercised, trained with a specific purpose in mind. Or how if she let the edges of Celine’s voice in her mind blur, that purpose didn’t always seem so different from the slaughterhouse.

“It was lonely.”

She replies in the end, and it feels like she has somehow said both too little and far, far too much.

**

When they are still young enough that being awake at night feels like stealing, they make a snowman in the lamp-lit road.

Zoey likes strange things like this: snowmen at night, cookies for breakfast, stuffed animals with missing eyes and patchworked skin. Things that juxtapose. Things that don’t immediately make sense. Not out of rebellion but just because she finds genuine delight in these places other people don’t always think to look.

So, when it hits the middle of the night and neither of them can sleep, Zoey drags Rumi into the street in their pyjamas and they start crafting. Zoey takes responsibility for shaping the mound while Rumi, who isn’t wearing gloves (who never wears gloves, because any lack of control over her fingers makes her nauseous), uses her feet to push piles of snow nearer to the piece of the road they have chosen as their canvas.

When the moulding is complete, Zoey sets off in search of twigs and Rumi starts to apply pieces of coal to the shape. Once the eyes are placed, Rumi becomes immediately aware of the weight of her role. How and where she decides to position the coal determines his expression, his character, his very essence. She is breathing life into an unoccupied shell.

After progressing carefully with his smile, she presses a piece of coal into the centre of the middle section where his heart would be: the first button of his coat.

Except that, of course, it is only an illusion. There is no coat. There is no heart. There is just a dark, black, lifeless lump of coal.

Rumi pauses. Her chest is tightening around something. It reminds her of the way snow forms around specs of dust in the atmosphere. The coal has coated her fingertips in soot and, as she looks at them, she feels a little dizzy.

“Here,” Zoey is by her side, “Your hands will get cold.”

She has pulled her gloves from her hands and is tugging them over Rumi’s own. The material is warm and soft.

Rumi thinks of the coal on her fingertips. “I’ll get the inside dirty.”

“Who cares?” Zoey tilts her head. The streetlamp light is catching on the loose wisps of her hair and there are snowflakes in her eyelashes. She looks puzzled that the spread of filth might be a cause for concern. Then, she is grinning. “You’ve got coal on your nose.” Fingertips come to rest on Rumi’s jaw and the rough pad of a thumb swipes twice against her nose.  “All better.”

It lasts less than two seconds and then Zoey is taking her hand and pulling her off in some direction. Rumi isn’t really paying attention to where they are going, too busy noticing how Zoey’s hand feels against hers through the fabric of the glove.

The glove is a little tight – Zoey’s hands are smaller than hers – and Zoey’s grip is tighter still but her stomach doesn’t turn the way it usually does when her fingers are restricted. There are holes burning into her face where Zoey’s fingers had been and Rumi dimly wonders whether it has anything to do with this.

In the morning, they find him knocked into pieces. Rumi stares at his remains, frozen. He had seemed so solid last night, so invincible and permanent. The discovery of his fragility and fleetingness stupidly, childishly, warms the back of her eyelids.

She blinks, fast. It’s just a snowman.

“Poor Mister Snowman.” Zoey moves past her, “I guess we’ll just have to rebuild him.”

And watching her like this – standing in the middle of the road with an armful of coal, covered in soot, on pyjama leg tucked into her sock – Rumi thinks she might be the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

**

The first time Mira takes her hand they are at a Christmas market and the intent is nothing more than to stop Rumi from getting swept away in the crowd.

Her fingers are long and slender and unimaginably soft. At first the skin is cool to the touch but then, gradually, a warmth radiates outwards from where hot blood is pumping just below the surface. It isn’t anything like Rumi remembers of the clumsy grip of her own swollen, dying hand.

The heat is infectious. It travels through her fingers and up her arm to her chest and then all around her body.

They’ve stopped and Mira is looking at her. “You okay?”

The market is a blur of soft orange and yellow behind her and the air tastes like cinnamon and white chocolate.

Rumi nods.

“You look like you’re burning up.” Then Mira is closer and her other hand is on Rumi’s face. It stirs some memory buried in the back her mind and, reflexively, she flinches lightly.

Mira’s fingers are marvellously cool against the heat in her cheeks and she can feel everything in searing detail. The sharp edge of her nails, the bump of her knuckles. It’s too much. It’s not nearly enough.

Then a child drops his hot chocolate next to them. The smell of it hits the back of Rumi’s throat and bile claws a hot and acrid path from her stomach. Her nose stings, her eyes water. The child is crying and she has the sudden, horrible urge to shake it by the shoulders.

She jerks backwards. The action pulls her hand from Mira’s grip, who looks surprised then hurt.  

Rumi tries to sink as far as possible into the scarf wrapped around her neck. “Sorry,” she mumbles, watching the mother sweep the crying child into her arms, “I’m feeling a little off.”

Mira looks at her for a second longer but she doesn’t press.

“Let’s go home.”

It’s gentle and sweet but Mira doesn’t reach back for her hand again and Rumi feels the cold hollowing out the marrow of her bones.

**

Rumi catches Mira and Zoey kissing once. Although, ‘catches’ feels like the wrong word, as if she were sitting, waiting with bait on the end of a hook, when in reality it was completely by accident.

It’s morning, and around the time that Rumi usually goes for a run but, for whatever reason, today she doesn’t. They mustn’t have realised because it is clear, even reflected in black glass of the microwave in which Rumi is watching, that they have no idea she is there.

So, Rumi convinces herself that she isn’t either. She doesn’t see Mira yawn in the doorway. Or Zoey loop her arms tenderly around her neck, lift on to her tiptoes and press a quick, chaste kiss to her lips. And it doesn’t hurt in a way that tastes almost like betrayal.

Rumi looks away after that. Zoey keeps a food waste bin for the environment (“but the turtles!”) and Rumi stares into instead. She can’t remember why exactly it is open – perhaps she was peeling fruit or cutting vegetables – but she does remember the sight of the old food blackening and growing fur, and the sweet putrid smell of dying tissue.

Rumi has had secrets: dangerous, treacherous, rotten secrets. This – this harmless, sweet affection between the two most important people in her life – this is not the same.

**

Sometimes, Rumi gets these waves of debilitating panic. They don’t manifest in the way she has seen on TV or read about in books. There is no hyperventilation, or tears, or sudden, dizzying feelings of imminent death. There’s just an abscess in the centre of her chest that grows outwards, slowly, and in all directions. All she can do is stand there and as it presses against her organs and bones until it feels like it might consume her entirely.

Everything inside of it is completely still. Nothing moves in and nothing moves out, right down to the air in her lungs. It’s like a dark hole beneath her ribs, as cold and black as the water beneath the frozen lake. Sometimes, if she is alone, she presses the heel of her hand to her sternum and imagines plunging it into the darkness. She wishes that it didn't help.

Mira finds her on the bedroom floor.

While everything inside Rumi is numbed still, everything outside buzzes with the constant, frantic energy of flies on raw meat. As a result, she doesn’t hear her name being called, or the knock, or the door opening. She doesn’t even notice Mira is there until she is crouching directly in front of her.

Rumi is numbed deaf and dumb so she has no idea what Mira sees when she looks at her. Whatever it is, though, prompts Mira to crawl behind her, bringing her knees up around Rumi’s sides and wrapping her arms around her front. She stays there until the empty, clawing space inside of her shrinks to a manageable size.

Mira doesn’t ask what’s wrong. So, Rumi doesn't say, I think I crave the cold.

Mira doesn't ask what happened. So, Rumi doesn't say, there’s something awful in me. The space where my heart should be is a black hole and anything inside of it drowns.

Instead, she asks, “Feeling better?”

Rumi turns the question around in her sluggish mind. She supposes she does feel better. Not good by any means, but better. But, if she says yes, will Mira leave?

“I don’t know.”

It feels like rot on her tongue. She’s lying and she had wanted so badly not to lie anymore.

Stop being greedy, the cavern in her chest whispers. Greedy and manipulative and preying on the goodwill of the most quietly generous person she knows.

She remembers the time they had forgotten to empty the food bin before a two-week tour and come back to it full of maggots. She remembers peeling an orange over it, a segment slipping from her numb fingers, and how quickly they had sensed the sweetness of living flesh and swarmed it.

Abruptly, and without her permission, the image changes. Instead of an orange slice, it is Mira and Zoey, still and smiling, as writhing maggots consume them whole.

But Mira is right here, squeezing her a little harder, and the image dissipates.

“Do you want to move or stay like this a little longer?” 

This question is much easier.

“Stay.”

Rumi answers but it sounds like a plea and really it is. Please stay, please please please. In a voice that sounds like her but far younger and far smaller and far lonelier.

**

As a rule, she doesn't tell Mira when she is like this and, as a result, Mira doesn't always find her. Rumi discovers that when she does, she feels better a little faster and when she doesn't, she feels worse a lot longer.

**

“I’m sorry.” Rumi whispers into her knees.

“Don’t be.”

“I don’t know why.”

“You don’t have to.”

**

Mira holds her a little tighter and suddenly there is just enough room inside Rumi’s chest for her lungs to expand.

“How do you know to do that?”

“Pressure helps.” Mira replies in that embarrassed way she gets when she is talking about some soft, unguarded part of herself.

Rumi’s heart lurches. How many times had Mira grappled with her own insides collapsing for her to have figured out that pressure helps?

Pressure helps.

It catches on something uneven in Rumi’s mind.

It’s the pressure. It’s the pressure that helps. It isn’t the black hole or the plunge or cold. She doesn’t crave the inhumane and dead. She craves the pressure of something warm against her skin.

The realisation is heavy and viscous and it floats down her throat and gathers as a sweet sticky lump at the base of her neck. Hot tears run down her face and they burn as she chokes on the air in her warm, wet, living lungs. All the while Mira holds her wordlessly.

**

One year for Rumi’s birthday, Mira passes her a plastic box. It’s a DVD with a cartoon elephant on the cover underneath the title, DUMBO, in capitals. Inside, in Zoey’s looping writing it reads:

Thought you might relate

For our Dumbo

They’re too busy these days to watch whole films together but Zoey fast-forwards to a clip where the baby elephant trips over its entirely too big ears and takes an entire circus act tumbling down with it.

Zoey and Mira, nudging each other and snickering, are explaining how much it reminded them of her. Rumi watches them tripping over their words, interrupting each other, all the while laughing as they recount all Rumi’s mishaps, and it dawns on her…

“Are you making fun of me?”

Her eyes have started to water because ‘thought you might relate’ sounds almost like ‘saw this and thought of you’ and does that mean– can that mean–

Zoey and Mira pause, and after one look at her quivering expression are thrown into a state of instant alarm.

“No, no,” Zoey starts, before cringing, “well–”

 “I mean, yes,” Mira takes over, “but–”

By this point there are tears running freely down Rumi’s cheeks.

“Does this mean you love me?”

Mira and Zoey freeze, completely still.

For a horrifying moment, Rumi wonders if she had made a grave mistake and misinterpreted. Something hard and cold starts to build in her chest.

But then Zoey, the first to recover, is flinging her arms around Rumi’s neck. “Of course, we love you. Of course, of course, of course.” And she is peppering kisses all over Rumi’s face even though it is definitely covered in tears and snot.

Mira follows soon after, wrapping them both in an embrace so hard Rumi can hardly breath and whispering into her hairline in a voice uncharacteristically small, “Did you think we didn’t?”

They stay like that until Rumi ugly sobs so hard she gets the hiccups. On a particularly aggressive one, she manages to knock Mira’s glasses off and spill the water she was trying to sip all over Zoey. And then Zoey and Mira’s eyes find each other and they say in unison, teasing but oh so achingly fond,

“Our Dumbo.”

Our Dumbo–

And Rumi starts sobbing all over again.

**

They make an effort to explicitly tell her they love her after that. Birthday cards, texts, phone calls, even post-it notes reminding each other to get milk, all end in some variety of “love you”. At least once a day (and often much more), Zoey presses her nose against Rumi’s cheek and whispers IloveyouIloveyouIloveIloveyou until the fan of her breath against her nose and eyelids and lips leaves Rumi squirming. The words don’t come as freely to Mira but she squeezes Rumi into long hugs and pushes quick, self-conscious kisses to her forehead and Rumi just knows and somehow that starts to mean even more than the words because she had never thought love could exist in so many places.

The way Zoey kisses the patterns along her arm, the way Mira braids her hair without needing to be asked, the way they send photos to her captioned ‘thought of you’. Rumi realises to occupy someone’s mind can be a kind of love.

She starts to learn there are things she does and feels that are out of love as well. The coffee she gets for Mira on the way back from her morning run, the checklists she makes for Zoey on critically busy days, the way she just wants to be near them. All. Of. The. Time.

This huge, hollow space inside of her isn’t empty, like she had originally thought, but full, filled to the brim so high that is near bursting. And this pressure growing outwards isn’t a cold, dead part of her but something soft and tender.

This love she thought she had been lacking – it’s everywhere. Round every corner, through every door, under every unturned stone. Even in the places Rumi least expects it.

**

It’s spring. There’s a chill in the air but the first wave of flowers are beginning to push up through the thawing soil and bloom. Rumi places a sunflower in front of her mother’s headstone.

It always takes her by surprise that this was her mother’s favourite flower. Something about it clashes with the strange and hazy notion she has of what a mother should be, and it reminds her of how little she will ever really know the woman that haunts the trajectory of her existence.

She doesn’t often visit her mother’s grave. It doesn’t always feel like she has a right to be there, like the air is too heavy, sagging under a grief that isn’t hers. She hadn’t known her mother but Celine had, and Celine had loved her. She had said she was beautiful and kind and sang like an angel but fell in love with a devil.

How could anyone love a devil? Rumi remembers the taste of the question on her lips. Salt and hot cocoa.

Sometimes people love the wrong person. Or love the wrong way. Celine’s voice had been thick with pain and her eyes shiny in a way that had made Rumi feel uncomfortable, then immediately guilty for her lack of sympathy.

She sits with this memory, with the feeling of Celine’s fingers in her hair and lullaby in her ears.

She thinks of Celine breaking the neck of the calf. She thinks of her digging for hours in the freezing cold to bury the old cow, about the bell tied around its neck, and how she refused to buy another one.

She thinks of what mercy is.

She realises, not suddenly, but like she has always known, that the calf was not screaming in fear. It was screaming for its mother. It was crying out for love and familiarity and safety.

It was born knowing nothing but that and it died that way as well.

**

“I think I love Celine.” She tells them both one day not long after the visit to the grave.

They are in a cafe. Rumi sometimes finds it easier to say the personal things in her life, the things that make her feel vulnerable and small, in wide open, public spaces. Maybe because it controls and contains the level of reaction the other party can have. Maybe because there is plenty of space to run to if she feels cornered. Maybe it’s because the first place she had looked for intimacy had been an ice plane that stretched to infinity.

She lets this last thought occupy her mind for a moment, then pass on.

She doesn’t say the rest – the hard parts. Simple words that hold in them a multitude of complexity: that she still loves Celine or that she loves Celine despite. But Zoey and Mira understand anyway. They know her well enough to fill in those gaps and Rumi is struck by what a luxury it is to be known that way.

Zoey and Mira share a quick look.

“That’s okay.” Zoey says, eventually, voice soft. And she doesn’t reach over and grab Rumi’s hand – even though Rumi wouldn’t mind one bit in the slightest if she had – but instead holds her own across the table for Rumi to take. Because there had been a time when touch made Rumi skittish. And that they know this and remember and adjust – it makes Rumi’s insides feel like they’re falling.

Mira is quiet. Her mouth is a hard line. Rumi knows she sees a lot of her own neglected childhood in Rumi and that makes it difficult to extend much forgiveness to Celine.

But the fact is, Celine raised her. She put food in her mouth, clothes on her back, and set her wheels on what she had thought to be the only possible set of tracks available. Never mind the clothes were a bonnet of pins and the tracks dropped off a sheer cliff face. Rumi was made of the wrong type of snow and she had moulded her anyway, night after night, hour after hour, until her hands were surely numb from cold and black with soot.

There were parts of Rumi she could never love: the parts she had been taught were sin; the parts that stole away the most important person in her life; the parts that shattered the life she had known. But there were parts of Rumi she had loved. Maybe the parts that reminded her of her mother. Maybe other parts, in other ways that are difficult to see without time and distance and reflection.

“I think she loved me the best she could.”

“It wasn’t enough.” Mira’s voice is sharp, angry. Zoey frowns and places a gentle hand on her arm, but Rumi understands.

“I know. You’re right.” And she is. It wasn’t enough. And maybe it still isn’t. “But it was all she could give.”

She remembers the way Celine’s hand had gripped her shoulder so hard it had hurt at the hospital. How her lip had curled in disappointment if Rumi was any less than perfect. How she had uprooted them to the darkest corner of the country to keep Rumi, not only out of sight, but out of harm. How those years had been the only years Celine hadn’t visited Rumi’s mother’s grave. Rumi hadn’t realised then that there could be love in pain and in anger and in grief.

She holds her other hand out hesitantly towards Mira. The action makes her cheeks pink. She isn’t used to this yet: inviting touch, inviting warmth. It feels clumsy and foreign to her in the same way relearning to use her frostbitten hand had.

Mira disagrees with her. She is biting down an argument – Rumi can see it in the tightening of her jaw and the narrowing of her eyes. She is taut with anger and worry, but even so, she grabs hold of Rumi’s outstretched hand without a second thought.

**

It’s summer when she kisses them.

The farm that their food waste goes to turns it into compost and, in return, they are allowed a portion of whatever the season produces. From the brambles, the three of them pick blackberries that stain their fingers purple and sweet, and eat them lying in the grass.

Rumi has her head in Mira’s lap, dozing. She watches through half-closed eyes as Zoey presses her lips fleetingly to Mira’s. The gesture is sweet, done with the practiced ease of something done often, and is nothing Rumi hasn’t seen before.

It’s less of a secret now – no longer a thing just to be glimpsed through reflections or murmured through hotel walls – but at the same time it isn’t something the three of them have ever really discussed either. It makes sense, Rumi rationalises, since it isn’t something that really concerns all three of them, and she pretends the bitter taste on her tongue is from an unripe blackberry.

Rumi is happy for her friends – of course, she is, what kind of a monster would she be if she wasn’t? – and beyond thankful that they trust her enough to no longer keep this hidden. But sometimes, if she lets the image of their lips linger too long in her mind, it stirs the old, sleeping part of her that used to hold her hand in ice water.

Mira’s eyes slant down and Rumi realises she has been caught staring. The moment feels a little precarious, like it’s balancing on a point and Rumi can’t quite tell which way it’s going to fall.

Then–

“You can kiss us.” Zoey says, simply, open and earnest – always open an earnest, “You don’t have to, but you can.”

“Yeah, only if you want to.” Mira adds, sounding casual, but looking a little rigidly off to the side, ears pink.

If you want to.

Rumi considers. She does want to, she realises, and it makes her hot right the way to the numbed tips of her fingers.

She really wants to.

And, so, she does.

**

It’s winter and Rumi comes back from her morning run to find Mira and Zoey slouched across their oh-so-beloved couch. It’s unusual for either of them, let alone both, to be up at this hour and Rumi’s chest twists. Really, it’s embarrassing how desperately happy the thought of a few extra minutes of their company makes her. But then they catch sight of her shivering form and as she is being tackled between them – Mira in the corner, Rumi tucked comfortably into her side, and Zoey lying across them on her back – Rumi teases the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, they are equally as happy to see her too.

It all becomes a little bit too much then, and Rumi buries herself further into Mira, who combs absently through the loose strands of hair at her temple in response.

“You’re going to drop that on your face.”

Zoey has her arms raised above her, watching videos on her phone. “Relax, I’m not Dumbo over there.” She snips back, light and teasing.

“Shut up.” Rumi murmurs against Mira’s neck, turning to hide the bashful smile she can feel forming. A combination of post-exercise weariness, the cold seeping slowly from her bones, and Mira’s fingers in her hair is making her comfortably mellow.

The fingers pause as Mira catches the sound of their voices coming through the phone speaker. “Old interviews? Really?”

“The fans make killer edits.” Zoey shrugs, or at least shrugs as much as someone can from a horizontal position.

“I remember that one,” Mira realises, a dry smirk making its way over her lips, “A basketball player, huh?”

“Nah,” Zoey lets the phone rest on her chest, grinning up at the other two, “I never even played. Just knew it would get a laugh.”

Mira snorts. “Crowd-pleaser.”

“What can I say?” Zoey bats her eyes, “Is that why you said hacker? Comedic effect?”

“Nope.” Mira pops the ‘p’, “Deadly serious.”

Zoey bolts upright, eyes wide with disbelief. “No way.”

Mira nods.

“And the thing about maths?”

Mira shrugs, “The Honmoon is lucky I’m bad at algebra.”

Zoey bursts into giggles, flopping right onto Rumi so that she can feel every vibration of Zoey’s laughter through her body.

She wants to sit like this with them forever. She wants to listen to them speak about every tiny detail of their lives and collect all of the parts of them like stamps and post cards and old polaroid photos to stick into the scrapbook of her mind.

And they let her. No, she reminds herself, they want her to.

“What did you actually want to be then?”

Zoey hesitates, “You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t.” Mira promises and Rumi can already hear that it is a lie.

“A bandit.”

The room is silent. Rumi can feel Mira’s shoulders trembling beneath her as clearly as she can hear the pout in Zoey’s voice.

“You promised you wouldn’t laugh.”

“I’m not.” Mira swears – except that she absolutely is.

“You’re evil.”

“I can’t help it. That’s worse than my answer.”

“I was really into Tangled, okay?”

“You wanted to be Flynn Rider?” Mira isn't even trying to hide her amusement now.

Zoey groans.

“Not Rapunzel?”

“No, I wanted to marry Rapunzel. Duh.”

There’s a pause.

Rumi can feel a light pressure on her head. Mira has picked up the end of her braid. “You basically did.”

“Huh,” Zoey sounds far too pleased with herself, “I guess I did.” There is the short, light pressure of a kiss on Rumi’s cheek before Zoey turns her attention back to Mira, voice sly, “How do you know the name Flynn Rider, anyway?”

“Hm?”

“Don’t play dumb. We both heard you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Wow,” Zoey is laughing, “I would never have pegged you for a Disney fan.”

“I’m not,” Mira refutes, vehemently, before mumbling the next bit so quietly that Rumi is pretty sure she only hears it because her face is practically pressed against her voice box, “I just kind of maybe wanted to marry Rapunzel as well.”

“I heard that.” Zoey whispers, gleefully, apparently having caught it as well.

“Whatever.” Mira retorts but Rumi can hear the smile on her face, “Looks like we both got what we wanted as children, then.”

She plants a kiss onto Rumi's hairline.

“Guess we did.” Zoey’s voice is soft, doting and there’s another pair of lips at her temple.

“What about you Rumi?” Mira whispers against her forehead, drawing her gently into the conversation.

As she turns her head towards them, Zoey presses a quick kiss to her nose, “Yeah, spacey, did all your childhood dreams come true?”

Rumi looks at them both in turn. These two who have wedged her between them and who would rather her freezing and sticky with sweat than not at all; who kiss her salty skin and hold her cold hands and–

Rumi feels warm. Impossibly, dizzyingly warm.

And safe.

And loved.

“Yeah,” she nods, smiling softly, “Yeah, they did.”