Chapter Text
Everybody wants something.
Ryu Rumi wants to kill herself.
Ever since she was a small child, she’s had big feelings. And those feelings were often negative, always negative.
Her mother, Mi-Yeong – a beloved popstar who the world mourned decades later, died during a difficult childbirth.
No husband in sight – the father left as soon as he discovered that the consequences of his actions were growing in her womb. Nari, he was called, was Mi-Yeong’s producer and significantly older. Fearing the exposure of his scandal, he left his star idol and the mother of his child like a coward. Like a monster.
You could even say, like a demon.
But there was a friend in sight.
Someone even more than that depending on who’s eyes you looked through.
Vision blurred by tears she could hardly feel running down her numb face, Mi-Yeong saw Celine. Her dearest bandmate for the better part of 15 years. The woman she craved like sunflowers reach for the sun.
Oh, what a silly dear, she should have known Celine wasn’t the sun.
Celine was the moon, only reflecting her light.
And ever since she died, the nights were dark. Even the days were too because Mi-Yeong was Celine’s sun, rising every morning with a smile that warmed her cool heart and flushed her pale cheeks until it was her cheeks that were pale, her heart that was cold, deathly cold.
During the final push, Celine watched the life fade from the woman who gave her own purpose.
Weeping tears that had been restrained in desperate attempts not to make the worst situation worse, the remaining Sunlight Sister dropped to her knees and dug her nails into the hand limp in her grasp, wailing for her beloved to return.
Then she kissed over the indentations with quivering lips that murmured apologies – apologies for letting her friend indulge in the attention of an older man, apologies for being too wrapped up in her own internalized loathing to unravel Mi-Yeong from the mess she found herself in.
Apologies for not being enough to stay around for.
Mi-Yeong’s forgiveness came in the form of a child.
Little feet unable to walk, little hands only able to want and not get, little shoulders rolling and wriggling with the restless feeling of being alive, little eyes closed – unseeing to the world around them, little noises coming from little lips.
Oh, she was so little.
So small for the big burdens her existence came with.
All over her tiny body, littered across the little expands of skin layered over her little fat and little bones, were large birthmarks. Darker than her complexion, staining her back, her head, her knee and surrounded by much smaller ones that were scattered like freckles with a vengeance.
“Who will adopt her when she looks like this?” The midwife asked another, cradling the squirming newborn with obligated care. “Who will want her?”
That’s when the world crumbling around Celine so viciously suddenly paused, that’s when she began to rebuild it as she rose on unsteady legs and held out hands that were suppressing emotional trembles.
“I do.” She hated how weak she sounded, how fearful and small her tone was, but she knew it was the rightest choice in the most wrong of situations. “I want her.”
At the time, her hadn’t been the pitiful child.
Her had been the corpse on the bed, the body that wasn’t cold yet, the woman waiting to be buried.
Her had been the woman from before this mess, before the baby, before Nari, before Min Ju – the third Sunlight Sister – died of cancer, before the pop group disbanded.
Her had been the girls Celine spent her youth with, spent her youth pining over in platonic flirting and cheek kisses because friends kiss, right?
Friends imagine their lips against tenderness of your neck when they braid your hair. Friends imagine their hands caressing your cheeks when they place the star clips in your hair by your curly buns. Friends adopt your child to cling onto your presence.
Her had been them.
But, overtime, her became Rumi.
The name came to Celine when she brought the newborn to a house that wasn’t ready for the fragility of a baby but still offered the safety of a home, staying awake all night with the sleeping infant cradled in hesitant care because she was paranoid at losing the little that remained of Mi-Yeong.
Raising her eyebrows slightly, the dullness engulfing Celine was lit up by the beginnings of a thought.
Ryu Mi-Yeong...
Ryu Mi...
RyuMi...
“Rumi,” she murmured quietly, her voice hoarse from crying harder than she had in far too long. “What about Rumi?”
It’s not like Celine expected the drowsy babe to express much of an opinion about a name she couldn’t even say or understand yet, but she still braced for rejection, for someone to tell her she was already doing this wrong.
Then, stirred from her delicate slumber by the shudder of Celine’s chest as she bit back sobs, Rumi woke with little brown eyes, a little sniffling nose and little fingers wrapped around the woman’s hovering one.
The babble that she let out was incoherent and likely unintentional, but it sounded… happy.
It tugged the corners of Celine’s frowning lips up into a small, quivering smile as her usually sharp eyes were weak around the edges, her gaze filled with tears.
“Yeah? You like that, Rumi?” She asked as if she were trying to make a new friend and not talking to a newborn.
When that babble blessed her ears again, she sniffed and spoke in a broken tone that promised to mend overtime.
“Oh, Rumi, I can’t promise that I’ll be very good at this. But I do swear I’ll try.” Sucking in a shuddering breath, Celine gently kissed a little forehead, not minding the birthmarks as much as she worried she would.
“I’ll try my hardest for you, my darling, my little patterned miracle.”
And Celine did try; she tried very hard.