Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Don't think you can escape what you are."

For a horrifying moment, Jinu realizes he really had thought he could.

The stagnant air that presses down upon him says otherwise. Neon flame had already encircled him where he stood, guillotining any chance of an escape. Beyond the stretch of stone steps that leads to Jinu, the braver demons murmur in a frenzy while others turn submissive and silent at the tone of their master's voice — but Jinu hears none of that. Sees none of it. Blinded by memories, he crumples to his knees upon an altar made of uneven stone, pawing the earth for his sister's hand blindly.

There's nobody there to reclaim his outstretched palm, though.

There is no weeping little girl waiting for him when his vision returns, no devastated mother. Gwi-Ma's tendrils of power, scraping like fingernails against bone, continue to pry around in his throbbing mind; the rumbling laughter behind him speaks to the fire's pleasure at causing him to fumble so helplessly once again — all for a family that died long ago.

Punishment, the word blares in Jinu's thoughts. Punishment for being careless.

He had known Gwi-Ma could've been looking in on him in the human realm. Not always, but often enough. It was hundreds of years ago that he'd learned he couldn't afford to be caught doing anything but what Gwi-Ma expected of him, so he'd crafted a delicate system of how to be — who to be — above ground, and with great care. No more suffering for a misstep on the mortal plane, for following any sense of longing for life beyond the oppressive carpet of the Honmoon. Or, worse: longing for freedom beyond Gwi-Ma.

It had made Jinu a good actor. Quick to provide what was needed of him on the first take.

And with that confidence, the explanations had felt like enough in the moment.

'I'm just leading her on,' he'd say. 'I just need to find her shame, so we can use it. I'm using her. I'm manipulating her — haven't I learned from the best? You don't trust your own teachings?' And each time, Gwi-Ma would hum. Consider. Process. It was an old dance they'd performed together so often over the centuries that Jinu had been confident he could slip by with his bleeding, aching heart unnoticed. Some part of him lied to himself, of course. Some part of him had been such a good actor, he'd even been his own captivated audience.

It was too obvious, though.

The fondness, the burst of love that had lit up his chest when he'd looked into her eyes. The lilting honesty in his voice as it had embraced hers and carried up and over the beautiful lines of light that blanketed Korea... Now, he stares at his trembling fingertips and recalls with pathetic clarity how Rumi's hand had slotted so effortlessly into his own. It felt like something he'd been stripped of for four-hundred years. It felt like what living was supposed to be like.

She'd offered him a fleeting moment of hope, of a freedom that overlooked a vast and beautiful horizon.

The promise of a world beyond the suffering, the guilt, the misery.

"I understand," Jinu finally says, trying in vain to numb himself. "Please, allow me to prove myself. As... you've taught me."

Another song and dance they perform together, when Jinu is caught being insincere in his devotion to his master: grovel in words and actions and hope that he's not picked up and burnt into ash before a horrified audience. Their relationship has always been a wound sewn shut with flimsy thread; one wrong pull of muscle and the whole thing will unfurl. He forces himself to breathe evenly and turn back toward Gwi-Ma, legs wobbling under the weight of everything in his head. As he does Gwi-Ma's flames crackle around him, building sweat on his brow.

"Take off the mask," the fire says.

Jinu ducks his chin, but he obeys. Warm healthy skin turns blue and dead as purple lines creep over his face — an infection in a once human spirit, a symbol of his lies and misdeeds against those who deserved better. Glowing golden eyes cast their miserable gaze at the floor. A suffocating silence constricts the very air before his patterns glow and he's unceremoniously forced onto his knees.

"Kneel," Gwi-Ma growls as he falls. Jinu's hands catch him, but the weight of pressure on his back leaves him bent like a straining bow string. The earth is close enough to his face that it cloys his smell, claws scraping on rock rendered the color of flesh by Gwi-Ma's light. His flame dances in staccato rhythm with faint laughter as he tells him, "Ahhh... Stop pouting, Jinu. It's not becoming of a demon so capable as you. Have I not spared you from burning tonight?"

Jinu's downcast mouth twitches.

Gwi-Ma doesn't care for an answer. "This song you've been working on — it's almost done, isn't it?"

It is a question Gwi-Ma offers that he can latch onto, Jinu thinks. Something he can use to reorient himself, or else he'll never be able to pull himself out of the burning whirlpool that threatens the humanity left inside him. With focus, his voice becomes disciplined and systematic and cool.

"We haven't completed the ending. It's close, though."

"Look at me," the monster whispers, and Jinu tilts his chin up to obey. "Listen and remember well."

The knot in his throat narrowly goes down as he swallows. "I'm listening."

"And remembering well, my nobi?"

"... I wouldn't dare do otherwise."

Disgust coils in his insides. He's groveling and Gwi-Ma knows it. He can tell by the soft, almost sweet laugh that dislodges from the fiery mass. Lingering outrage at Jinu's flickered hope still paints Gwi-Ma's tone with disdain though, stray embers raining like spittle.

"Living in your mind now — too late, because you're mine now."

Jinu's lips part as a mixture of voices clamor over each other in his head, overlapping with ferocity like a belt lashing on wet skin. He bites back a whimpered breath as his temples throb and ache at the pressure of too much too fast for a meager human mind. Lyrics. Lines are being fed to him with gleeful intent. An unwanted duet, to wipe away all promise of liberation.

Jinu echoes words that were whispered to him four-hundred years ago: "I will make you free when you're all a part of me."

(Jinu watches Rumi's lips move, a smile around every optimistic word... Just them and their song, building effortlessly from each other. It's as natural as breathing. "We could be free," she sings for him, to him, so kindly, "Free...")

Gwi-Ma chisels away the memory of Rumi with each striking word and slots himself there with malice.

"Give me your desire," he mockingly sings to the huddled form on his altar, "Watch me set your world on fire."

("We can't fix it if we never face it." Her hands are warm in his, and for a blissful moment, they're all that exists. Just a swell of promise for a better tomorrow against a secretive night sky. For the first time in four-hundred years, someone looks at him like there's really a chance for someone like him-)

"내 황홀의 취해, you can't look away," Jinu sings back more forcefully now, heat burning his cheeks, sweat running down stark purple patterns along his jawline.

("Let the past be the past 'til it's weightless," she and he sing. Their voices melt together. He wants to — if he could just tell her...)

"No one is coming to save you," Gwi-Ma hisses.

Far down below the altar steps, the Saja Boys watch, expressions blank.

(He wants to press his lips against hers, thank her for the warmth in his chest. But Gwi-Ma will see, will know. It's too dangerous. But what if it — what if he did let go of it all? His shame, his guilt, that feeling that he'll never be whole again... What if... "Rumi, wait," Jinu calls out. She looks back at him before she can leave, the stars in her eyes. Oh, to believe so deeply-)

Jinu's throat feels tight, and he can't summon the words. The duet with Gwi-Ma feels like sandpaper across his skin.

"You're down on your knees," Gwi-Ma sings. Sings, in a voice that Jinu had once so desperately entrusted with his survival.

(Jinu's smile is slight. "I can't wait to see you on that stage tomorrow."

The moment the words leave his lips, he is ruined.)

Finally allowed to rise to his feet, the final line falls from his lips.

"I'll be your idol."

The other boys seem conflicted about the end of their era.

While it's certainly true that the 'Saja Boys' were a means to an end and the work was more grueling than they'd anticipated (interviews, variety shows, fan meet-ups, on and on and on in so short a time-), their work had been a reprieve from all of the wretchedness that often waited down below. This had been the closest thing to freedom that any of them had received in centuries — and why not relish in it? Why not enjoy the purest act of performing, of being adored for voices they had once used to sing to their parents, their aunts and uncles, their siblings?

It was an easy sell when Jinu had approached them. Contrary to popular belief among the other demons, where was no audition to be had. There was no search for the best, brightest performers.

Handsomeness was a requisite, admittedly.

But one doesn't live in the same barren hell for four-hundred years without noticing the distant pull of someone else's voice trapped in song, and Jinu had noted them distantly in the past. Had never approached them, naturally. He had been skittish at the thought of caring about another breakable thing ever again to consider friends or lovers.

Even the tiger and bird had to fight for his affections when they first floated into his life.

But he did listen, any time a demon opened their mouth to sing.

He listened very, very closely to voices when they would carry over the craggy rock that jutted up all over that wasteland. Their songs were so often distant melodies, with lyrics lost to the passages of time, thick with homesickness that Jinu had on occasion escaped into fleetingly. Bolstered by confidence in his plan, he'd approached each demon one by one: Abby Saja had agreed before Jinu could get his pitch out in full. Romance Saja had to consider it for an entire fortnight. Mystery gave no answer, and yet appeared the day he was due. And Baby? Baby had shrugged and eventually conceded that he'd had nothing better to do.

And so it went. Five leashed souls who had very few attachments, if any, and certainly none when it came to one another. But that's how demons are forced to exist. They find joys in the simple things, perhaps even share amused or devious smiles or a mutual understanding. Then they prepare themselves for the inevitable moment those small pleasures and budding relationships are burned to cinder in front of them.

They partook in something dangerously close to mortal life, and they pleased their master as they danced on that dangerous precipice between success and failure, between reward and torture. And soon they would win. They were almost elated by the thought of so many souls being culled tonight.

If you had asked any of them, it was never truly malicious or personal. Jinu had known that feeling himself, after all. None of them had sought to harm until harm sought them, and once a person's been beaten into the dirt and trained to loathe so many parts of themselves, it's easy to find comfort in the intoxicating flavor of a soul as it runs down one's throat.

A momentary high. A reprieve. A chance to be commended by the devil that had distorted them, even if such pride in their efforts would surely rot into disdain for their tarnished souls..

Evil. Irredeemable. Monsters.

For tonight, they could all be desirable to demon and human alike. They could be revered for those fleeting moments in front of a backing track, and then think of all of the mercy that their master would bestow upon them like medals of honor. The voices in their heads would lessen. The realm would never be hungry again. And then... maybe there would be a moment permitted to rest.

Or at least, that's what the plan is supposed to be.

In their small, bright changing room and dressed in shades of black, Jinu peers back at himself in the mirror of his vanity. The memory of Rumi's hopeful smile clutches one wrist, while Gwi-Ma's smoldering heat shackles the other. They tug his mind back and forth relentlessly, all while he sits so very still and studies the shadows across the plains of his face. He's tired, but the glamour of his human mask hides it all behind smooth, perfect skin.

What now?

Here, in one hand: Rumi's peaceful gaze, telling him everything would be okay.

Here, in the other cold, clawed hand: Gwi-Ma's promise of pain if he dared help them.

He can hear them, melting together.

A beautiful voice raising in song for him.

A young voice begging for her brother to come back.

He buries his face in his hands and sits in the silence as the clock ticks down the seconds. It's not until he feels the press of a cold, wet nose and soft fur into his arm that he sucks in a surprised breath, turns his attention to his tiger. Unnamed but not unloved, the beast usually seems to smile with those crooked, odd teeth. Perhaps it's just a trick of his plagued mind, but it doesn't seem to be the case now. Is that concern in his feline eyes?

Sliding his hand over the crown of his large fuzzy head, the corners of Jinu's lips turn up weakly.

"What do you think, old friend?" he asks wearily, with claws summoned to scratch beneath the tiger's chin. "Would the Honmoon save a guy like me?"

Rumi's voice soars with confidence.

Light bounces off every angle of her. Rhinestones on her cuffs twinkle like the stars that have returned to her eyes. Gold tassels bounce as she raises her arms, saintly, glowing warm with adoration for her fans, for her friends who prepare to join the stage with her. There is no fear. Just jubilation. Just the auditorium and the taste of a Golden Honmoon on their lips.

"I'm done hiding, now I'm shining, like I'm born to be..." she sings; her fans joins in with her, harmonizing effortlessly as their souls glow blue and beautiful with inherent power — a sea of happiness and undivided connection. Jinu nudges through the crowd until he's pressed up against the barrier, clutching his aching side beneath his jacket. There would be no demons to steal Zoey and Mira's face. No Takedown to bare Rumi's shame to the world. He can already imagine the looks of anger and betrayal on the Saja Boys' faces, when they realize they'd been led too far astray by his lies to prevent what happens next.

It doesn't matter. Not anymore.

The fans scream and giggle in ecstasy around him. It's so palpable, he's not even sure they'd notice him without his raised hood. If he's honest, he also can't take his eyes off of Rumi as she belts out their hunter's mantra with pride. "... and I know I believe!"

The other two girls appear beside her as the backing track swells exuberantly, and soon their three-part harmony carries through the speakers, through the very air itself. Huntrix moves with fluidity, moons around a sun, three parts of a whole: a perfect, cohesive performance, carefully practiced to delight the very energy that safeguards the planet.

The golden threads of the Honmoon flutter in anticipation at the promise of finality.

They're so close. Freedom, just at the tips of their fingers. It fills Jinu's chest with something warm, so much so that his mouth falls open as he croons the words back. "Up, up, up, with our voices, 영원히 깨질 수 없는..."

As if a lantern through thick fog, Rumi sees the glow of his blue soul before she sees Jinu's face among the crowd. His soft brown eyes look back in fluttering relief. Relief and — something more, something both had felt as they'd floated in their own delight together, hand in hand, yearning for freedoms neither had been allowed for so long. No more fighting, no more pain, no more secrets.

Her eyes lift into happy crescents as she sings at him — for him. "You know that it's our time, no fears, no lies..."

— and even with the distance between them, he couldn't help but reach his hand out to her with longing to feel the warmth of it again.

Rumi reaches back.

Their golden Honmoon rolls across the earth in a beautiful, intricate wave.

"That's who we're born to be...!"

The last thing Jinu sees before the blanket of gold light violently pushes him back down into the earth is Rumi's horrified expression, just beyond her outstretched, empty hand.

Ah... Well, his downhearted thoughts whisper, just before his body makes impact with an unyielding stone altar. It was nice to dream, anyway.

Chapter Text

The moment Jinu's body meets the demon realm's unforgiving earth, he can feel angry claws descend upon him.

His thoughts are so scrambled by the freefall and subsequent hard knock to the head that he doesn't quite parse what's happening at first; his vision is filled with blue and purple and red, patterns flashing in blurs as limbs swipe at him relentlessly. His fingers immediately become talons as he slashes back — feels his blood and the blood of other demons strike his face in wet gushes. His hooded jacket is shredded into patches across his torso and is immediately stained; one demon's hand strikes him across the face and carves a messy set of gouges from ear to nose. He sinks his fingers into the assailant's throat and squeezes.

A hunter's blade would be a kindness in comparison, for either of them. At least those sharpened tools are quick to turn them into lifeless cinders.

Almost humane, if you're desperate enough to look for it.

"Fall back!" Gwi-Ma's voice booms, and the attackers all scamper away down the stairs, some even tumbling off the high edges of the altar in their panic. No amount of outrage could keep them from obeying, and it's only in this moment that Jinu's senses return to him enough to grasp the severity of the situation. They're all furious. And who could blame them? He'd taken everything he'd promised them and not only threw it away, but did so knowing it would be the end of everything for them. They would slowly starve to death — slowly perish under Gwi-Ma's especially indelicate temper.

And it was his fault.

He weakly pushes the limp body of a dying demon off him and rolls onto his knees, quaking with the effort. The sting of their onslaught makes his breath catch in his throat. Human clothes hang off him in ribbons and blood, dark like ink stains, saturates parts of him. He's half-bared, vulnerable, shivering as the fight finally begins to leave him and replace itself with pain.

In front of him, Gwi-Ma's fire is ever vivid with colors that haunted their dreams if they had dared sleep.

He fell, he thinks. He fell, he fell, he fell.

Unworthy, disgusting creature that he is. The Honmoon crushed him like a bug. And he fell.

Did she know? Did she know that he'd — no. No, she wouldn't have done that to him. He tells himself again and again in the madness of the moment. They'd both felt something; it was real, he knows it was real, and she was so gentle in her affirmations. We'll both win. But as he sits on the cold altar with his arm clutching around his slicked body, he realizes through the burn of his stomach and coldness that washes over the rest of him that such profound hope was a mistake.

Gwi-Ma's voice sneers, "What are you crying for? You did this to yourself."

To his horror, tears have cut through the blood on his face and drip freely from his wobbling chin.

"After everything I've done for you... all of the exceptions I've made for you when you've faltered... You sit here before me — crying like an infant. What a pitiful, pathetic display." His flame flares outward as his voice raises higher. "I gave you a chance to prove yourself worthy of my attention, of my gifts! And instead of receiving my grace, you've betrayed us all. Betrayed us to the same miserable fate as your family!"

The demons down below scream and beat the earth with their fists and sob. With the Golden Honmoon completed, Gwi-Ma will feast on whatever is left here... and they will be left to either feed his flame or starve. Jinu had been watching it happen before his eyes, had known it was their only chance to stop the door from truly slamming shut in their faces forever. There will be no more human souls to feast on. Gwi-Ma's reign will wither.

And they will all eventually wither with it.

It could be decades. Centuries. But they will fall, one by one, stumbling through this barren world until their emaciated ankles give in and they collapse. He's seen it before in the human world — as a child, as a grown man, watching people who had been just as desperate as his family, people who would struggle to scrape the bark off trees to boil into a meager porridge. 

What could he say? That it all went to plan? That he was just fooling her? Leading her on, for the sake of their survival? Whatever lies he would've smoothly delivered before have become large knots in his throat. He's a fake, a liar, an imposter — he's defeated. There is no coming back from this. Whatever slim pickings of reverence he'd gained being their capable savior has been ground to dust with every choice he'd made at the end of it all. Whatever chance he'd had to be redeemed and permitted salvation by the Honmoon was a lie, even as it had left Rumi's soft lips.

Hanging his head, he says nothing.

No apology. No explanation. No plea for his survival.

He's done.

"No more slick words left in you, are there?" Gwi-Ma's seething. He wants to burn him into nothing, into ashes that the others merely trample across. How many demons are forgotten underfoot? One loses track. The tyrant laughs, but there is no humor in the sound. "No, of course there aren't... You were used as a hunter's tool, a plaything to be discarded, and now all you can do is live in greater shame. Isn't that right? Not only are you a selfish, murderous liar, but you're stupid enough to think one of them would ever save something as disgusting to them as you."

The memories slam into him like one body into another. He jerks back weakly, too tired to fight it even if he could. So his eyes look through Gwi-Ma, seeing Rumi's horrified expression as he falls. Over and over he falls, listening to the sobs of his sister — the crunching of dirt as the palace doors are pushed shut. Then he's bowing to the king. Bowing to Gwi-Ma. Bowing in defeat, over and over again. Four hundred years and it feels like every moment of weakness had only just been committed. He squeezes his eyes shut against the migraine that bloats behind his vision, brain-matter throbbing at the invasion, the intrusion of thoughts and voices and memories and—

"Enough!" Jinu screams.

And with that desperate, rabid sound, a throb of pink striations run along the altar, stopping at the feet of the demons down below.

It's a single, shocking word to those watching. Nobody tells Gwi-Ma what is and isn't enough. Not unless they sought death.

Panting, blood-soaked, hair unkempt against a sweaty forehead, Jinu's wild gaze finds Gwi-Ma through the haze of violent memories that still try to assault him.

His eyes have shifted from their humanity, back into the color of a Golden Honmoon that coats the bruise-colored sky above them. 

And then Jinu snarls, "This is what you deserve."

As the crowd of creatures huddled down below gasp and murmur among each other, Jinu closes his eyes and waits for Gwi-Ma's flames to find him. That's how their master had almost always dealt with incompetence or insolence: burning wailing demons, sometimes to death, sometimes just enough that they can limp away and lick their wounds beneath the shade of sunken debris. The death may not be quick. Or it may be a swift, unrelenting hand. But as he waits and anticipates and almost yearns for something he'd once fought so hard to escape, he imagines Rumi.

Rumi's gentle hand, running over his tiger's massive head; offering him a simple, cheap bracelet — an olive branch between hunter and demon — and how greedily he'd snatched it up; the way she had playfully toyed with the lines of a blue Honmoon, offering him a chance to sing alongside her. A demon and a human. The impossibly cliched darkness and light. Maybe it had all been a trick, but the way she had looked up at him... Was he just too stupid to see something more cruel there?

(No, no. She looked shocked. She looked mortified as he fell. She reached for him-)

Hope was a mistake. Hope was a weakness. Hope destroyed him.

Hope had such beautiful eyes.

"Take him to the pit."

Jinu's breath catches.

No.

Ice in his veins freeze him over for only a moment, and then bestial instinct takes over any sense of dignity. He rises to his feet and starts running for the edge of the altar, clamoring for the nearest escape, but it's as pointless as its ever been to try and flee. As his patterns flare up with light, he slams into the ground violently — pinned but still trying to force his limbs out of their invisible shackles. Levitation fails him. Teleportation fails him.

A bug stripped of its wings.

And this bug calls out: "No, no, stop! Let me go! Don't!" As he fights against empty air, clawed hands suddenly grab him beneath each armpit, hoisting him up and lugging him backwards. He tries to flail in protest against the pressure of Gwi-Ma's control — and against the demons who have loyally obeyed and have collected him in their grasp — but no matter how much he wills his body to respond, his legs only twitch as he's dragged away. Panic leaves his voice rough and desperate as it echoes through an infertile world. "Please, don't do this, just kill me! Please! Kill me!" And then again, with fury, "Kill me!"

"I should have left you begging on the streets," Gwi-Ma spits. He watches Jinu's writhing form pulled down step after sharply jutting step. "Left you to live a short, pathetic human life full of misery and death. Left you to starve. Well, if it's endless hunger you prefer, it's hunger you'll get!"

The crowd of demons begin to part down the middle as Jinu's body is dragged toward the single structure still standing from the old world: a red hongsalmun. Its two pillars vibrate as a portal yawns open between them like a doorway. Jinu looks from one demonic face to the other — some are bleeding like he is, gashed by his claws in their scuffle. Some of them look disappointed, tearful, despondent. Most look furious.

Among them, he catches sight of the Saja Boys. They haven't stripped out of their silky modern button-up shirts, nor their jewelry, but their skin has returned to shades of purple and blue once more. Their gold-colored eyes watch him as he passes, expressions indifferent. The only one of the four that can't seem to school his emotions is Abby, with furrowed brow and angrily clenching jaw. Blame. Scorn. Outrage. Rightfully deserved, even as Jinu still struggles against Gwi-Ma's gravity with every passing moment. The horned demons that tow him — that tower over him — clutch his bare arms tighter the more he fights it.

Then, they pass through the portal.

Gwi-Ma's altar, standing in the middle of dull rock and dark sky, shifts into even more of nothing. The other side of the portal is a vast expanse of dead trees and mountains tall enough to nearly scrape the underbelly of the Honmoon. But Jinu knows what this is — where this leads to. He's endured this punishment once before, long, long ago. At the mouth of these desolate mountains, a cave sits with a yawning maw. It's inviting to no one, but prepared to consume all the same. Ripped, discarded bujeok litter the ground where Jinu's knees brush — paper talismans once for the purpose of good, devastated by corrosion for hundreds of years in the dark.

Soon enough, the fight within him withers into soft pleas. Rough hands drag him through the cave's hollow entrance and into near darkness; the glowing patterns across their demon bodies are the only light that leads the way. All the while, every slight sound bounces off the cavernous walls. Jinu's strained breathing mingles with crunching footfalls and occasional uncomfortable grunts from his chauffeurs as their grip on him adjusts. He knows they're not permitted to talk during this unkind ritual, though maybe that's for the best; they probably have a lot they'd like to say to him, judging by how roughly their nails dig into the muscle of his bicep.

The deeper they wander in, the more ancient, mournful voices whisper and wail and beg... These are the sounds of demons long since destroyed inside this place, Jinu knows. Their voices are like stars that have long since burnt out and yet exist, centuries later, for those left behind to bear witness. Some of the voices he recognizes. Remembers from years past, before Gwi-Ma had sent them away to the Pit.

And now, he's sitting at the edge of that very same horrible, long chasm.

He tries, despite himself. Tries to teleport away when they drop his arms back to his sides. Tries to float when they shove him forward. For the second time, he falls again — deeper and darker and longer, he falls. Down in the Pit, you don't know when the ground will finally greet you, like a kiss from a fist.

Eventually, though: a landing.

It's hard and brutal and he loses conscious for a time.

A short, nauseating time.

When he stirs and opens his eyes, all he finds is darkness.

He fights to keep his breath steady, but his lungs start pulling faster and faster from the damp, stale air as the panic creeps in.

This is going to be all he has. For years, for decades, for centuries if Gwi-Ma so chooses. This will be all there is. Sitting down in a ravenous cavity of rock and darkness, forgotten, left to wither without the mercy of death. He paws around the black abyss for some shred of hope that something can grant him a miraculous escape — but no matter how many times he gropes around the Pit, there is only the same circular wall, over and over and over again-

His steadily rising cries for mercy are entombed from the outside — sealed shut with a heavy stone.

A heavy weight unlike anything they've ever endured begins to press down upon the demon realm.

There are a lot of demons who have given in to their panic and have spent hours upon hours clawing at the Golden Honmoon's barrier. Others have slowly sank to the ground, quietly comforted by what few friends or lovers they'd weaved in what little privacy they've been afforded. Usually that kind of comfort didn't come easily and was often chastised, but this night Gwi-Ma was surprisingly silent on the matter. It was... as if he had started floundering in his own way, left to figure out just how long he had left before his flame would well and truly burn out.

A soon to be dying king with a crumbling crown, as foretold by the demon who would serve the final blow.

Not before his bondservants all perished first, of course.

But perhaps some of them welcomed the day that the great King Gwi-Ma of the demon realm had to truly fear for his continued existence.

Jinu had been taken away — would be punished endlessly, they know, and would be last to be consumed by the fires when nothing else was left to feed and stoke it. The Saja Boys weren't really sure what would happen to them, though Baby figures they would be given the smallest amount of leniency for not betraying all of their demon ilk for the love of a woman.

With their glorious leader gone, the four of them stand together long after the other demons have dispersed. They walk along an unappealing path of uprooted, decaying tree corpses, slowly shifting back into long robes and sheer gats. Mystery toys with the curved fangs jutting out from under his lips. Baby rolls a half-eaten sucker between curved monstrous claws.

Some jewelry lingers, though. None of them return to their top knots.

As they reach a clearing of cracked mud and long-collapsed huts, they turn towards one another.

A loose circle of demons, ready to face the pitiful end of everything, angry and tired and still fighting scathing voices of their own.

Romance speaks first, after the silence overstays. "I guess that's it, then."

"... Guess so," Abby mumbles.

They all anticipate turning and going their separate ways.

For some absurd reason, they do not.

Chapter Text

Rumi has waited her entire existence for permission to exist.

She'd wanted to prove she was worthy of the human part of her — and to deshell herself of the demonic heritage that had made her naked body a waking nightmare to look at in the mirror. Since she was a little girl, she'd dreamed about changing the Honmoon's colors, sometimes wishing so deeply, she'd cry upon waking from a dream after realizing it had all been in her imagination.

And she now she's finally getting to see it realized.

Her voice had soared, had intermingled with the beautiful harmonies of fans who had brought them to this moment. And down at the barricade, Jinu had sang with her; he was a beautiful sight then, radiant with promise and hope and all the things she had sworn he could have again. Freedom to choose. A chance to find his own redemption. A purpose beyond being a tyrant's loaded weapon.

She reaches for him. She wants to feel the warmth of his hand in hers. She wants to see their hard-won laurels gifted when their patterns vanish and their bodies are purified by the mercy of the one thing she had sworn to protect with her life.

("Because if there's no hope for you, what hope is there for me?")

And then Jinu sinks under the weight of the Honmoon.

("Then we'll both win.")

Gone.

("You can be free from those voices forever.")

Rumi falls, too. But not like Jinu.

She has felt pain before. Physical pain, emotional pain. Daggers in her spirit and claws through her flesh. But no amount of suffering she'd built herself up to handle could prepare her for the agony in her chest at the sight of Jinu being crushed beneath the Honmoon's weight. It's like the air is punched out of her. She becomes voiceless in her dread.

He had vanished from her sight. From her life.

The song's instrumentals continue to play, but she can only hear the blood pulsing like liquid fire in her ears. The golden shawl sparkles brilliantly across the crowd. Someone on the overhead speakers congratulate Huntrix for yet another incredible performance while Mira and Zoey rush to throw their arms around her, nuzzling close, eyes closing in the ecstasy that accompanies victory.

In the heat of the moment they must mistake her pale-faced shock for something else. What else could it possibly have been, if not the realization that all of their work has finally come to fruition? A world united by their music. A society truly shielded from the evil, disgusting creatures that fester beneath their feet. Even now, Rumi can feel stray tears from Zoey's eyelashes as she clings to her.

She whispers excitedly, "We did it, Rumi! We did it!"

"Keep it together you two," Mira's voice wobbles.

Rumi can only stare at the space where Jinu used to be, a space already filling back in with other bodies.

He is gone.

Simply gone.

"Ah — I'm sorry for the unfortunate news," an announcer chimes in over the many overhead speakers. "We've received word that the Saja Boys will not be performing as planned. It seems they've had an emergency come up… but they would like to sincerely congratulate Huntrix for their wonderful performance tonight."

Rumi's knees threaten to buckle beneath her. When tears finally track down her cheeks, Mira and Zoey can only look on in panicked confusion. They steady her arms in their hands and tuck flyaway strands of hair back behind her ears. Surely, these were just overwhelmed tears of joy.

After all, the Honmoon turned gold.

What was there to mourn?

By the time they're ushered off the stage and microphones are thrust into their faces by eager reporters, Rumi's make-up has been adjusted, and her smile carefully stretches across her painted lips. Nothing quite masks the puffiness under her eyes, nor the pink irritation that lingers — not very sightly for a well-cultivated idol persona — but most find it endearing tonight.

Surely, it's just a girl that cares deeply about her work.

She practices the art of disassociating well. Gives thanks to the fans, promises more to come in the future. Though Zoey and Mira's expressions betray their concern at times, the three work in a harmonious balance, greeting eager fans waiting to be noticed and cradling bouquets of flowers in their arms.

Faults and fears cannot be seen, Rumi thinks.

The fault of exhibiting grief.

The tightness of fear in her stomach.

A sort of numbness takes over as she signs her name on CD cases and glamor shots. One fan frowns at her from behind the red rope that parts them from overeager concert-goers. "I hope the Saja Boys are okay," the girl says, and then holds out an Idol Awards poster, slightly dented despite her great care. "I'm glad I saw them before the show, but…"

Rumi signs beneath Jinu's signature.

And then signs another poster. And then another.

The world around her wobbles and blurs and her palms begin to sweat—

Rumi.

Rumi.

"Rumi."

She startles, and realizes she's sitting across from Mira and Zoey in the back of a limousine with expensive leather seats, homeward bound. Their own music is playing softly on the radio, which she realizes belatedly has to be Bobby's doing from the front seat.

"Are you okay?" Mira asks, brow furrowed. "Back there on the stage, you looked…"

"I'm sorry," she says, forcing a smile. What could she say? What would settle that uncertain look in their eyes? The truth wasn't going to be it. That much she knew for sure. "I'm just — it's so much. We've worked so hard to get here, and I just can't believe… I mean…"

Zoey smiles sympathetically. She reaches over to put her hand on Rumi's, squeezing.

"It does feel totally overwhelming."

"But nothing my girls couldn't handle!" Bobby chirps from the driver's seat.

What was usually a warm glow from Bobby's kind words fizzled out before they could reach her. Cold from the inside out, she presses a hand to her chest and breathes in shakily. When she closes her eyes, she just sees him. Over and over again, she sees him. Encouraged. Heartened. Then plummeting.

"It's okay. I'll be okay," she lies.

One of many lies she has told, and with more to come.

Before they reach the paved driveway that leads into their garage, Rumi's phone buzzes in her pocket — not a voice call, but a simple text. As they lean in to read it together, she can feel a short-lived burst of anticipation.

It's Celine. She must have felt it. Felt the Honmoon change.

The words that reflect back at her makes her throat tighten, despite everything.

'Rest yourselves.

We'll talk tomorrow.

I am SO proud of you girls.'

They get home fairly late, but Zoey and Mira are full of unbridled energy. They throw off their jackets and kick off their shoes at the door, giving Bobby a cheery farewell and rummaging around in their spacious kitchen for bowls and the snacks to fill them with. They talk about maybe taking a few weeks off to relax, to plan out some kind of well-deserved trip and actually harvest the fruits of their years of hunting labor.

Somewhere between Zoey shoving Pepero biscuits in her mouth and Mira manhandling a popcorn bag into the microwave, they talk about a future they used to chatter about in the dead of night, when none of them could sleep. A future without fighting. Without fearing the next failure.

"It's going to be so weird not bashing demon faces in," Mira laughs.

"Right?!" Zoey claps her hands together. "I don't know what I'm gonna do with all of those demon insult journals! Maybe recycle them for jong-i jeobgi."

Rumi belatedly realizes silence has filled the kitchen. Both girls have stopped talking and are peering at her now — expectant, waiting for her input on something she'd tuned out. It occurs to her that she's been suspiciously quiet, so she masks it with a yawn that is admittedly a little forced. "Sorry, guys. That — that all sounds great… I'm just really tired. Maybe we can plan something for tomorrow? A relaxation day?"

Mira opens her mouth, but Zoey gives her a soft bump with her shoulder.

"That sounds great."

"Ah, yeah — " Mira agrees. "Yeah. Get some rest, huh? It's been a crazy two weeks."

A surprised laugh bubbles up from Rumi's mouth, because her friends had no clue just how crazy it had really felt. Two weeks since they'd bumped into the Saja Boys. Was that all it was? Just two? Fourteen days of nearly beheading one of them, of sticking out their tongues when the cameras weren't watching, of finding Jinu in the hushed darkness of nighttime, sitting with him and laughing softly and wondering what it would feel like to lean over and —

Rumi could never know what it felt like, to be tormented by memories the way demons were. But right now, she could at least understand a little.

Swallowing, she says, "I think I'm going to take a bath and hit the bed."

"Sure thing," Zoey doesn't delay in answering. "If you need us, we'll be here."

So — they definitely know something is off.

It wouldn't be the first time. It also wouldn't be the first time she hides it all anyway.

If Mira or Zoey are considering convincing her to stay for the couch and snacks, they hold their tongues. Rumi would have to be blind to miss the worry that creases their brow or the careful way they speak; it must be awful, she thinks, to know something is amiss but not know what. Has she been doing this to them all this time? With her nervousness about the bath house, or the way she'd hidden the decline of her voice? Is this just what she does? Inspire people to help her, only for them to get bitten for their kindness?

She offers a weak smile and has to force herself not to rush her steps as she leaves.

The moment her bedroom door closes behind her, she presses her body rigidly against it. The lock clicks into place behind her fingers. The room is too cold, too quiet. Some part of her wants to see a large, blue mass of fur curled up and sleeping on her floor. A bird in a silly little hat, tapping at her window. Did they get pushed down into that hell too? Were they demonic, or did they have a chance to remain free in the chaos? The thought of being the reason they're gone too…

One moment she's leaning on her door, the next she's in her bathroom, running the water in the shower. The mirror is damp and fogged, and she runs her palm across it to see what looks back. A fraud. A fake. A liar. For hours, she has dreaded this moment. For hours, she's pushed it away. She takes a deep, strained breath and slowly peels away her shimmering idol jacket from trembling shoulders.

A sob forms on her lips when bruise-colored patterns reflect back at her.

"No…" comes the weak response. She rips away her shirt, her bra, studies the lines that curve across and around her thin pale frame. "No, no, no…"

Not only has she not been saved from these patterns, the demon marks have grown further down her stomach — down her arms, too, and even closer to her wrists. Fingers clutch the marble counter, white-knuckled.

She was still just as wrong and broken as the child who had first shown Celine the funny little mark on her bicep. She was just as disgusting and foreign as the teenager who had slapped Mira's hand away when she had reached for a scrape on her elbow during training.

Jinu was gone, and she still wasn't whole.

"Why? Why? I've done everything I was supposed to. We sealed the Honmoon! We stopped Gwi-Ma, we — I was supposed to be fixed! I was supposed to be better!" She sinks to the floor. Her sobs fade into the spray of long-forgotten shower water. "I was supposed to be free. We were both — "

Her breath shudders.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry… I wanted to set you free. I wanted to save you, I swear."

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

What is that supposed to accomplish, saying such things to a bathroom rug? It's too late. This very moment Jinu is trapped a world that will despise him now. He'll be tortured for an eternity if he's not already been burned to ash, a betrayer to his own kind. She'd set him up for that. She'd been the one to put the final nail in his four hundred year-old coffin; every hammer stroke leaves a vicious image in her head: Jinu, surrounded by fire; Jinu, beaten by his fellow demon; Jinu, with his spirit broken, looking up at a world — a new life — that had rejected him.

And here she was, curled up on a bathroom floor, bawling her eyes out.

Yet another Gwi-Ma, promising a desperate man safety and security, only to rip it away in a lie.

She's floating.

The sky is both above and below. Endlessly, city lights twinkle and bleed together.

As he hovers beside her, Jinu slips his hand into hers with a feathery touch. Tentative. Sweet.

Their patterns glow together, unified.

Rumi isn't naive. She knows just what lies beyond the handsome, harmless-looking boy staring back at her. Like any demon, he was responsible for countless lives lost. He had hurt humans like he was trained to do, had consumed souls for a master that was relentless and cruel and would allow for nothing less. Jinu was dangerous. He was cunning. And she knows that at the start, no matter how much of it was sincere, there was always some part of him that had no choice but to collude with her for his own benefit.

But looking at him in front of her, buoyed together by hands ornamented with jagged lines… It could only remind her of a man who had gripped her wrist as if a bracelet could actually save his soul. Again and again, all she could see was a lonely, hopeless human spirit, desperate for another chance to live.

Not just survive.

Looking at him now, that is what she sees. A survivor. Someone who had been unmade so many times that he'd learned how to put himself back together. A person capable of great harm, but also great care. There is an endless wealth of possibility in the brown eyes currently tracing her figure in starlight.

"Rumi," he hums, "Will you sing with me?"

Of course. Of course she will.

She reaches up to brush his windswept bangs from one eye.

The gesture leaves long, thin scratches on his forehead that flood with blood.

Pulling back sharply, her gaze snaps to the claws that have consumed the tips of her fingers.

"Oh my god. I didn't mean to, I was—"

"It's okay," Jinu says, pulling her hand in to press against his cheek. She watches as gash after gash spreads open across his skin. Across his face. All over his arms. Down his chest. "It barely hurts. It barely hurts… It…"

His mouth opens, and the scream that leaves his lips is bloodcurdling.

She gasps awake on the bathroom floor before his name can escape her lips.

Chapter Text

Sleep doesn't come easily for Rumi, the night the Honmoon turns gold. Jewelry and make-up stripped away, the lingering glamor from the stage is replaced with damp hair and nightmares; these dreams are short and sharp, not unlike a small knife wound, and keep waking her to the blue coldness of a quiet room... and a soft pink glow. When she lifts her shaking hands she can only watch her patterns flicker with nauseating light, as if compelled by her misery, her shame.

The panic from her nightmares flows into depression while awake, and that flows into exhaustion that starts the entire process over again. By the time the light from a crawling sunrise streams through the gaps in her curtains, she's given up on the idea of trying to make up for lost rest. Instead, she stares at the ceiling. Waiting. Waiting for what, she's not really sure. For reality to shift? For the possibility that she had dreamed yesterday all along?

Maybe she's just wishing the tiger and bird would rise from the bedroom floor with another handwritten note from Jinu.

What would it even say? 'Thanks for nothing'?

She let him down, and soon she would have to shatter Celine's perfect ending too. The thought of her horrified gaze on her bare arms constricts something warped and delicate in her chest. As the tears swell in her eyes and threaten to flee into the shells of her ears, she tells herself that this has to be it — no more tears, no more weakness. She isn't sure what will happen if the other two find her in such a sorry state, but the fear of it happening nearly suffocates her.

She's no stranger to covering something up. She just needs to keep doing it.

Because... because the demons are finally locked away, and their jobs are finished.

The patterns aren't gone, but maybe they're just delayed. Maybe it takes time for them to vanish, the same way that it took them so many years to spread. Maybe, maybe, maybe. There is still a chance things could be okay.

For her.

For her.

She presses her hands over her eyes and sees a dark-haired, tall figure running his fingers over blue strands of light, wary and hopeless.

("I don't trust it, but I want to.")

"It's not fair," she whispers in the dark. She turns on her side and watches the golden Honmoon pulse across her bedroom floor. She tells it, "He earned your mercy."

It's too late now.

It's over. It's done.

And she has to live with it, the same way she's lived with the sight of her markings year after year.

She has to.

(Just keep going.)

When Rumi comes out of her room, the other two have simple breakfasts set at the table, a third spot for Rumi created with care. As drained as she is, remembering that they're both here for her both heals and harms. All this time she'd been excited for the day she could finally be her true self around them — and yet she was moving to join them, knowing that there was so much of her hidden away from view. And after all of the concern she'd caused with her struggling voice and her performance as a hunter...

Making them feel like they have to look after her is a terrible feeling.

And it's happened more lately than she wants to admit.

"We were wondering when you'd roll out of bed," Mira says.

Rumi laughs displaying a well-practiced smile. "I guess I was making up some sleep I missed."

"Oh yeah, I was totally wiped."

"Not me, I couldn't sleep!" Zoey beams. "I was scrolling through all of our socials, getting hyped up by everyone else. I think that really was one of our best performances! Even late night talk shows in America kept bringing us up; we should totally do one of those sometime."

Despite herself, Rumi can't help but smile. "What, go international?"

"Only after we get a real break this time," Mira huffs. "No launches, no interviews, no rehearsals. Just couch and bed and maybe some jam sessions."

It almost feels normal at the table. If there's anywhere she can lose herself, it's in the company of Mira and Zoey, at least for a short while. They talk about all the things they want to do now that they'll have more free time away from hunting. Hobbies they had considered, solo works they'd like to have on the side. Sometimes its easy to forget that they're so young, that this is only just a small part of their hopefully long lives; Rumi has never thought past escaping parts of herself. She wouldn't even know where to start, and her contributions to their conversation are woefully uninspiring.

(Especially when she knows something they don't know.)

"I'm sorry for being so weird last night," she finally says. "We dreamed about this moment since we'd started training. And I know it was so special, and it should have been a celebration. Together. It was just so much at once... I really thought I would have a way different reaction."

"We're just happy you're feeling better," Zoey says around a spoonful of Jolly Pong. "I totally understand what you mean, though. I thought I'd freak out a lot more than I did. But really, I think it was just... this weird sense of peace?"

Peace?

Rumi's genuinely happy for her.

She envies her too.

Mira shrugs, a little in awe herself. "Yeah, it really does feel like we're waking up to a whole new kind of life. If we didn't have an idol group, I feel like I'd have been totally lost now." She smiles, glancing between Zoey and Rumi. "I'm really glad I still have you two. That this isn't... just it. You know?"

Their hands move to sit on the table.

All three move in tandem to cover each other's fingers with their own.

"Through thick and thin," Zoey grins. "And we've still got fans to entertain."

"Except now we don't have to worry about anyone eating them," Mira adds.

Zoey smiles, though she looks almost a little guilty. "You should have seen all of the buzz about the Saja Boys. Everyone's wondering where they went... I kind of feel bad for the people who liked their music. You could tell they were worried."

"Ha!" Mira smacks a fist beside her bowl. "If they knew what kind of freaky soul-sucking monsters they were worried about, they'd run screaming."

"I'm so sure now, their Soda Pop song was definitely about eating people."

"Oh yeah, totally."

"Smell you later, losers!"

As the girls giggle amongst themselves, Rumi focuses on eating.

Bite after bite, gaze boring holes through the table's wood finish, trying to stop the creeping heat in her neck or the guilt that burrows deeper and deeper still. It is a good thing, she thinks. It's good that the demons can't hurt anyone anymore. It's good that they can move on with their lives. It's good that their fans are safe.

She smiles back at them because it's good, good, good.

"How... How could this happen?"

Rumi had anticipated these words from Celine. It didn't make hearing them any less of a slap to the face of the child that still yearned for acceptance. Her body goes hot and her stomach burns like ice on skin, and she doesn't dare move as her mentor's hands roam across her arms and clavicle — not dare touching those jagged lines of contamination. Nausea and disquiet intermingle, reflected from Celine's eyes as they raise to meet Rumi's gaze.

She must see the struggle reflecting back, because she tries her damnedest to reel in her horror. Instead, she reaches for a shawl that had been thrown haphazardly across her desk and drapes it around Rumi's shoulders, and then gently rubs circles there with her thumbs now that there is a barricade between her fingers and the markings hidden beneath.

Their reunion prior had started wonderfully. There were happy embraces at the mouth of her quaint cabin, followed by the warm congratulations of a proud mentor. They'd all done so well and worked so hard, and they finally had a chance to rest. Rumi could see it then, in the relaxed slopes of Celine's shoulders; she was comforted, had truly felt at peace. She had longed for the day hunters wouldn't have to risk their lives — that there wouldn't be another Ryu Mi-yeong.

Most of all — and Rumi was sure of this, despite everything else — Celine had wanted them to be able to have a life beyond all of this, now that their duties were fulfilled.

If only those marks on her skin would've just... gone away, softly into the night.

"Maybe it's... just part of me now," Rumi says in a near whisper. Mira and Zoey had left to give them a moment together with the promise of a delicious, triumphal lunch, but she still fears them returning and hearing the truth from her own lips. "Maybe I was too late... and it just... spread too far."

"No," Celine says firmly. She reaches up to cup Rumi's face in her hands. And god, she looks back, praying that she can be so certain as her mentor — her mother. "The Honmoon wouldn't do that. Not to you. It's purifying. It cleanses evil from this world. And it can see that you're a good person underneath this, Rumi; it knows that you didn't ask for these marks."

'Neither did Jinu,' she thinks. 'He didn't want his marks, either.'

And he was turned away by the Honmoon all the same.

"Then why? Why didn't it fix me?"

"Maybe we just... need to give it time," Celine says. Excuses the Honmoon, because it's all they have. "Maybe they'll start fading. The longer the bridge between the demon and human realm is fully broken down, the more you'll finally be free."

Free.

Rumi ducks her chin, and Celine immediately reaches beneath it, tilting her daughter's head back up.

"You're a hunter. You defended our world from harm. Only good can come from that."

Like so many times before, Rumi sees love reflected back.

Not for all of her, but most.

She learns how to stretch it thinly over the parts Celine can't bear to look at.

"Let's have lunch. Enjoy the moment we've been given here," Celine says.

As they prepare to leave her bedroom, she offers a soft reminder:

"Put your jacket back on."

Hours bleed into days bleed into weeks.

Rumi worries she may be going crazy.

Time is like a wound that gushes out of her, impossible to keep closed up. Sometimes Monday turns into Friday. But there is comfort in the business of their post-Idol Awards touring — Golden had just released, after all, and they had been planning to release a few more songs to round out the year. It was strange to lose an entire half of your life's work overnight — hunting, that is — but idol work was easily just as taxing as risking death in the middle of the night. Celine calls her every other day to check on her markings, and every time she gets off the phone she swears they've grown a millimeter, a centimeter, an inch more.

But the work is healing. It's life-saving, and she's relearned how to lie to everyone's faces without a single tell. She beams on stage. She laughs in interviews. She slides into step with Zoey and Mira during choreography rehearsals, and they comment happily on how motivated and excitable she's become. When they're outside of the penthouse, she can focus on being an idol with every fiber of her being; she can shed the burden of hunting and enjoy the fruits of their labor as singers and performers, and she can avoid thinking about the itch of her skin beneath her sleeves, and everything can be perfect.

Everything is perfect.

Everything — will soon be perfect.

Everything is going to... eventually be perfect.

Only there are moments where her thoughts slip. The beginning notes of Soda Pop play on the radio, and she can't bring herself to change the station or shut it off — it is catchy, Zoey always admits, and the three of them absently work their shoulders to the beat, despite everything. Sometimes a happy fan will have Saja Boys merchandise on, unaware that there wouldn't be anything new to enjoy past their first single.

And sometimes, when those kinds of thoughts are heavy in her mind, Rumi ends up at her laptop, watching videos in the gloom of an early morning where she can't be so easily discovered by her friends. She types 사자 보이즈 and watches as videos from variety shows and interviews load on the results page. Jinu's face is almost always front and center in the thumbnails.

Click.

There is no sincerity in the way the Saja Boys answer questions from overeager reporters. Beneath the alluring smiles and false stories, there are demons who are working hard to prepare a feast for their master. She watches Jinu talk, though — slippery like a snake with his false charm, playing his part so cautiously. She knows what that's like, maybe now more than ever.

Lying, putting on appearances... hoping that it will all pay off in the end and you can be just a little less unhappy.

It makes her heart ache, as she brushes her fingers across the screen. All she can see is the indecisive, nervous man who had taken her extended hand; the pain in his expression when he'd wanted nothing more than to believe in her; how soft his eyes had looked when they smiled back at her. Her patterns ache miserably.

They light up across her skin as she leans in and kisses the small, pixelated version of him on her screen.

He just talks beneath her lips, a phantom, unaware of where he would be days after this video ends.

The following silence is punctuated by a soft groan, and she rubs her temples. "... What the hell am I doing?"

On her screen the interviewer asks: "And what's something about you that your fans don't know about you?"

"Well," Jinu says, looking caught off-guard despite himself, "I'm... a cat dad?"

Bathed in the glow of his colors, Rumi laughs, surprised by the sound as it leaves her.

Sleep.

Sleep.

Sleep.

Laptop shut, bedroom lock checked for the fourth or fifth time, Rumi collapses backward onto her bed. Her hair is freed from its binds and lies around her like a snow angel. There in the darkness, she wrings her hands and watches an unchanging ceiling as her emotions and thoughts catch up with her once again; it happens like clockwork, one moment distracted and the next drowning in the excess that Jinu and the Honmoon and everything in-between had left behind. She usually doesn't feel sleep capture her — more often than not she's tossing and turning, then falling into a lottery of dreams. She's never sure what she'll remember seeing, but she's stopped hoping for the best.

Tonight, she sits in an audience, confused by the unhappy mutterings around her.

"Just sing already," someone says. "Just sing!"

On the stage, Jinu stands in front of a microphone, alone. His hands clutch the stand, wringing its neck as his mouth hangs open. His panicked gaze darts around the studio, tracing the faces in the crowd as he struggles to make a sound. "What're you doing?! What kind of performance is this?!"

Rumi moves to stand up, hands fists at her sides, but before she can fight back against the mockery —

The spotlight lands on her, bleaching her skin and forcing her to shield her eyes.

"Well," a distorted voice asks, "If he's not going to, what about you?"

Stupidly, all she can think is: But I don't know my choreography... What song is it? Where are the others?

She's unable to see Jinu anymore, not with her eyes fighting to stay open.

When she opens her mouth to sing something, anything, all that comes out is a strained cough.

I can't.

The light is too much. It's too bright, too expansive now. It washes away the crowd. The studio. Jinu on that stage. It feels like the spotlight wants to smother her until every breath in her lungs has been squeezed out. Is this what it's going to feel like from now on...? Buried under all of these horrible feelings as she hides from the world?

Then, somewhere in the distance — a soft, rasping voice.

It's so, so quiet.

But it wakes her up like a jolt of thunder.

"We can't fix it if we never face it..."

She sits up sharply in her bed, eyes scanning the darkness of her bedroom for the source; there's nobody here but her, and yet the sound persists. A melodic voice that struggles to form the words. Languidly, every word drawls with effort.

"What if we find a way to escape it?"

Rumi crawls off her bed, hair pushed out of her face as it trails behind her. There's no one here. No one at all. But as her feet meet the floor, the golden Honmoon ripples beneath her toes. A compulsion she can't quite understand pulls her to her knees, where the weak voice seems to reverberate through the thin lines of gold.

"... We could be... free — "

Again, her voice sticks in her throat.

Jinu.

Chapter Text

Jinu measures parts of his life by how hard and fast he falls.

The first time he falls, he's sitting in the muddy streets of a distant Seoul with dirty hands and an empty belly. He stinks of sweat and illness and unclean poverty, almost too weary to lift the heavy instrument and cart it across the bustling streets. His old bipa is in desperate need of new strings and polish, but it — much like him — manages to play in spite of itself. This, he thinks, is where he stumbles first. He is an unworthy brother and son, unable to provide for a sick family; he is a man who still feels like the anxious teenager that had tied his hair into a sangtu, days after burying his father in a humble grave just outside of the city walls; it had cost them everything they had left to give to lay him to rest.

He's easy prey. Jinu knows this. He flounders regardless.

The second time he falls is the moment Gwi-Ma's hypnotic voice finds his ears. If he's honest with himself, the coercion is woefully easy; all it takes is a bag of millet being dropped into his lap, proof of the demon king's power to provide. How could he not believe what is whispered to him then? The voice knows every single one of his failures, has spoken his faults even when he tries to sleep at night, puts his shame into words that no bipa can drown out.

When the bag of millet runs out and his stomach gurgles under his hands again, he gives up. He gives in. He falls further.

And for that, he deserves everything that happens after.

The third time he falls… that is when any chance of freedom curdles into a foul rot in his soul. The patterns invade him like tethers beneath his skin, mooring him to his disgrace. Every day after the moment he had pulled his hand from his sister's grasp, he sinks without mercy. For every laugh among the yangban and melodies he plays on behalf of the king, another viperous purple vine slithers over his flesh. Keeping them hidden from the noblemen as they pass him in the hallways leaves him anxious, too disturbed to disrobe even in complete isolation, all for fear that someone would see, would know, would judge.

Symbols of his cowardice.

He couldn't think. Couldn't play. Couldn't hear anything but his sister's pleas, couldn't see passed his mother's defeated stare.

Weight from dependable meals fill in the hollower parts of his body, but the voices keep him up in bed, accompanied by the glow of a waning candle — voices that remind him over and over how sickeningly comfortable the blankets beneath his body were, how traitorously warm, selfishly safe.

It is inevitable that the flames find and overtake him.

And when he falls that third time, there's a near immediate impact. Every bone in his body shakes when he meets the uneven earth of the demon realm. Here, he is robbed: of his breath when he lands, of the healthy color of his flesh, of the soul half-decayed inside him — all are gobbled up by Gwi-Ma's maw. He rolls over. Dirt and ash cling to his robes as he attempts to fill his lungs with the newly pungent air. Then he looks up — and cries out in fear.

The demons, parted on either side of him, watch with interest at this new, pathetic creature brought down before them. Some are engrossed in watching a human lose the last threads of their humanity, having known nothing of life beyond their realm. Others watch with their own memories assaulting them, reminded of the lives they'd left behind when Gwi-Ma collected their souls. Jinu crawls backward on his hands as if expecting them to leap on him, devour him, but none of them so much as lift a foot in his direction. They simply mutter among each other, some elated, some old and tired and disinterested.

Gwi-Ma's voice rises above theirs.

"Welcome to the rest of your life, little songbird."

"Wh… where…" The word is nearly voiceless on his lips as he begins to lock up with panic. The hair bound on the crown of his head has begun to unfurl, locks falling down his face, fluttering wildly at his lips as he breathes fast. His final meal eaten as a human threatens to climb up his throat, when he catches sight of his hands and finds sharp, unnatural talons where fingertips used to be.

'You deserve this,' someone says. Or maybe he thinks it. 'All of it.'

"Don't worry," Gwi-Ma insists. "As long as you obey your king… I'll make sure you're never hungry again."

His stomach growls beneath his palm as he sits against wall of the pit, panting from exhaustion. He'd attempted the sheer climb upward yet again — an exercise in futility that has lasted days now. The pitch blackness stretches long and far above him and every effort to scale the wall only ends in a series of disheartening falls, every single a shorter drop than the last. Aging scabs from his wounds are at times scraped bare again in the tumble, and while he sees nothing but the unyielding dark, he feels the claw marks ooze like his dry lips.

"… This sucks."

He's been talking aloud more and more, and though he's already growing unfond of his own voice, the alternative is letting the darkness bleed in and batter him with voices that aren't his own.

Eventually, his limbs burn too much to try again. He lays back and kneads the knots in his calves, flexes his bared, battered toes against loose gravel underfoot. It's hard to relax in the icy depths beneath the mountain and its winding caves; other than his jeans, there's nothing left to shield him from the chill.

Again, his belly gurgles.

Thirst is a constant ache in his throat.

Some ugly part of him thinks of the honey-sweet taste of a human soul as it glides past his tongue.

'Sick.' a voice says, 'You're sick. You crave a person's life. You're hungry, and instead of a bag of millet, you want to take someone from their friends, their family. Disgusting. You're worthy of being hunted.'

"Shut up," he hisses, and then presses his wrists to his ears; the blood pulsing under his skin helps disrupt the stream of unending contempt. Despite this, the relief he gains is immediately drowned out by a feeling of helplessness. How many days has it been since he's been cast down into this hole? It doesn't matter, he supposes, but can't help but dwell all the same. The dark stretches beyond just his eyes; it eats up time, erases the seconds and minutes and hours; sometimes he feels awake while he's asleep; sometimes he feels asleep while he's peering wide-eyed through the abyss. The pulsing headache that accompanies dehydration usually helps him reorient himself, but it can only do so much.

How frustrating it is, to want to live and die in the same breath.

Time marches not forward, but sideways, and he is dragged along with it.

He knows he won't die, not anytime soon; Gwi-Ma wouldn't allow something so simple; Jinu will be hungry, he'll be thirsty, he'll dream of the feeling of warm soup running down his chin as he greedily consumes it; he'll recall the taste of human candies invented centuries past his time; he'll wish for a blanket for the chill; more and more days will bleed together; days will become weeks; the pit is one long day, impossibly vast; he hums to himself for company; he misses his tiger and bird; he thinks about Rumi, wonders if she's finally found what she needed; cold, hungry, yearning, sleeping, rinsing to repeat -

And then the melting of days is brought to an abrupt stop by a little voice, calling out from the nothingness.

"Oppa."

It is not the first time he's heard her since tumbling into the pit.

His face contorts as he turns his body away, pressing his cheek and nose into the wall. 'Ignore it,' he thinks. 'She's not real. Just ignore it.' And yet he finds himself slowly turning toward the sounds of a child softly crying. There in the great big heaving shadow of the pit, his sister stands — and as always, his memory fills in every hair on her head, every loose thread on her hanbok, every blemish on her skin.

"You're not real," he rasps. He's apologetic as he says it, though. Always apologetic, even when he knows what's coming. The girl's eyes gleam wetly in response. Her existence looks all wrong in the pit, displaced from the past into the present. It's like the shape of her has been cut out of a photograph and laid on a black funeral shroud.

"You left me behind… Why? Why? You said you wouldn't leave like Appa. You said we'd have a home. All of us, together."

He doesn't remember her name anymore.

Not hers, not his mother's. His father's.

Gwi-Ma had taken those from him a long, long time ago.

"I'm sorry," is all he can think to say. It's not enough.

"I hate you," she spits.

"I know."

"I hate you, I hate you…!"

She's upon him in an impossible instant, her small fists crashing into his face, his shoulders, his chest. Over and over her knuckles thump into him as he lifts his hands up — hands he can't even see in the black void — to try and defend himself, pathetic an attempt that it is. It feels real. It feels like his flesh raises from the abuse, filling with blood beneath the skin. It's all a figment of his mind, but for a harrowing moment he can only feel its violence. She yells, "I hate you! I hope you die! I hope you suffer forever and ever — and I hope it hurts! I hope it hurts — "

Her hands open up, palms smacking him across the mouth, knocking his head sideways as he squeezes his eyes shut. He drops his hands to his sides, then, and accepts it —

There is another series of slaps to his cheek, but softer. Urgent. Not out of anger, but out of a need to refocus his attention.

A hand grips his chin after, and the fingers are too long and firm to be his sister's.

"Jinu. Calm yourself."

That voice.

"... Romance?" he utters. Ah, no. That's not his real name.

It couldn't be him, though. He reaches out through the dark, and palms someone's sharp cheekbone and ear before his hand is knocked away.

"Tch. You've got some nerve, addressing me like we're still bandmates after what you did," Romance growls. As Jinu's mouth drops open in surprise, something cool and solid presses into his bottom lip — and then it tips forward, and cold, earthy water pours past his lips. The immediate comfort it provides stings his eyes as he gropes for the source of the drink; his fingers run across what feels like a flat and solid moon flask, one of the handles broken off, a relic of some long forgotten time. Jinu ravenously gulps down every drop.

"He doesn't watch as much as he used to," Romance, faceless, whispers. "He's more frugal with his power."

Running his tongue over his softened lips, Jinu quietly wishes he could see the other demon. Is he even real? Maybe he's dreaming, awake or otherwise.

"Why are you doing this?" Jinu asks.

The darkness is silent.

Then, so softly, the darkness admits, "I don't know."

When the stillness afterward carries on too long, Jinu blindly reaches out again and only finds empty air.

"What's the matter, Jinu? Come, play for your king."

Curled up against the furry rib cage of a slumbering blue tiger, the demon that Gwi-Ma beckoned peers out through a long curtain of unclean hair. His robes had slowly started seeping off color days ago, blackening into cloth that had began to reek of ozone, much like the rest of the demon hoard. When Jinu doesn't move, he is unceremoniously torn away from the tiger's company — and then deposited on his knees near the steps that lead up to Gwi-Ma's altar; he stares in confusion at the familiar battered bipa that lays flat before him.

"A little gift," the fire tells him, so softly, as if a father slipping a present into his son's small hand, "so that you may know what my mercy feels like."

Hesitant, Jinu lifts the bipa into his lap.

It feels lighter than when he was human. More delicate, somehow. As he cradles the instrument he looks around him to find demons spectating with quiet interest. Expectant. Hopeful for a song that will breathe any kind of life into the gloomy world they're trapped in.

Gwi-Ma's tone shifts, impatient. "Well?"

"Thank you," he quickly says. "For your mercy."

The fiery mouth grows larger in its pleasure. "Sing for me. Sing of me."

The bipa feels wrong beneath his positioned claws, but the want to survive presses him to bow his head in concentration. His mind quickly puzzles together a tune, a series of words, all carefully playing upon each other; the king and his supervisors had always admired the speed of his wit as he spun songs from empty spools. Here before Gwi-Ma, his voice finds strength again, the same way it had with his country's leaders. The demons behind him stop speaking as they focus on the nostalgic twang of his lute, and then on his alluring voice as it carries up through the air.

"… There once was a mighty demon king…"

He sings for his new monarch.

On the third verse, his clawed finger severs a string.

Sleep.

Sleep.

Sleep.

Lying in the middle of the pit, shivering, he forces himself back into an uneasy slumber. It's hard to tell whether he's successful sometimes, because a lot of his attempts to rest are simply more of the same — inky blackness behind his eyelids, with the occasional relief of a dream in full color. It's not unlike a man who had gone blind late into his life, waking up and finding himself sightless yet again. His eyes flicker behind his eyelids, but there is no tint nor hue, no liveliness, no dream that takes him away from the pit. Even in his dream, he's still sitting in it, feeling around for something, anything, other than dirt and gravel.

His hands touch the pegs of his bipa where it sits in front of him. Just a dream, he knows. Just a dream.

Hushed voices whisper in the darkness. "Just sing! Sing for us! Sing!"

They chant it over and over, and all he can think is: I don't want to do this anymore.

The dark is too much. Too overbearing, too expansive. It consumes everything in its path. His bipa, the demons, the colorful memories of a world he longs to return to. He fears if he opens his mouth, that darkness will pour into him and drown whatever is left of the mortal man entombed under this skin. It's too much. It's too hard to keep going like this. Why did he ever bother fighting so hard to stay alive in the first place…? All this time amputating the things that had made him a human… and for what? What was the point of surviving for so long? If he had just died with his sister, his mother…

It's all so hopeless.

("That's the funny thing about hope. Nobody else gets to decide if you feel it," Rumi tells him, holding out a fragile threaded bracelet. "That choice belongs to you."

He's frozen by centuries of doubt. But when she moves to leave, his hand desperately rushes to find her wrist.

Not for the hope he sees in the bracelet, but for the hope he desperately needs from her.)

A soft inhale is drawn.

He's awake, but he's also not sure if he is.

("Why does it feel right every time I let you in?" Rumi looks back at him, singing around a small smile. "Why does it feel like I can tell you anything?")

Staring up at nothing — an unending void above him, a cold floor beneath him — he curls his fingers around the phantom memory of Rumi's hand in his. His lips tremble as they find the shapes of comforting words in the dark. The voice that leaves him is rough from disuse at first, but slowly gains strength as he croons:

"We can't fix it if we never face it… what if we find a way to escape it?"

And voice growing even stronger still, he tips his chin back and drags out word after harmonious word.

"We could be free — Free…"

Rumi's voice echoes all around him, quiet at first, then gaining power. It's just a ghost, he thinks, a hallucination like his sister or Romance. Rumi had certainly not been left out of his delusions, either.

He finds he doesn't care. It doesn't matter. Not now.

Their voices harmonize in shared passion — shared desperation — and even though he knows none of this can be real, he feels warmth blooming in his chest.

For a single, beautiful moment, everything melts away.

"We can't fix it if we never face it… let the past be the past 'til it's weightless."

Chapter Text

There on the floor of her bedroom, listening to the otherworldly sound of Jinu's voice as it fills the space around her, Rumi sings her heart out.

His brittle but lilting words seep through the very walls of the penthouse — no, not just the walls. They beckon from beneath her, even this far from the earth, in the great height of their home. Beneath the legs she'd collapsed onto, she feels gentle reverberations that shake the Honmoon as though they were shimmering guitar strings. Her thoughts are racing too quickly to piece together what it means in the heat of the moment; instead, she opens her mouth and joins in their song, her voice fighting against the constriction of adrenaline.

"Let the past be the past 'til it's weightless," her melody offers, soothes, implores.

How can he still be alive? After everything that happened, after being thrown back down into Gwi-Ma's violent swaddle of fire, how? Is she still dreaming, left to plead for the ghost of him to reach through the floorboards, only for her to wake up with regret and longing in her heart? If this is a trick, it's a cruel one. If it's a trick, it isn't a perfect mimicry of the night he'd sang with her.

He sounds so different, she thinks in a panic. He sounds worn down. Trampled.

Her palm presses against the floor in response, and desperation stings her eyes.

She belts, begs him — "So take my hand, it's open…!"

Beyond her flight of delicate notes, she hears his faceless harmony. Supporting her voice. Joining in, clinging to her presence like she is to his. 'I'm here', she wants to scream, 'I can hear you, and I'm here!'

The Golden Honmoon ripples and shifts into iridescent colors around her, like puddles of shimmering oil, glimmering opal that illuminates her in the gloom. And for a fleeting moment, the finely threaded barrier between the two of them feels different. She swears she can hear him more clearly as it shifts, sensing him. A solemn blip on a radar. A vanishing form in a forest, loved and looked for and yet consumed by the fog regardless. One wrong step in the bog, one mistaken branch, and she'll lose him all over again.

So close, and yet so far.

"What if we heal what's broken?"

His voice is faltering, tapering off, and she knocks her fist into the floor with a frustrated cry.

"Jinu! Jinu, where are you? Can you hear me?"

She presses her cheek against the delicate threads of the Honmoon, straining, as if seeking out his heartbeat in the very thing that had spirited him away from her. Nothing. She hears nothing else beyond the thrumming pulse of the building. While the Honmoon under her skin fades back into its golden brilliance, she says more urgently, "Nonono — Please, don't go! Say something…!"

But all that she is left with is a rush of energy and emotion that turns her legs to jelly and leaves her hands trembling. Again, she sings the song — their song in its entirety, praying it will draw him back toward the light, but only she remains. The longer she calls out to silence, the more frightened she is that he was never there in the first place.

The muscles in her neck tense at a knock on her bedroom door.

Wide, glossy eyes slowly turn toward a shadow lingering in front of the narrow, frosted window on her door.

"… Rumi?" Zoey's soft calls out, hesitant.

'Don't panic', she thinks, and then finds a familiar mantra to cling to, 'Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay calm…' She quickly gets to her feet, rushes to collect a robe that she'd draped across her chair, and drags it over the patterns on her arms before she ties it at the waist. Frantic hands smooth back her hair and scrub at her eyes as her footfalls pad across a completely ordinary wooden floor.

"Ah, one second…!"

As she opens the door, she's met with Zoey and her wringing hands. She's in the pair of sweats covered in cat-themed patterns — Rumi had bought those for her two birthdays ago, she remembers — and has clearly been sleeping for at least some part of the night. Her freckles are starker against her washed skin and her hair is curling more wildly in places a pillow had villainized. Rumi tries not heave any of her anxious breaths and smiles. Maybe a little too wide. She knows she has to look frazzled, if not flushed in the face.

"Oh, sorry. Did I… wake you up?"

Zoey wastes no time in explaining herself in a big, bloated rush. "No! Well, actually, I forgot to bring a drink to my room with me, and I had really bad cottonmouth, so I figured I'd get something from the kitchen, but then I heard you… singing? Like, really singing. The kind of singing you usually do in a booth or on a stage, only you're doing it in the… middle of the night, which is totally fine and all, but it's not usually how you do things, so…!"

The smile Rumi wears is forced, but perhaps a little more genuine as she watches Zoey ramble.

"I know, um." She sucks in her bottom lip, happily allowing her waning hysterics to be mistaken for embarrassment. "This is so stupid, but — I had this idea for a song, and I really needed to get it out. I just need to nail it and put it to paper."

"Yeah, you were really going for it." There's an awkward swing in Zoey's tone, like maybe she's not quite sure what to make of what she'd heard. And what was it that she heard? The thought puts Rumi on edge, and she gulps at the itch that she feels crawling slowly down her arms, her thighs. She tries not to think of what that usually means.

"How, um. How much of that did you hear?"

"The last few minutes," she admits, sheepish. She presses a hand to her chest as she looks for the right words. "The lyrics were really… sincere, and tender. Like, I could really feel them resonating with you, and it made them resonate with me, you know?"

Rumi doesn't know what to say to that. She'd been hiding those moments stolen away in the night, keeping the duet under lock in key in her memories. Not for the first time in her life, she wants nothing more than to throw her arms around Zoey, to explain the marks beneath her clothes — and now, to scream from the rooftops that a demon took her hand in his and looked at her in ways that she could never see herself. And in that moment, everything had felt so right. Felt good. The sky had never felt so endless and full of possibility, a happy future just outside of their reach.

When she thinks of the shape of his profile and the peaceful smile he wore, her heart shakes. She'd spent her life focusing so intently on her duties to both hunt and hide, the concept of falling in love had sounded both unimportant and fake.

Zoey, she wants to tell her, so badly, I think I fell in love with someone.

"I've had a lot of inspiration lately," is what she says instead. An understatement, she thinks.

Zoey assesses her for a moment before nodding and smiling more genuinely — if she's suspicious of anything, she's more than happy to abandon those concerns for something kinder, more palatable. She never was one for entertaining the worst. "I'm glad! You seem like you really got a fire lit under you the last few weeks. And your voice has sounded really healthy and strong." With the sharp of her elbow, she nudges Rumi's arm, leaving the slight ache of eager friendship. It soothes Rumi's nerves, if even a little. "See? I told you those tonics were legit."

Right, the tonics. The tonics she'd drank as unhelpful snacks.

The grape juice flavor reminded her of when she was a little girl, soothed by those simple pleasures.

"Well, I sure can't deny the results."

Her hand moves to her throat, ghosting along the same path Jinu had the first night she'd met him.

She'd been sleeping in turtlenecks for a while now.

Will the sharp edge of guilt ever dull, she wonders? It's no wonder demons would clamor for the chance to get it wiped away.

"Of course you can't! He's a miracle worker. Just in time for the Idol Awards — and I can definitely get you more if you need it!" She moves to touch a pocket for her phone, only to realize there are no pockets (or phone) on her person. "We've got a lot of rehearsals this week, I mean, so if you ever feel like you need anything else-"

"Oh no. No, no, don't sign me up for any return visits anytime soon. I'm healed and ready to go."

"Okay, if you say so. But the offer is still always there. Just don't overdo it! Especially with this late-night practice." Reaching out, she gives Rumi's arm a soft squeeze. "Besides, Mira and I want to hear you messing around, too! You know we love to listen to you brainstorming."

"Okay, okay," she relents. "Sorry again for racket."

"It's fine! We're hunters, remember? Our inspiration can be a little noisy. I like the noise."

And Rumi likes how confident Zoey is with her noise. Brash and fast and brimming with youthful energy. It had always made her feel more comfortable to create her own commotion. She wishes it were enough tonight to allay the terrible pit in her stomach that she knows will linger long after Zoey goes back to bed.

Her friend turns to shuffle down the hallway once again, but as Rumi steps back and starts to close the door, Zoey reconsiders.

"Hey," she says, "Did you already have backing vocals recorded?"

"Huh?"

"I just thought I heard another voice singing."

And truly, life had continued being busy. Live music shows, practice for year-end festivals, charity events, fan-signings. She feels like she has to thank Bobby with a thousand deep bows for the distractions he's inadvertently provided her. Not that it keeps her mind from racing when she's left to herself. One night she'd thought she'd never hear from Jinu again, and the next he's so tangible that even Zoey had noticed his presence. She isn't crazy then… right? He's really out there, below the surface of the human realm, enduring god only knows what. And here she is, powerless to do anything for him.

Radio interviews. Powerless.

Surprise meetings at conventions. Powerless.

Watching Golden continue to hold sway at the top of the charts. Powerless.

Their music is doing incredibly well, and despite everything, the handful of song concepts they're waffling on are pretty strong. The duet Zoey had heard that night isn't brought up again — maybe because Zoey senses something too sensitive in the space rumi saves for its lyrics. Maybe she thinks Rumi will reveal a demo, as she's done in the past; she wasn't as strong a lyricist, but it wouldn't be the first time she's locked herself in her room and suddenly reppeared with a new beat or verse.

The night Jinu had sang with her isn't the only attempt she makes at reaching him. She's just more cautious now when she does it, waiting until Zoey and Mira are indisposed with their own personal ventures before she sings to her floor like a completely insane person. Most of the time, she sings a one-sided duet, though there's frustrated moments where she just curses him instead for being a fickle jerk who makes her worry like this. At one point, she mockingly starts singing Soda Pop, and it ends up a wholly sincere attempt of reaching him by the end.

And then, there's the dreams.

Strange, fractured dreams. Hybrid beasts that consist of her faults and fears, of course — she's had plenty of nightmares about her problems over the years, none too kind to herself — but intermingled with her usual psychological mess is the haphazard and oftentimes abrupt appearance of Jinu. At first she'd chocked it up to lingering regrets and words left unspoken between them. But the more she revisits sleep, the more substantial the dreams feel. As busy days shift into quiet nights, she finds herself both dreading and looking forward to sleep.

Tonight is no exception.

Before she can so much as register the stage she's standing on, Jinu is wrapping one arm around her waist and pulling her in. She recognizes the choreography from a few years ago — a sort of western tango intermingled with dance pop, light and easy. As muscle memory takes over, she looks up at him and tries to parse what's happening; much like most dreams, she doesn't recall what is and isn't reality.

"Wh — what are we doing?!"

"A collaboration," he says back.

As they move across the stage in practiced, smooth motions, she catches glimpses of the excited crowds down below. A squeak of shock catches in her throat when she realizes some of those shrieking fans have horns and tusks and glowing eyes. Demons and humans intermingle beside one another and wave their wands — Saja Boys and Huntrix logos, mixed in equal signs of adoration.

"I don't remember Bobby booking this," she says, but clings more tightly to his hand and bicep. "What happened to your face?"

She wants to reach up and touch angry, half-healed scabs on his cheek. But they can't disappoint the fans.

"I can't remember right now," Jinu pants. She doesn't feel like she's breaking a sweat, but she can see the gleam of it on his brow as he starts struggling to keep up with her pointed steps. He says in a teasing voice, "It's nice that you're worried."

"Me, worried? About you? Keep dreaming, loverboy," she huffs, turning red. Something about his voice…

"I am. It's a nice one too." At the sight of her puzzled brow, he elaborates. "The dream. Hallucination? Whichever."

His hand is big in hers, but also sharper than she remembers. His neck looks thinner. Something in her mind clicks.

"Where are you?" she whispers. "How can I help you?"

"You can't," he breathes, and sounds frustratingly content with himself. Like he's dancing through a high he doesn't want sobered. "But I like that you want to."

At the end of her twirl, he releases her, and — ever the professional — she hits her pose. Her gaze catches another full view of the audience then. An over-eager demon with one eye and thick bloodred lips beams up at them and waves his wand before vanishing straight down through the stadium. There one moment, gone beneath the ever-turning wheels of the Honmoon the next. A water demon waves a homemade sign covered in glitter just before tumbling past a sea of human ankles. One by one, the colorful horned heads bob and fall away, and the crowd gets just a little quieter for every voice that is suddenly silenced.

Jinu stands in front of her on the long walkway, expecting something, and she realizes his idol outfit has become tattered and dirty.

Or had it been like that all this time?

She sucks in a breath when she realizes what he's waiting for, while the crowd thins on either side of them.

"Don't," she demands him.

Jinu shrugs helplessly before he's pulled through the stage floor.

When Rumi wakes up with a start, it only takes her a few minutes to calm herself before her focus pivots immediately.

Because maybe if she can't reach him in song, then sleep will have to do.

Chapter Text

Enveloped in a thin veil of fog, Rumi sinks into a sweltering body of bathhouse water and sighs deeply.

She's sat in heated baths before, sure, but nothing like this. It feels like every knot in her body is coming undone, from the joints in her toes to the aching buttons at the base of her spine. It's like an ointment applied to early two decades of tension. Not a cure, but a treatment to relieve some of the itch.

Her thoughts echo what she's been told time and time again by her bandmates: 'you should have done this aaages ago'. It's times like these that she laments what the patterns across her skin have taken from her; she'd love nothing more than for Zoey and Mira to be here, to giggle over anything or nothing, to talk future plans. That was supposed to be the big step forward for them now, wasn't it? Their futures, what they plan to do once the Honmoon was completely sealed, what a world without worrying about demons looks like to them…

But for now, this will have to do.

In all honesty, she's not sure when or how she got to the bathhouse, and if there's something she had been meaning to accomplish, she's all but forgotten about it in her haze of relaxation. Time has been kind of difficult to track day to day, and she'd been so caught up in the complex web she'd weaved hiding parts of herself from the world…

Maybe this is just what she needs to recharge and get her head on straight.

With that thought as an ample enough excuse, her eyes slide shut with ecstasy and she rests.

Peace.

While she stares at the darkness swimming behind her eyelids, she hears and feels the water ripple as it's displaced by the sudden but calm arrival of another body.

A deep voice breaks through her tranquility almost immediately, offering only this:

"Uhm."

Like a beartrap, her eyes snap open.

Mimicking an unmoving statue, a very dazed Jinu sits on the opposite side of the large rounded tub, arms stiff at his sides as they vanish under the water. He's still fully dressed from head to toe, down to the golden chain he’d worn as a Saja Boy. His plaid button-up shirt clings to his wet skin and his hair hangs in limp, sodden locks across his forehead. Some small part of Rumi's brain is reminded of the stare he'd given her when he held up her Save the Date invitation: deadpan and earnestly lost, with a searching gaze and mouth parted.

But the bigger part of her brain remembers that she's naked just feet away from him, and that realization cancels out any other rational thought.

Her response is delayed, but brutal.

"Get out, you sicko!"

Her hand fumbles for the bamboo handle of a shower brush and wields it like her sword, just before she proceeds to start smacking it into Jinu's head with swift vengeance. To his credit, he'd tried to turn away from her before the onslaught of attacks — but it was no use, and all he could do was lift his arms over his head and scramble to escape her mortified wrath. He says a few words, though she doesn't quite register them in the heat of the moment.

Things like 'ow, wait' or 'why me', mostly.

The wood makes one last satisfactory noise on the crown of his skull just before his palms slip on the lip of the tub. Then he flips ungracefully over the wall with a yell, kicking up hot water off flailing limbs covered by waterlogged jeans. Rumi doesn't get the satisfaction of looking over the edge and seeing him in a bent-up pile on the bathhouse floor —

Because she's suddenly jerking awake in her bed.

No bathhouse, no Jinu — back in reality.

Oh no.

As it turns out, controlling the logistics of your own dreams is really cumbersome. The first and most difficult hurdle is awareness. Knowing you're in a dream in order to control its nonsensical flow. After numerous attempts to reach out to Jinu through nap after nap and night after night, she had finally found him… and then had walloped him into submission with a scrub brush. Lying in her bed, covering her red face with her hands, she prays that she had completely made up Jinu's existence in this one very particular dream.

There's no point in lingering on it too long, even though she undoubtedly will.

But it does bring up another logistical issue, and that is actually finding Jinu. If he's really there sometimes and she's not just slowly giving in to some kind of madness, it means that there has to be some kind of overlap between him and her. If she's totally honest she didn't even consider that demons did sleep. Then again, she didn't consider almost anything about what life was like beneath the Honmoon. Even during the nights before the Idol Awards where she'd snuck away to spend time with him, he was always skittish about talking about himself, preferring to discuss things about the world that he'd entirely missed out on.

Looking back now… maybe he wasn't allowed to. He always seemed like he had more he wanted to say. She could see the want in his eyes, only for the words to die before they reached his lips.

She just wishes they'd had more time.

The idea that their dreams might be the only way they get more of it fills her with dread.

In the days that follow her embarrassing bathhouse nightmare, she works through her schedule with refined determination. Now that she can hyper-focus on something else, she doesn't have to think about the way her body disturbs her every time she bathes, or the awful feeling of lying through her teeth to friends who had a right to better company. If she can just focus on this new Jinu-shaped puzzle, everything else becomes easier. It's a rush of adrenaline that distracts her from the very real possibility that there is nothing she can do save him. No, no, there is always a solution. It can't just end like this. She had always daydreamed about the permanence of the Golden Honmoon — now she wonders if its perfect shine has unspoken loopholes that won't end in its collapse and damnation of the world.

A hard sale to even herself, if she's honest, but what else can she do?

Maybe if she can do something for him, anything, they can both win. They can both get what they want. Even now.

She can fix this. She can fix something. Doesn't everything have a solution?

"Oh my god, slow down," Mira pants from a distance behind her.

Oh, right.

Rumi skids to a stop on the sidewalk, tugging her hoodie around her face more securely. Their early morning jogs have been helpful to start the day and keep her thoughts sharp and straight like the blade she no longer summons. There's a calmness to the sounds of songbirds and their footfalls as they traverse the chilly path, and while they've never been able to drag Zoey coherently out of bed this early, she thinks maybe the expectance of quieted focus would drive their friend up a wall.

While Mira catches up, Rumi turns her face toward the rising sun and steadies her breaths. She feels patches of sweat cooling beneath the long layers of her leggings and sweatshirt, protective threads that shield everyone else from her truth.

Mira lowers the glasses meant to help conceal her from the public eye, her own face shiny with exertion.

"No way are you getting faster than me! I'm the taller one."

"Looks like you need to up your game," Rumi teases.

"You shouldn't goad me on like that." Mira smirks as she tugs on the brim of her baseball cap. "You know I get serious about challenges."

Oh, Rumi knows. She's pretty sure she still has an indent on her shin where Mira accidentally kicked her during a very aggressively charged game of chukgu in their earlier years together.

They find a railing to lean on that overlooks life below — a little truck bustling across a narrow street here, a nice-smelling food stand opening there. Sometimes a red squirrel would make a run for it up its tree and find some hidden nook. A feeling of calm easily washed over them in moments like these, where they can catch their breath in more ways than one.

Every so often, golden strands would ripple across the land.

She tries not to let her smile falter when it happens; the constant reminder makes her want to pick up speed and run again.

"We should get breakfast," Mira says. "We'll get Zoey's fave, so she can't be mad we picked without her."

Rumi is already starting to walk up the incline of the walkway. Her hand rests over her stomach, which almost seems to gurgle in response.

"You read my mind. All this running's got me famished."

"Perfect. And after this, we're going to talk about where we're going for our break."

Rumi stops, turning toward Mira with a puzzled expression.

"Break?"

"Yep. Two weeks off. Bobby already planned it into our schedule. He'll even water your plants while you're gone, so don't even bring them up. I'm thinking VIP into Lotte World, but negotiations can be made." Despite the beginnings of a frown forming on Rumi's face, Mira presses with faux indifference in her tone, counting off her fingers. "Aquarium, museums, spa days… I might even be willing to tolerate Mickey Mouse if Zoey wants to take a trip to the states; we're not so big a thing over there — which is stupid, because we're awesome — but we wouldn't have to try and blend in as much…"

"But we have so much to do," is the unhelpful response.

"Our workload is literally cut in half now," is Mira's oh so slightly edged response.

Rumi can tell what's going on immediately, even if she wishes she could feign ignorance. Mira's limit on bullshit has always been exponentially low, even if Rumi was an easier exception; she got away with a lot, she knows. More than Mira would allow for literally anyone else in her life. The newly uncomfortable silence is just one step away from an impromptu interrogation. Mira just needed one good reason — or one bad response — to try and cut through the heart of the matter, even if there's blood in the fallout.

Rumi opens her mouth to find some other excuse, but Mira shortcuts a predictable conversation.

"Okay, look, I'm not trying to be mean here — you know I'm not. You've been weird since we sealed the Honmoon. Like, more than before the Idol Awards. We've tried to find a way to talk to you about it, but you keep changing the subject, or just saying what we want to hear to get us off your back."

"I'm not being weird!"

"You're being a lot of things! And I know Zoey won't bring it up to you, so if she won't then I have to."

Heat burns up Rumi's neck. "You don't have to do anything. I'm not your burden!"

Mira's arms fan out beside her, parroting the frustration in her voice. "No, you're our friend. And friends are supposed to look out for each other."

The patterns under her outfit start to itch, and she digs her nails into her palms. "I just need time. There's so much to process."

"Then process it with us. Stop shutting us out of whatever's going on with you." And there it is. Beneath the resentment of Rumi's increased isolation, a dangerously vulernable sense of distress bubbles up. "When you're not focused on work you're sleeping, and you don't join us at dinner as much. And any time we try to plan something with you, you keep finding a way out of it. Sometimes Zoey and I feel like we're a duo. Do you even see us as friends, or are we just workmates to walk away from now that our job is done?"

The words are like barbed wire; they burrows into Rumi as she attempts to crawl over them — and to no avail. She can't find any honest words that would make it all better, can't feel anything but a pang of panic and regret and guilt. She thought she had been hiding it all with some measure of talent; after all, that was what she was good at. Hiding her faults and burying those fears to only dug up when night fell and she was alone in her room. But what can she do? What can she say? She can feel Celine's fingers on her sleeves, tugging them down, reminding her that it would only sow seeds of division between them. Make them wonder. Make them question things that shouldn't be questioned.

Now that the Honmoon is sealed… all she can think is that she's lied to them the entire time she's ever known them. There's no room for truth anymore. Not about these. Not when it has been a barrier between them all this time. How angry will they be, when they know she's never once fully trusted them? Despite how much she loves them? All of this effort, and all it has given her are confusing dreams and friends who feel like they're being slowly abandoned.

Mira must see something in Rumi's eyes. Maybe in the way they can't meet her gaze for long.

Whatever it is, it makes her tone soften. "It feels like you're — just drifting away, and nothing we do is helping."

"I'm… I'm not. I promise," she says, and her voice wobbles despite her attempts to keep it even. "You and Zoey are my best friends. I'd do anything for you guys. You have to believe me."

Mira's eyes widen before she folds her arms almost protectively across her chest. She glances away. Like old sour milk, her doggedness curdles. "I know," Mira mumbles, and then crosses the path to wrap her arms around Rumi. Rumi melts into her grasp and manages to keep the heat in her eyes from building. "I know. I didn't mean — I don't know why I said that. We're family. Always. I'm just… I don't want to lose any of this. You and Zoey, you're what matters."

Rumi understands. She really, really does.

She couldn't afford to lose anyone else in her life, either.

Rumi explains the situation between her and the girls, and Jinu offers, "Ahhh. That's rough."

Not remotely helpful, but she hadn't really expecting miracle work for a situation like this.

She watches him from the corner of her eye while she jots her autograph across a freshly printed Huntrix poster. There are stacks of them taller than her head, and Jinu's side of their crampled table isn't fairing much better. He pens his own signature across the corner of a glamor shot — he's giving an extremely cheesy smile to the camera in it — and then proceeds to toss the print away from him. It fights gravity in a series of flips before landing on the huge pile accumulating across the concrete floor. Rumi tosses hers away from her too.

Posters and printed headshots carpet every inch of the huge warehouse their table sits in. If she looks down under her shoes, she knows she'll find illustrated versions of herself striking a pose alongside her bandmates. One of her boots sits on Jinu's poster, and she shuffles it away, feeling guilty for scuffing his perfectly symmetrical nose.

"We've been… having more and more arguments, the last year or so," she admits.

Jinu assesses her for a moment. Then scrawls another signature in sharpie.

"You're hiding your true self," he reminds her. His voice is hoarse, and she can't quite place why that is. She feels like she should know, and maybe if she lingers on it long enough a lightbulb will go off. "People who care about you are bound to feel helpless about it. That's just what it means to love someone else."

… Helpless.

Helpless!

The lightbulb goes off faster than she anticipated. She processes the man sitting beside her as if it's the first time she's noticed. Her hands slam onto the table and she sounds off his name like an alarm. "Jinu!"

He winces, rubbing his ear. Oops.

"Yeah?"

Embarrassed immediately, she turns back to her work, signing with more urgency. "Never mind. I have things I have to ask you."

"But I was enjoying being your voice of reason," he grouses.

She lowers her pen and turns to scowl at him, because this is important, but her expression immediately softens. The hill of his shoulder looks smaller, and there's far too much depth to the collarbone that juts out from under his pink shirt. His cheekbones seem to collect more shadows. The rounded sockets of his eyes, too. It's been well over a month now since she'd last seen him in the flesh, and now that flesh seems to wither more with every new reunion.

Remorse sours the contents of her stomach. What the hell is wrong with her? She'd been sitting her for how long, rambling about the difficulties in her life, with her friendships — all while he's sitting here looking like this. She wants to reach out and run her hands across the thin wrist sitting beside her, but all she can seem to do is turn back toward the printed posters and resume her work.

"Where are you?" she asks again, not for the first time, and probably not the last. "Please. Just talk to me."

"Why does it have to be questions like that? Always questions. Why not just let me enjoy your company?"

"Because you're in trouble." She struggles for what else to say. "And I have to… do something."

Insufferably, his brow pinches.

"Like what? Seriously, I'm being genuine here. What can you possibly do?"

"I don't know! I don't know, okay? But it doesn't mean we should give up."

"… This is ridiculous. You're not even real, Rumi." He sighs, casting his frown toward his one of his many untouched posters. He begins to absently scribble a mustache on the picture's upper lip, then slides it off the table and onto the floor. "Nothing is, not down here." On the next glamor shot, he draws two devilish horns on top of his raven head of hair. Shoves it away, and it falls facedown on the ground.

"Down where?"

"You know where. You've seen it. We've talked there."

Crestfallen, she says, "I can't remember it."

"Good. Don't." He draws inky black patterns, not unlike his own, on the next face. He looks stressed at the very thought of introducing her to whatever cage he's been — maybe literally — crammed into. "It's over. Go live your life. Go on those trips with your friends, and find some kind of happiness past… all of this. The story couldn't have ended any other way for me, but you — you're half human. The only person in control of you is yourself, so don't squander that. I think I've caused enough trouble in my tenure as a demon, so if there's even a sliver of a chance you're real? Then do me a favor, and don't cause yourself anymore problems on my behalf."

She hears him. She does. But…

"But it's not fair," she breathes. Stubborn.

"That's life, he replies. Firm.

And so stupidly sure of himself. It makes her want to reach over and knock him upside the head, but she allows him room to speak, room to process whatever awful situation he's having a momentary escape from. She hates that he looks at peace when he says, "I'm just happy that whatever time I've got left, I get to spend some of it with you. Or, well. A version of you, I guess."

"Where are you," she demands, more desperately, because time is a limited resource. Even in a dream.

"Where I'm meant to be."

Her hackles rise toward him — for him. She can feel the brittle plastic of the pen in her hand bow as she squeezes it. "You know that's not true. You still sing it. Our song. You know what it meant for the both of us and you still sing it, and it reached me. And the Honmoon, it reacted to it — and it changed. That has to mean something."

As she fights him on it, she can see the slightest shift within him. He's got this way his eyebrows furrow when he's reconsidering, processing, trying to make sense of the mess left around him. That's all she can hope for this time, she thinks. She just needs to know that he's willing to give it a try: to keep surviving, no matter the odds, and believe there might be something beyond whatever hole he's tumbled down into. The look he gives the table reminds her of when that little girl had given him her drawing. She thinks of the wings he had been donning, the message that had rattled him.

He looked like a deer in the headlights when everyone had cheered back then.

"Man, you were such a jerk when we first met," she reminiscences with a smile. Looking around this hollowed out dreamscape, she can picture it now: fans all eagerly awaiting their chance in line… and then a stupid, punchable face staring at her from the inside of an upright sleeping bag. If she hadn't been so brimming with the desire to behead him then and there, it would've been a lot funnier. She snorts. "I can't believe you camped out overnight at a fan-signing event just to bait us."

"My levels of petty know no bounds," he chuckles.

As he turns to look at her, his gaze catches on her arms, and he sucks in a startled breath. "Rumi — "

Pressed against the table, the tip of her pen snaps off.

Then she's awake again.

As she sits up in her bed with a groan and a beetled brow, she looks where his worried stare had fallen... and she sucks in her own startled breath.

Her hands. Palms. Fingers.

They were completely overtaken by her patterns.