Archive of Our Own

one

Rumi is five years, two months, and three days old when the spiral of purple on her shoulder, the one that's been there as long as she can remember, the one that Celine avoids looking at and covers up, the one that Rumi's always found pretty and wanted to admire in the mirror, grows.

It happens at school. Celine walks her to school like every day, straightens her uniform for her, sends her into the building with a fond hand brushing over her hair and one of the small tight smiles that Rumi's learned to treasure. Rumi bounds off to her class like every day, takes her seat like every day. She's five years and two months and three days old and she's been in school for months now and she knows what she's doing.

The day turns sour at snacktime, when one of the boys who likes to make fun of the purple sheen of Rumi's hair knocks over his juice and is spills across the table and over the edge, pouring down over her lap. He sits frozen with wide eyes for a split second and then points at Rumi and laughs loud and announces louder that Rumi wet herself because she's a baby.

Her ears burn hot and her face hotter, the cotton of her skirt soaked in apple juice. Everyone saw him knock over his drink, and there's juice all over the table, but they laugh because he's popular and she's quiet, because he spoke first and she froze, and she tells herself she isn't going to cry because she's five years and two months and three days old and she is not a baby.

Tears burn in her eyes anyways, and she shrinks into her seat, as if she can sink through it and into the floor and disappear, can close her eyes and open them and be home with Celine and dry clothes and no one laughing at her.

The teacher appears, gently scolding the boy and all the students who laughed at her with him. It doesn't help. Rumi can feel them all looking at her, laughing at her even in their obedient silence in front of the teacher. Her shoulders climb higher, as if she can turtle her way down into her collar and disappear forever.

Rumi's been in school for months and has never needed a spare uniform. She's careful and clean, because Celine is careful and clean, and other kids have had accidents, have torn shirts or trousers or socks on the playground, but never Rumi. The teacher finds a spare uniform from another classroom, but it's too big, the skirt hanging past her knees, a lingering banner for all of the other students to point and giggle at for the rest of the day. She shuffles, shamefaced and slumped, out to the pickup area where Celine waits for her. Her too-big skirt and the plastic bag with her wet one make her want to hide, and she gives up and runs straight into Celine, landing with a whump with her arms around Celine and clinging tightly.

The teacher's voice, a wordless murmur above her; Celine's hand on her hair, gentle but steady. The shrieks of laughter and joy that soundtrack every day at the end of school as kids make a break for freedom are no different than any other day but they land different now, an echo of the jeering cruel laughter of her classmates. She buries her face in Celine's stomach and holds on tight and does her best to screw her eyes shut tight enough that she can't cry anymore.

Celine takes her home like always, unfazed, unworried. She turns right instead of left and wordlessly buys Rumi an ice cream cone, the kind with the vibrant purple ice cream that Celine finds revolting but that Rumi loves because it matches her hair. They sit on a bench in the park across the street while Rumi eats. They don't talk, because Celine doesn't like talking, not really, and Rumi does what Celine does because Celine is the most important person she's ever met.

By the time Rumi's finished her ice cream, she has sticky sugar on her fingers and her feet swing where they hang over the bench, and Celine smiles at her, wider and less restrained than usual, and Rumi beams.

"Let's go home, yes?" Celine produces a wet wipe from her purse and methodically cleans the sugar off of Rumi's hands, kneeling in front of her and pausing in her cleaning to poke at Rumi's nose once, twice, a third time, until Rumi giggles in spite of herself. Celine stands, and Rumi clambers up to stand on the bench. She's still not as tall as Celine, but it gets her close enough, and she pokes at Celine's nose, revels in the surprised laugh it earns her. She does it again, and giggles alongside Celine's quieter laugh, and she's not a baby but she had a bad day and she wants her Celine, so she shyly holds her arms out in a silent question.

"Okay, sunbeam," Celine says, indulgent and smiling. She opens her arms and Rumi launches into them; Celine catches her, like she always does, and Rumi buries her face in the safe harbor of Celine's shoulder. Celine holds her easily, even though Rumi's so big now— she knows she is, Celine told her she is, just yesterday, that she's growing up too fast— and Rumi forgets about her bad day and the stupid boy and the too-big uniform she's still wearing.

At home, Celine steps through the door with Rumi still on her hip and lets out an exaggerated groan as she bends to set Rumi down. Rumi laughs and pokes at Celine's nose again, laughs louder when Celine crosses her eyes and wrinkles her nose before shooing her off to change out of her uniform. The promise of training— Rumi loves training, loves it more than school and singing and coloring books, because she gets to train with Celine, who teaches Rumi her forms and how to fold her hand into a fist and how to curl her fingers around a practice staff that's bigger than she is tall— has her bounding off and nearly ripping her uniform in her hurry to change.

She's still struggling with getting her shirt on square as she hustles out of her room and out to meet Celine, excitement overwriting the way she'd spent so much of the day wanting to cry. Celine is waiting for her, and Rumi gets to train, and she can't wait to—

"Rumi." Celine's voice stops her in her tracks. She hasn't heard Celine sound like this, not really: strangled and uncomfortable, none of the stern gentle kindness that she carries so easily. "What is— when—"

Rumi doesn't know what she's asking, doesn't know what she's upset by, because Rumi's wearing the right clothes for training and she didn't forget her shoes because they're already waiting for her by the door and she knows she was needy but she also had a bad day and Celine's always told her she's allowed to have bad days and no one can tell her otherwise—

Celine's gaze is locked on some point to Rumi's right, and Rumi cranes her head around to look— maybe she forgot to close her bedroom door behind her— and is distracted by the spiral of purple, exposed by the shirt she's halfway into straightening out. It's bigger than it was this morning, reaching down her arm like spindly delicate fingers where just hours earlier it had stopped high on her shoulder.

"It's pretty," Rumi says without meaning to, and Celine recoils, and Rumi flinches back like a mirror.

"Cover that up," Celine says quickly. She crosses the space between them in short stilted strides, fingers flexing at her sides, and she deftly adjusts Rumi's shirt until the sleeve covers the whole of the pattern. "Come. We need to start training."

Later, Rumi will ask if her patterns make her a demon. Later, Celine will promise that when the Honmoon is sealed the patterns will all be gone: an answer that answers nothing of what Rumi asked, but the only one Celine will give her. Later, Rumi will understand that the patterns aren't just something to hide because no one else will understand them, but something that scares Celine, that shames her.

For now, though, Rumi thinks about purple ice cream and Celine crossing her eyes, Celine carrying her home, and decides it doesn't matter. The ground hums under her bare feet, a melody always cradling her when she steps out into the garden. She tugs at her sleeve to make sure the swirl of purple is covered, and bounces on her toes, ready to train.

two

Rumi's three days shy of her fourteenth birthday when she feels it as something besides the quiet thrum of the earth under her feet for the first time. A hum under her skin, something warm and quiet, rolling like a melody in her bones. She's awake before the sun, like she always is: she prefers to sleep in, a habit she inherited from her mother, according to Celine, but the quiet of early morning as she works her way through her forms is too comforting to resist.

She's almost done with the first half of the two hours of work she does before her lessons start each day— an hour of combat and weapons training, and then an hour of vocal exercises and music theory—and is at the tail end of one of her forms, practice staff spinning comfortably in her hands, when the world wakes in her bones and grabs her so hard she drops the staff.

It clatters to the ground, loud against the flagstones in the early morning quiet, and Rumi stares at it, at her hands, unsure of why she can suddenly feel the pulse of the earth in her own chest. Strands of blue wind their way around her, curling gently along her shoulders and down her arms, spreading out across the courtyard and the grove, over the walls and into the sky.

"Oh," she says faintly, turning her hands in the air in front of her in wonder. Callouses on her palms from weapons and her fingertips from guitar strings, but nails trimmed and neat and painted in cheerful alternations of pink and black. Celine had raised an eyebrow at her when Rumi emerged from her room with freshly painted nails— she normally favored quieter colors, dark blues and calming greens— but said nothing beyond complimenting Rumi's steady hand. It had taken her years to train her left hand into something as steady and solid as her right, both for weapons and guitar strings, but the precision demanded by nail polish had been the final hurdle she'd set for herself in perfecting it.

"Rumi, what are you—" Celine cuts off abruptly, half out the door into the courtyard, and Rumi's eyes snap up from the way the world cradles her gently in its hold to where Celine is staring at her with wide eyes. "What—"

"I don't know," Rumi rushes out. "I was just— I didn't mean to—"

"You shouldn't be able to do that yet," Celine says faintly. "You're so young, you shouldn't—"

"I didn't mean to," Rumi says without meaning to, the apology on her tongue rushing out after it, a habit she didn't know she'd cultivated.

"The Honmoon," Celine says, quiet, wondrous. "I don't think anyone has ever touched it so young before."

Dread twists in Rumi's stomach, and the strands of magic around her twist and gnarl in the air. The Honmoon is sacred, is critical, is the veil between realms that she was born to protect, but not yet. Celine has maintained it as long as Rumi's been alive, holding it together on her own until Rumi grows old enough to control both it and herself, until Rumi finds the others the Honmoon chose to protect it. Rumi's mother had been nineteen when she was first able to touch the threads at the heart of the world; Celine, eighteen; Rumi is only thirteen, and she feels impossibly younger as the Honmoon makes a home in her bones.

Rumi is young and unpolished, inexperienced, raw around the edges and touched by the demons marking her shoulder and arm, hidden away always. Rumi is thirteen years old and half a demon, half a hunter, and the Honmoon has opened itself to her without warning.

"I didn't mean to," Rumi says again. "I didn't— I didn't know it was even possible."

"I didn't think it was." Celine hasn't moved from her spot in the doorway, rooted in place far out of Rumi's reach. The Honmoon ripples and hums, warms Rumi from the marrow outward.

"Is it—" Rumi pauses, swallows, presses her lips together. "Is it because of—"

"Don't," Celine says over her. Sharp, shaking, scolding. Rumi's shoulders, tense under the unprecedented turn to her morning, slump, and she looks down to her hands again instead of to where Celine looks for all the world like she wants to run away from their home, from Rumi, from the visible threads of the barrier they're charged with protecting.

"I'm sorry," Rumi says softly. The Honmoon, still warm like honey and summer sunlight and the days when a younger Rumi's patterns hadn't spread, rumbles its discontent at her apology. A different heat, one less like magic and more like disquiet, burns at her arm, and she doesn't need to shrug out of her hoodie to know that her patterns have spread again. "I didn't mean to."

"We'll need to find the others," Celine says after a long moment. She squares her shoulders, pushes a hand through her hair. "Sooner than we thought."

"How?" Rumi sets her considerable stubbornness to ignoring the way the Honmoon holds her and focuses on retrieving her staff.

"You'll be able to feel them," Celine says, a quiet frown creasing her forehead, eyes distant already as she starts visibly changing her meticulous plans for the coming years. "You'll have to— I need to teach you. How to feel the Honmoon. How to use it. It chooses you all, but you have to find each other on your own."

Rumi wonders who the others are. Wonders if she's already feeling them in this syrupy warmth in her bones, in the calming hum twining its way through her ribcage. She stares down at her own hands, at the pink and black she'd so meticulously painted onto her nails, at the strands of magic winding their way through her knuckles and up her arms. She expects the patterns to burn, to hurt, to smoke or shriek or something when the Honmoon moves over them, expects the good of the Honmoon to reject the patterns on her skin, but nothing happens.

The Honmoon curls into her chest, hooks behind her sternum, and Rumi bites down on the inside of her cheek. Demons and the marks they leave are the enemy, are the danger she's meant to protect against, are the problem the Honmoon is meant to solve, but the magic of the Honmoon settles in between the rhythm of her pulse and, demon and all, holds her tight. She glances back up to Celine, still holding her post at the door, eyes wide and uncertain as the magic they live for welcomes Rumi into itself.

After breakfast but before her private tutors arrive for the day to put her through her homeschooling paces, Rumi showers away the sweat that had cooled on her skin after finishing her morning training. She lingers uncharacteristically under the hot water, staring down at her body. Her arms, patterned across the shoulders and down towards her elbows. Her hands, flickers of the Honmoon still visible and twining between her knuckles. She's thirteen years old, charged with protecting a world that will never know it needs her, and the magic keeping them all safe reached out to her and held her close.

Rumi clenches her fists and stares at the patterns on her arm. Grinds her teeth and ignores them and sets to washing her hair. Her tutor will be here in twenty minutes, and she already wasted too much time this morning.

The Honmoon murmurs in her chest, a quiet hum she feels in her bones. The patterns, longer than they were this morning for the first time in years, are a dormant dull purple as the Honmoon makes a home in her ribcage, and Rumi sinks into it, revels in it.

She might be a mistake, born wrong, born patterned and marked, but the Honmoon wants her anyways. She might be the wrong person to protect the world, to protect the Honmoon, to seal the barrier between realms for good, but she's what the world has. She'll learn the Honmoon, and find her team, and together they'll find a way to solidify the barrier for good.

three

The Honmoon, Rumi finds, is slippery.

It reaches for her whenever she looks for it, ready and willing, always there, a warm honey-like hum in her chest, but the minute she tries to grasp for it— to touch it, to move it, to pull power from it and shape it into something starlit and deadly and hers— it winks away, leaving nothing but trailing warmth and a fading blue afterglow. It chose her, wound itself into her atoms, but it refuses to make things easy for her.

Celine's teachings are comprehensive, but insufficient. It's a new feeling, to understand that there are things that Celine can't teach her; Rumi hates it, hates that it sits like an uncomfortable itch on her skin just like the patterns do, this realization of Celine's fallibility. But the Honmoon is mystical and magical and she was born to protect it, so Rumi listens and studies and practices practices practices, early in the pre-dawn dark before her forms and late into the night after Celine has gone to bed, out alone among the gardens that make up Rumi's only hobby.

She reads every hunter text Celine has available, and then reads them all again. Generations of hunters, centuries of work: she inhales it all over and over again, trying to understand the Honmoon, to understand the pulse of the earth that lives in her bones, the magic and the science of it all.

She takes notes and draws diagrams and studies metaphysics far beyond her teenage years. The Honmoon is a barrier, a physical wall between realms, keeping demons out of their world. The Honmoon is fueled by the love and adoration that pours out of the world in response to the voices it chose. The Honmoon is imperfect, something penetrable, something breakable, because it wasn't until globalism and a shrinking world and a growing accessibility that there was enough to power it; Rumi's is the first generation with a real, actual chance of sealing it shut.

The Honmoon is a miracle, and Rumi is a mistake.

The longer it takes her to learn the Honmoon— days and weeks and months of threads of it dissolving in her hands, slipping away from her touch— the more she throws herself into her research. Celine, uncharacteristically forgiving of failure, tells her she needs to be patient, that no hunter in recorded history has ever manifested a weapon out of the Honmoon's starlight at such a young age; Rumi, characteristically stubborn, nods her respectful assent and then reads late into the night, determined to understand.

The Honmoon is a miracle. It chooses its defenders, plucks them out of the ether and binds to them the minute they're born. It has chosen generation after generation of hunters, building three-part harmonies in pieces and bringing them all together. The Honmoon is imperfect and breakable, but it is the foundation of their continued existence.

She considers, well into the night, as exhaustion drags at her limbs and scratches at her eyelids, that perhaps the Honmoon— critical but imperfect, unwavering but breakable— made a mistake.

The thought wiggles its way into the base of her skull halfway into a sword form. She ignores it, closes her eyes, moves blindly from one stance to the next in the garden courtyard that's been hers since she was nine years old, surrounded by the young trees she's grown. She ignores it as she moves from one form to the next, and ignores the ache in her palms. Her arms tremble under the weight of the sword: she's been at it for hours, long since Celine had gone to bed on the other side of the house and Rumi had promised not to stay up too late reading.

She turns and swings, stops the arc of the blunt blade blindly and six inches from the infant rhododendron she's been nursing back to life. The abrupt stop jars the hilt in her hands and a spike of pain tears through her palms; the clatter of the sword as it hits the flagstones is too loud, too sharp, and she flinches back from it.

Her hands are bleeding. She blinks down at them curiously, almost numbly. The callouses she'd built over the course of her sixteen years on this planet, from sword hilts and guitar strings alike, have torn, and blood beads in her palms.

Sighing, she watches as droplets of blood fall to the flagstones next to her dropped sword. The familiar warmth of the Honmoon hums in her chest and she suddenly, unexpectedly, hates it like she's never hated anything.

"What do you want?" she snarls, head tipping back to the empty sky. The Honmoon sings, a wave of blue shimmering across the sky like ley lines. "I don't— why even bother with me if— if—"

The ache of a sob catches in her chest, cracking like an egg over the gentle hold of the Honmoon. She grips at her right shoulder, bloody palm already forgotten, and digs her fingernails into the patterns.

"It's because of them," she mutters. "I can't— I'm not allowed— because of the patterns. Who would let a demon touch the Honmoon, right?"

She grips harder at her shoulder, hard enough that even her short nails start to break skin through her shirt. There's a scream that feels like it's been building since the first time she asked Celine about the starburst of purple on her shoulder, one that feels ready to shatter the empty sky above her, and she bites down on the inside of her cheek until she tastes blood to keep it in.

We are hunters, voices strong. It's not Celine's voice she hears in her head. Our faults and fears must never be seen.

"I don't understand." It rips out of her like a splinter of bone had when she was six and snapped her forearm in half training. It hurts just as much. "Why would— it's not supposed to be me—"

She moves without meaning to, a furious howl in her chest; the sword is in her bloodied hand for only half a second before she's flung it across the courtyard, hard enough that the solid strength of it shatters when it hits the side of the house. The Honmoon screeches and shudders, jagged and howling just like she did, and a blinding white light wraps around her.

A sword sits in her bleeding hands. The hilt is wrapped in pristine, supple leather, nicer than any training sword she's ever touched; the blade is inset with the constellations she can't see anymore with how bright it glows.

A clatter sounds behind her, and she turns without thinking, sinking into a defensive stance. The sword sits in her palm like it was made to be there, the weight and balance and heft perfectly suited to her grip.

Celine stares at her, hair disheveled and feet bare, from the doorway.

"Oh," Celine says faintly.

Rumi blinks at her, and then blinks again, owlish, uncertain. She lowers the sword quickly, cradles it in her palms, stares down at it in wonder. The Honmoon twines its way around the blade, and her hands, up her wrists and past her elbows, blue and gentle and humming contentedly.

"Oh," Celine says again. "I— I see."

"I don't understand," Rumi says helplessly, because she's part demon, because she carries Gwi-Ma's mark on her skin, but the Honmoon that holds him back has reached out to hold her as well: not restrictively, but gentle, careful, trusting. "I— I don't know—"

"We don't have to know," Celine says, suddenly right in front of Rumi. She settles her hands gently on Rumi's shoulders, presses one palm to Rumi's cheek. "We just have to believe. It chose you."

"I don't understand," Rumi says again, helpless, anxious, trembling. She's felt tired her whole life, like her bones are too old for this world; Celine and her tutors have always teased her gently for being such a serious child. She's felt old since she knew what it meant to feel, forever looking ahead to the day she can finally rest, but she suddenly feels terribly, terrifyingly young.

"It's okay," Celine says softly. "It's okay to feel overwhelmed. I did, too. We all did." She presses her hand more firmly to Rumi's cheek, swipes a thumb at the exhausted tears welling there. "You can put it down, Rumi. It'll come back to you."

"I don't— I don't know how," Rumi says. The Honmoon rumbles around her, rollicking and waving, almost laughing, and Celine smiles. Really smiles, the rare one that isn't tinged with sadness whenever she looks at Rumi.

"Close your eyes," Celine says, gentle but firm. "Think about the Honmoon, and the way it connects to you, and you connect to it. Think about the sword, and how it feels to hold it, and breathe in."

Rumi does, eyes screwed shut, mouth pressed into such a firm line that her jaw aches. She considers the weight of the sword in her hands, the way she can practically feel where the air brushes along the blade, the way the Honmoon cradles them all, and breathes in.

"Feel how it was made for you," Celine carries on. "The hilt, and the blade, and the power. It's a part of you as much as it's a part of the Honmoon. Feel how all three of you are the same, just like you will be with the others when we find them, and breathe out."

Rumi's lungs ache as she holds the air in, fingers on one hand tight around the hilt and the other around a blade so sharp she can feel it ready to cut through the earth itself, even as it refuses to break through her own skin. Feel how all three of you are the same. She sinks into the sound of Celine's voice, the gentle surety of her touch, unable to tear her focus away from Celine just like she can't tear her focus away from the Honmoon.

She exhales slowly, eyes clenched shut. Celine hums softly, squeezes at her shoulder, shakes gently until Rumi opens her eyes.

The sword is gone. Her bloody palms sit upright in the air between them in the dark, and Celine frowns down at them, cups them between her own palms. She shrugs out of her robe and sets to dabbing at the blood, deliberate and gentle.

"You can still feel it." It's a statement, not a question, and Rumi nods helplessly. The Honmoon holds her just like Celine does, a soft thrum under her skin; every beat of her own pulse rattles up against the hilt of a sword, sitting in the ether, waiting for her to reach for it again.

"Yeah," Rumi breathes out.

"It'll be there when you need it," Celine says. "It'll always find you."

The Honmoon sings its agreement, warm like a blanket on her skin.

four

She lands with a whistle and a crack, whip-sharp and bone jarring, knees crashing into the ground. The soft familiarity of the gardens surrounding Celine's compound, the trees she grew and grew up with, is gone; there's only the rough gravel outside Namsang Tower under her knees now, harsh and biting.

The Honmoon is in shambles around her. Wavering and shuddering and falling, because Rumi is a demon, because Rumi failed, because Rumi couldn't do the one thing she was brought into this world to do.

The fading echo of Zoey, of Mira, pulls like a hook behind her chest, and she clenches her jaw, her fists, pushes her knuckles into the ground.

The Honmoon thrashes inside her, around her. The exhausted fury that had wound its way into her chest when Celine refused to even look at her sits sick and aching, waiting, rebelling against the Honmoon that's held her for as long as she can remember. She lost Mira and Zoey, and she's losing the Honmoon, and she wants it gone and is too tired to interrogate if the it she wants gone is the fury or the Honmoon or just her.

Music sounds from inside the tower, and the Honmoon twists desperately around her. It's not fading, it's not disintegrating, it's changing. It's holding onto her as desperately as she's holding onto it as it writhes in her grip, as violently as she holds onto Zoey and Mira as they slip out of her fingers.

Get up.

Mira, a gentle warmth barely distinguishable from the Honmoon itself, cradling and protective, a calming weight unsettled and teetering in the air around her. Mira who barreled into Rumi's life, following an inexplicable-at-the-time pull from the Honmoon; Mira who laughed outright at Celine until Rumi summoned a weapon out of the Honmoon and set it into her hands. Mira who cradled the hilt of Rumi's sword as gently and reverently as she held onto the two of them, soft where no one outside of their three-part harmony could see her. Mira, a spike of stubbornness Rumi stepped deliberately into loving when she was seventeen years old in the Honmoon always, rounding away and slipping into the indistinguishable morass radiating out of the stadium.

Get up.

Zoey, a quieter hum than anyone else besides Rumi or Mira would expect, unwavering and stalwart and kind, wavers in the roiling lines that have always connected them. Zoey who loves so brightly, who holds them together when they can't hold themselves. Zoey who Rumi felt in the ley lines of the Honmoon from the other side of the world, who Rumi chased across an ocean to find and fell headfirst into loving the first time she stepped into the springtime sunlight of Celine's garden to meet Mira, who pulled a weapon out of the Honmoon faster than anyone Rumi's ever heard of, is fading.

Get up.

Celine, and Bobby, and even fucking Jinu— the Honmoon holds it all like it holds her, and she feel all of them disappearing from it. She catches a scream behind her teeth, pushes it down into her chest and her knuckles into the gravel until they bleed. She's flayed open, an exposed nerve, the syrupy warmth of a solid Honmoon gone and something rawer, something older, scraping out from under it.

Get up.

Whatever the Honmoon is, it's not what they've always thought. Celine was wrong. Rumi was wrong. Every hunter before them, beating themselves bloody to hold it steady, was wrong. The Honmoon chooses its defenders, and the Honmoon chose her: half human, half demon, all mistake, branded and broken and incomplete The Honmoon chose her, and chose Mira, and chose Zoey. Whatever it's becoming might rip her apart, break her to pieces for good along the fault lines she can't hide anymore, if she steps into that stadium. But Zoey is in there, and Mira is in there, and the only place Rumi has ever belonged is with them.

Get up.

She pushes to her feet slowly, aching, patterns rippling and jeering as the mass casualty event in progress within the stadium rips at her fraying edges. She pushes herself up to standing, the weight of the Honmoon-- fraying, changing, waiting-- settling on her shoulders.

It won't be what they thought, a gleaming golden perfection protecting them all for good. It won't wipe away the patterns Rumi's spent a lifetime running from, won't take away her lies or failures, won't create a shining new world where they can just be, together, unburdened. It may very well kill her just like it kills every other demon Gwi-Ma's sent crawling into the world.

She closes her eyes and breathes in, reaches into the writhing Honmoon for the distant ripple of Mira, of Zoey. Far from each other, but not from her, their every breath as clear in the pulse of the world as her own. There's a melody waiting for them in the Honmoon, something new, something familiar. Something that's hers, and like everything that's been hers for the last six years, it's theirs. She finds the unwavering metronome of Zoey's pulse, the stubborn percussion of Mira's, and breathes out, opens her eyes, and sets her sight on the two halves of her heart because this might kill her but it'll protect them, the two of them, the only home she's ever belonged to, and nothing else can possibly matter beyond that.

The Honmoon clings to her as she steps forward, and sings her home.

five

They ask Bobby for three days. Three days to disappear, three days to be just them, three days to lay all of their mistakes out into the open with one another and find a way to patch them all together into some semblance of what they used to be. What they need to be, now, together.

They ask for three days, and he gets them ten. Ten days while he keeps the world at bay, while he spins the publicity into something they can work with.

Rumi, waking up on the fourth day with an aching throat from screaming in the middle of the night once again, has never loved anyone the way she loves Bobby for those extra days.

Her coffee has long gone cold as she frowns down at it, curled into a chair at the kitchen table. Zoey, always the earliest riser of the three of them, boundless energy sealed under pressure in such a small frame, had silently set it in front of her— not too hot, no milk, a half teaspoon of brown sugar— when she shuffled out into the daylight, had brushed her lips over the loose messy tumble of Rumi's hair and a hand over the patterns exposed by the tank top she hadn't covered up when shuffling out of her room this morning.

(She almost had. She'd reached for a hoodie on her way to the door, half habit and half need, because they may have shattered and rebuilt the Honmoon together, because Zoey and Mira may have held onto her as hard as she held onto them, hard enough that all of them are raw and wounded with their inability to let go of each other, but there are still moments where Rumi wavers. Where their eyes flick to her patterns, mapping them, Mira carefully stoic and Zoey unabashedly assessing, and Rumi shrinks under their weight.

She had reached for a hoodie, and paused only at the sight of her own hand. Knuckles still bruised and shredded, but healing. Patterns winding their way like shimmering fault lines between the bones of her hand. Beautiful, Zoey had murmured the day before, Mira humming in agreement.

There's no hiding them away. Not anymore, not from them.)

They aren't okay. Not yet. Rumi lied. Mira and Zoey raised their weapons at her. They all gave up on each other-- on them-- before finding their way back together. They've talked it through, cried about it, yelled themselves hoarse at each other. They aren't okay, but they're together, braided around one another by the stubborn linkage of the Honmoon that found them and saw them and tied itself to the three of them together, and they will be. Not a one of them is willing to accept anything less.

Mira's the last to wake up, dragging herself into the land of the living with furious reluctance, just like every morning. Zoey, sitting on the kitchen counter scrolling through her phone, blindly fixes her coffee-- hot enough to scald the sun, no sugar, a heavy dose of oat milk-- and holds it out without a word. She takes it with a distinctly caveman-like grunt that anyone outside of the three of them would take as disgust but really, in Mira-speak, is a thank you, and settles down across from Rumi.

They don't talk. Rumi props her chin in her hand and stares absently out across Seoul and wonders if it should feel worse, this silence; the Honmoon hums in her bones and she remembers the fraying shuddering feeling of them being ripped away from her, something dichotomously opposed to the syrupy warmth of them now in spite of all the superficial uncertainty, and realizes that they're going to be okay. They're locked together, all three of them, a three part harmony even now when they're still relearning how to be around one another. They'll be okay for the same reason the Honmoon is okay: because they're them, because they love each other, because they chose each other when everything was falling apart.

Rumi smiles, a small thing that her mouth seems to have forgotten the shape of, directed down at her coffee. She glances at Mira, half asleep but still bridging the spaces between them; at Zoey, heels bouncing softly against the dishwasher as her forehead creases in thought and mouth moves silently, thumbs flying over her phone as she notes down a lyric idea.

She's always loved them best like this. On stage, in public, in a fight against demons: she loves them in every facet of the world and has for years, confident and kind and unwavering, even when they raised their weapons to her and their rejection punched all the hope out of her lungs. But she loves them best at home, where Mira lets herself soften, where Zoey can let her mind race or quiet or calm to whatever it needs to be. Where they all have given themselves and each other permission to need one another, to rely on one another, to be tired and weak when they need it. Where she's theirs, and they're hers, in whatever shape that takes, and nothing else-- not the Honmoon, not the demons, not the fans or the label or the eight billion people they've been tasked with protecting-- outside of the heart that is them matters.

Their phones all chirp at the same time. Zoey yelps and almost falls off the counter; Mira chokes on her coffee. Rumi freezes, because there are only two people who they have a group text with, and Bobby promised them ten days of quiet.

"Guys--" she starts to say, springing to her feet, as if she can stop what's coming, but they're both already standing and glaring at their phones. "Don't--"

"Rumi," Mira says. She's fully awake now, and seething. The elevator dings, and Rumi flinches.

"Just let me talk to her first," Rumi tries again as the door slides open.

"Not a chance," Mira says shortly. There had been a new level of fury in her eyes when Rumi had told them how she made it to Namsam Tower, how she had teleported and from where, and why. Zoey had frozen, going ashen under her freckles and then barely making it to a bathroom before throwing up, but Mira had climbed to her feet and paced in silence and then broken their coffee table in half with one hit and a ragged yell that nearly cracked the world with it. It's the only thing they haven't talked through yet: her patterns, her parents, the Celine of it all and how it's shaken their foundation to the core because Mira and Zoey have always idolized Celine, had loved her since she gave them a home and a purpose and a family in the shape of training and hunting and the three of them together. They've talked it all into the ground, but none of them have had the guts to touch on how Rumi asked Celine to kill her and thought she would do it.

"Mira," Rumi says, softly, carefully. She wants to stop what's coming, but more than anything she wants to hide, wants to curl up under the protective shield that is Mira and let Zoey hold her together and never have to face what she'd asked of Celine again.

"Rumi." Celine's voice is unsteady, less so than the night in the grove but more so than any other time any of them have heard her, and Rumi tenses, flinches, clenches her fists until the beginning edges of demonic claws dig into her palms.

"No," Mira says, authoritative, pulled up to her full height. There's a tremor in her shoulders, in her hands at her sides, and Rumi's stomach twists with it because Celine was the only parent who never let Mira down. Celine moves to walk past her without acknowledging her, and Mira flushes scarlet with rage, and Rumi scrambles to grab Celine by the shoulders and yank her bodily back towards the elevator before Mira-- Mira who has loved Celine fiercely since the day Celine sat her down and quietly offered her own personal attorney to file emancipation papers if she wanted-- does something she'll regret.

"Rumi, I need to talk to you--"

The Honmoon screams. Rumi flinches so hard she nearly trips. Celine jerks back when Rumi's eyes flash momentarily yellow, but Rumi's already moving, already reaching for Mira and her anger, when she realizes that Mira is also reeling with the Honmoon.

Rumi stares past Mira's shoulder, and Mira spins on one heel, jerking back just like Celine did, because the Honmoon is rippling jagged and bright around Zoey, vibrating rapidly with the fury snapping in her eyes. There's a foreign sharpness to her shoulders, her knuckles white around handfuls of shimmering starbright blades waiting to be let loose. Her lip curls back in a silent snarl directed straight at Celine, who she's idolized for as long as Rumi has known her, who helped her sell the idea of idol training to her divorced parents and earned her unwavering loyalty for it.

Zoey has always been the brightest of them, the kindest, the most forgiving and least angry. Where Mira's anger burns quick and sharp, and Rumi's has always drowned under her own guilt, Zoey's has always simmered so quietly, on so long a fuse, that in six years together Rumi has only seen it boil over once, when Mira's family had given an interview specifically to publicly denounce her.

This is not that. This is not Zoey stalking back and forth across the apartment, snapping shin-kals in and out of existence, breathing loudly through her nose to keep herself from hunting down Mira's entire family. This is Zoey, unwavering, burning, ready to put Celine down as if she hasn't adored Celine since the first time she laid eyes on her.

"Zoey," Rumi says softly, scrambling past a shell-shocked Mira until she can reach Zoey.

"Get away from her," Zoey says, seething and still glaring at Celine. Her fists clench around her blades, the Honmoon flickering in time with her heavy breaths. It gathers around her, power and fury bunching visibly around her shoulders like a cloak, the outlines of more shin-kals blurring in and out of existence in the Honmoon, ready for her to grab and solidify.

"Zoey," Celine tries.

"Get out," Zoey says, her voice echoing in the Honmoon as it shudders and flickers like a strobe light, frantic, furious. Her shoulders tremble with tension under Rumi's hands when she reaches for her carefully— not because Zoey would hurt her, because Zoey would never hurt her, but Celine is a whole other story right now and Rumi isn't sure any of them could take it if Zoey, of all people, hurt Celine— and drags her touch down along the taut lines of tension in Zoey's forearms, past her wrists, to curl around her fists and the blades trembling in them.

"Zoey," Rumi says again, thumbs brushing over Zoey's knuckles. "Please."

A muscle in Zoey's jaw clenches visibly, the Honmoon twining tight around her, around Rumi where she keeps hold of Zoey's hands. "I'm okay," she says gently, giving up her grip on one hand to press her palm to Zoey's shoulder, to brush up along the side of her neck, to tuck her thumb in behind the clenching muscle at the hinge of her jaw. The Honmoon snaps like sparks on Zoey's skin, lighting behind her freckles. Rumi wants to sink into the light burning out from Zoey in spite of the tenuous situation Celine's arrival has put them in, wants to drown in her, wants to let her loose and bask in her anger because Zoey is hers and she's Zoey's, they belong to each other and to Mira and not even the Honmoon or the world or Celine can matter at all in the face of that.

"I'm sorry," sounds from behind them, Celine's voice wobbling and quiet. "I just wanted— that's all I wanted to say. That I'm sorry."

"You should go," Mira says, firm, unwavering. Rumi wants to look at her, wants to grab onto her, wants to wrap around Zoey and wrap around Mira, to expand until she can hold them both to her chest and let them all sink into the Honmoon they rebuilt together and let the world pass by without them. Instead, she forces herself not to look away from Zoey, lest she outright murder Celine, because at this point Rumi's rather convinced Celine might let her.

The Honmoon softens when Rumi swipes her thumb along Zoey's jaw. "Zoey, baby, please," she says softly, ignoring both the sound of Mira possibly physically picking Celine up to remove her from the apartment and the way the endearment had slipped so easily off her tongue. "Look at me."

Zoey's entire body shudders under the tension, but she listens, finally, the snapping fury in her eyes softening as she meets Rumi's desperate gaze.

"Hey," Rumi says softly.

"I'm going to— she—"

"It's okay," Rumi says, aiming for soothing and falling desperately short. "It's okay."

"It's not," Zoey says, short and snapping and nothing like herself. Her jaw tenses under Rumi's touch again, the Honmoon creaking under her anger. "She— you asked her to—"

"I asked her," Rumi says. Her eyes burn. She's so tired of crying, so tired of falling to pieces. "I asked her. That was me."

"Because you thought she would!" Zoey's posture finally snaps, the Honmoon howling at the way the words rip jaggedly out of her. There's a soft shink as the blades in her hands disappear back into the Honmoon, and the sound breaks something in Zoey, as if she hadn't even realized she'd been holding a weapon in front of Rumi again.

"I'm sorry," she gasps out, half a sob and half a wail. "I'm so sorry— I never meant to—"

"Zoey, it's fine, you didn't—" she cuts off at the wrench in her chest as the Honmoon knots around itself, a drowning tide of guilt slamming into her. Zoey's guilt, a storm in the Honmoon howling to be heard, because Zoey raised her weapons to her, because Zoey let her leave, because Rumi offered her sword and her bared throat to Celine and they all lost each other, even if it was only for half a night.

"Zoey," Rumi says, almost frantic, because Zoey is maybe about to hyperventilate and the Honmoon is reacting to her like it never has before. She unwinds her grip on Zoey's hand to press both hands hard against her cheeks, to pull her close, press her forehead to Zoey's and drag shaking thumbs along her cheekbones as if she can hold them together this one time when Zoey can't. "Zoey, I'm okay. It's okay. We're okay. We're okay."

Whatever last moment of resolve Zoey has shatters, and she crumples. Rumi drops without thinking, still-bruised knees hitting the floor before Zoey does so she can catch her, hauling her close and holding tight enough that she swears she can feel the Honmoon creak around them. Zoey's hands dig into her back, her whole body shaking in Rumi's hold, a muddled mantra of I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry disappearing into Rumi's shoulder. Rumi buries her face into Zoey's hair, her own tears rising unbidden because she almost lost Zoey, she almost lost Mira, she almost lost the whole of her heart because she hid herself away from them and Zoey is breaking to pieces in her arms because of it.

A familiar angular warmth settles along the length of her spine; Rumi doesn't have the energy to do anything but hold tighter to Zoey and sink into the way Mira's long arms reach around the both of them, the way Mira's forehead and apologies press against the back of her neck. Rumi's legs go numb the longer they stay slumped together on the kitchen floor, but she can't do anything but tighten her grip and hold on until they've all managed to cry themselves out.

"Is she gone?"

Rumi's not sure how long they've been quiet on the floor when Zoey speaks up, her voice raspy with fatigue against Rumi's collarbone.

"Yeah," Mira says into Rumi's hair, breathing in slowly and exhaling slower.

"I still wanna punch her in the tit," Zoey mumbles, and it startles a laugh out of Rumi. Around them, the Honmoon rumbles, warm and iridescent.

"Get in line," Mira says. One hand, fingernails uncharacteristically bitten down short over the last few days, shifts to brush over Zoey's hair; Rumi moves without meaning to, her own hand joining Mira's in Zoey's hair, her spine unfurling until she can tilt her temple against Mira's.

"She did her best," Rumi says softly, without meaning to. She's surprised to realize she means it, and the Honmoon flickers with her patterns, a fluttering gentle hum that rumbles through all three of them like an earthquake. "We were all— she did her best."

"Rumi, babe," Zoey says, exhaustion weighting at her voice. "You can be as zen as you like. I still am gonna want to punch her in the tit for at least six to ten business days."

"That's what we're here for," Mira says solemnly. "Me and Zo stay mad at Celine so you don't have to. You and Zoey bought up that one design house before my brother could. You and me, we put all of Zoey's high school bullies on the no fly list for all our concerts. It's, like, our thing."

"You know about— wait, what?" Zoey sits up so abruptly they all wind up flailing, a discordant pile of tangled limbs overbalancing until they wind up sprawled in an even less dignified pile on the floor. Rumi's legs ache as feeling starts to edge back into them, but it barely registers because one of Mira's long legs is sprawled over her thighs and Zoey's half-flopped across both of them and planting a hand each on Rumi's sternum and Mira's shoulder to shove herself half upright.

"Nothing?" Rumi says, high and reedy. Definitely because of the weight of Zoey's palm on her chest and definitely not because she's lying and definitely not because the Honmoon is humming contentedly around the three of them and Rumi would maybe possibly perhaps let it wither and die if it meant she could lean up onto her elbows and press a kiss to Zoey's collarbone, the hollow at the base of her throat.

"God, how did you manage to lie about anything for six years," Mira grumbles. "You're so bad at it."

"Can we go back to the what," Zoey says, a nervous edge to her voice.

"I mean, technically we just, y'know," Rumi mumbles, burrowing down into her sweatshirt before realizing that she's not actually wearing one, shoulders and skin and scars all out on display. "Gave a list. To Bobby."

"Bobby?" Zoey shrieks. "Bobby was in on it?"

"More like Bobby was the mitigating force," Mira says with a snort. "Rumi wanted to sic the whole fandom on them."

"Rumi!"

"Mira was going to get one of them deported!" Rumi yelps.

"Mira?"

"Oh, come on, they would've deserved it."

Rumi snorts without meaning to, because Mira's not wrong. She remembers the first time Zoey had gone nonverbal with them, anxiety tying her in knots that she'd tried to hide from them; she remembers how easy it had been for them to decide to wait for her and how hard it had been to actually do it; how Zoey had emerged a day later with shadows under her eyes and mumbled apologies and self-deprecating explanations that set alight a fury Rumi hadn't known she was capable of deep inside her gut.

It had been easy, figuring out who they were. It had been harder to decide what to do about the list of names they found, and ultimately they'd handed it over to Bobby to let cooler heads prevail.

Zoey lets out a dramatic groan and flops down on top of them. Air bursts out of Rumi's lungs in a grunt, and Mira whines pathetically. "I can't believe you two," Zoey says with a whine of her own. "Did you seriously—"

"Trust me, this was the measured option," Mira says drily. She grunts and swats at Zoey until she moves enough that they can rearrange themselves, and Rumi, buried and immobilized under their weight, gets a half second of emotional reprieve thinking they're going to get off her before Zoey grumbles and shoves at her, pushing until she can bodily turn Rumi onto her side and shove her face-first into Mira's shoulder.

"What—" Surely that squeaking sound isn't her own voice.

"Shut up," Zoey mutters. Apparently that squeaking sound was her own voice. Rumi holds her breath and lets them manhandle her around until Zoey's plastered against her back, forehead pressed between her shoulder blades; Mira scoots closer until Rumi's head is tucked under her chin, Mira's pulse thrumming dangerously close to her lips. "I'm still mad at you."

"What?" Rumi stiffens. "Why—"

"She's not actually mad," Mira says, droll, bored, as if she isn't cradling the both of them to her chest protectively. "She's just freaking out."

"Shut up," Zoey says against Rumi's spine.

"It's scary," Mira says, soft, quiet enough that Rumi might have missed it if she wasn't in dangerously immediate proximity to Mira's throat and chest and mouth and everything. "We almost lost you. We almost lost us."

Zoey nods fervently against her back. Her grip around Rumi's ribcage tightens.

"I'm sorry," Rumi mumbles against Mira's shoulder, one hand pressing over Zoey's on her stomach, and then immediately lets out a shriek when Zoey bites the back of her shoulder. "What the—"

"Stop apologizing!" Zoey says, squeezing tighter at Rumi's ribs.

"You heard the woman," Mira says, obnoxiously amused. "You really wanna argue with that?"

"Yeah," Zoey pipes up. "I'm tough. You wanna mess with me?"

"Celine was gonna try," Mira says with a snort.

"Too soon!" Zoey yelps. "Rumi, bite her for me."

"What— no," Rumi says, strangled, as if she wasn't already daydreaming of doing exactly that to the long expanse of throat she's pressed against.

"Probably a good idea." There's a cheeky smile in Zoey's voice, familiar and unafraid, molten, something Rumi's heard thousands of times before and had always been able to pretend doesn't affect her. Had. Mira might be the one everyone thinks is barbed and dangerous, but Zoey wields her affection like a weapon, painfully aware and cruelly intentional. "She'd probably like it."

Rumi lets out a strangled groan when a flush of heat spreads along Mira's skin, tangible everywhere Rumi's pressed against her, and Zoey laughs, loud and bright and confident, so very much the Zoey Rumi has loved for years. Rumi makes the mistake of relaxing minutely, thinking the moment will pass by unremarked, but then Zoey's lips press against her shoulder again, right where she'd bitten down, gentle and warm and painfully deliberate.

"I love you guys," Zoey says, lips brushing still against Rumi's shoulder. "You're the only thing that matters. I don't care about the Honmoon or the rest of the world or whatever, I just—can't lose you. Either of you."

The Honmoon rumbles deep in Rumi's bones, and her pulse stutters. She thinks of the Honmoon, opening itself to her when she was thirteen, hinting at gold a decade later before bending itself in her hands to something newer and stronger; she thinks of standing in front of a hundred thousand people cheering for her voice, loving her from across the world.

It's no question, really. She'd break the Honmoon open like an egg, would personally open the door for Gwi-Ma and let the world fend for itself, would never set foot on stage or sing a note ever again, if she had to choose between it and them.

"When I left Celine," she murmurs into Mira's skin, hand pressing hard over Zoey's at her stomach and winding their fingers together tightly. She holds tight to Zoey and buries herself into the dark safety of Mira's neck. "I— I just needed to be where you were. I didn't care about anything else. I had to fix it because if I didn't, if I couldn't, I-- you were both there. I wasn't trying to go to the tower or find the Saja Boys or anything like that. I just wanted to be where you were, to be together, even if--"

She cuts herself off at Mira's sharp inhale, at the unsteady breath Zoey lets out against her back.

"Gay," Mira says flatly after a half a minute of all three of them breathing unsteadily into one another, and a laugh bubbles out of Rumi's chest when Zoey lets out an aggrieved yell against her back.

"Rumi, seriously, do it this time," Zoey whines, palm pressing harder against Rumi's stomach. Mira snorts but then pauses, unmoving for a long second before tilting her head back just enough to give Rumi the space to bite down if she wanted to.

Rumi, brave in a way that has nothing to do with the solid warmth of the Honmoon shoring up her spine and everything to do with Zoey and Mira holding her steady, draws back just enough to raise an eyebrow at Mira.

"Only if you ask nicely," she murmurs, lips curling into a gleeful smile when Zoey hollers her approval and Mira's face flushes so red she looks like she might combust.

"Maybe later," Mira manages to say, low and unashamedly dripping with want, after a protracted moment of Zoey cackling and Rumi being desperately, inordinately pleased with herself.

"Only if you say it." Zoey dislodges from where she'd been pressed so tightly against Rumi's back— which Rumi absolutely does not make a sad whining noise about, not at all— so she can pop her head up to lean her chin on Rumi's shoulder and glare at Mira. "Stop acting like you're too cool for it. We've seen you cry over way too many movies for that."

Mira pulls her head back enough until she can look at them both without getting crosseyed. Her glasses are askew, though somehow still mostly on her face, and Zoey reaches out to straighten them absently. Rumi bites her lip at the way Mira softens immediately, tilting into Zoey's lingering touch before slotting her focus back to where Rumi's pinned in place.

"Yeah," Mira says, uncharacteristically hoarse. "Yeah. Obviously I love you guys. Nothing else comes close."

Something Rumi hadn't realized was locked up tight in her chest loosens, and the tension that's held her upright for as long as she remembers crumbles away, leaving her boneless between them. Rumi doesn't flinch this time when Zoey's lips press against her shoulder, or when her hand unwinds itself from Rumi's hold to reach out and guide Mira forward to brush her lips over Rumi's, or when Zoey bullies her way in to press a fleeting kiss to Mira's mouth and then kisses Rumi's laugh into silence.

The Honmoon curls around them— not her, but them, a three-part harmony held steady— humming calm and content, a quiet tide rolling in and out, making itself at home twining around the three of them.

+1

Rumi wakes to a storm.

Rain drums against the towering windows, heavy and constant, and there's a weight sprawled over her back and legs, sticking to the dried sweat on her skin. A twitch that feels like a hand skids briefly along her spine, and she drags her head around on the mattress— where the pillows are, she couldn't be bothered to care about— and is met with a wild mane of way-too-much pink hair.

Mira's dead asleep, curled on her side and holding Rumi's arm captive against her chest like a stuffed animal with one hand, the other curled possessively between her shoulder blades.

"Go back to sleep." Zoey's words brush against her spine, humming sleepily as she wiggles around and sprawls more comfortably over Rumi's back. "It's early."

"It's not," Rumi mumbles, too lazy and too unwilling to disrupt Mira's jaws of life grip on her arm to crane around and catch Zoey's eye.

Zoey's laugh is soft in the quiet, and she presses a kiss low on Rumi's back, between the twin indents she and Mira both had obsessed over last night, warm and lingering. Rumi's eyes flicker open, and then flutter shut again, when Zoey doesn't press any further. "It is for how late we were up."

Rumi flushes at Zoey's lazy comment, unable to look away from the bite mark that's bloomed stark and visible on Mira's throat; Zoey will have at least one to match, provocatively low on her side, in the distinct shape of Rumi's own teeth. Her back stings in the open air, just the tiniest bit, where Mira's fingernails had dragged down the length of her spine; her whole body aches pleasantly and if she had the energy to move she knows she would find bruises on her own hips from where Zoey had held her down in the same way she did everything else in life: cruelly, beautifully unrelenting.

"Demon stamina, am I right?" Zoey murmurs. Rumi doesn't need to see her to know exactly how smug she looks right now. "Who knew?"

"Will you both shut up?" Mira says with a grumble. Her hand flexes at Rumi's back, flailing momentarily to swat at Zoey's head, before settling back down as she drops back into sleep abruptly.

Rumi hums, content, pillowing her head on her free arm and letting her eyes slide shut again. Mira breathes deep and even in her sleep, hand once again draped loosely over the middle of Rumi's back. Zoey stays sprawled on top of her, a comforting weight with her chin notched into the curve of her lumbar spine and fingertips lazily tracing along the patterns where they curl up along her back and ribs and shoulder blades. Her touch follows the patterns and the line of Rumi's spine and the possessive sprawl of Mira's hand, gentle and methodical, melding with the hum of the storm outside to lull her back towards sleep.

The Honmoon is quiet.

Rumi, half-asleep, wrinkles her nose and wakes up just enough to breathe in and reach for it. It flickers softly at her touch, deep in her chest, and she relaxes further under Zoey's touch, melts further into Mira's side. The Honmoon has held onto her since the day she was born, has held her together for just as long, humming and howling to keep its grip on her because the Honmoon chooses its defenders and it chose her, a girl born a storm, a demon born to try.

The Honmoon is quiet, but Rumi sinks into it anyways, the way it touches her and Mira and Zoey, the way she can feel it in her skin and feel them on her skin and feel them in the Honmoon itself, more than the Honmoon itself.

It's quiet. Zoey and Mira hold her instead, and Rumi drifts back into sleep, the almost imperceptible pulse of the Honmoon rolling in quiet time to Zoey and Mira's breaths.