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A loud splash marks the end of the battle against a group of water demons. Unfortunately, that splash is Mira, who got dragged into a dirty puddle by the last demon right as Zoey managed to sink a knife into his chest.
“Oh, come on!” Mira yells, sitting up and looking down at her now soaked and dirty shirt, “Are you kidding me?”
“Are you hurt?” asks Rumi, walking up to her and giving her a hand back to her feet.
“No, but now I almost want the bastards to come back so I can kick them in the face for ruining my shirt.”
“What is it with you and water demons? They always seem to have it out for you, and you definitely have it out for them.” Says Zoey as she leans on an alley wall.
“They know what they did. Ugly fuckers every one of them.” Mira starts walking back towards the tower, the others close on her heels.
“Eh, I wouldn´t go that far, did you see the green one I was fighting? He was really rocking that undercut.”
“He was covered in patterns.” Says Rumi.
“So? He was hot.”
"He is a demon, Zoey."
"I know, but if he were a good demon, I'd give him a shot."
Mira opens her mouth to answer, but before she can, they hear another splash behind them. They turn around and see Rumi, who apparently hadn’t been keeping pace with them, down on the ground, elbow on another puddle, and looking at Zoey with her mouth open.
"You would date a demon?" Rumi looked incredulous, as if that idea had never crossed her mind. As if she didn't know that was even possible.
Zoey looks a little sheepish. “Maybe? If they were nice and like, not eating people, of course.”
Mira rolls her eyes at her and turns to give Rumi a hand up. “Of course you would. Can we get out of here already? I’m trying really hard not to think about why my shirt smells so bad right now.”
“Ooh, race you!” Zoey takes off running back to the tower.
“Hey!” Mira yells as she starts running too.
Rumi looks at their backs, shakes her head a little, and then follows, lost in thought.
XxX
Bed, balcony, bed, balcony, bed, balcony. Rumi paces back and forth in her room, her thoughts going a mile a minute. She keeps going over the conversation earlier in the alley, but also over so many other moments. Little things said in random moments. Little jokes here and there. So many little comments made by Zoey over the years. Complimenting a demon’s shoes, or making little jokes -to- them, or even asking them how her own outfit looked. Rumi and Mira never did any of that. It felt almost like- “like they're just people”. Rumi mutters to herself. Zoey treated the demons like they were just people. Bad people, making evil choices and hurting others, and she’d certainly never hesitated to stab any of them in a battle, but where Mira and Rumi mostly treated them like pests, Zoey felt like she interacted with them differently.
Rumi stops and looks down at her arms. Her patterns had grown again over the last few months, now reaching just past her elbow on both arms. And, as had happened on and off over the two years she’d known the other girls, she had been thinking about telling them.
Usually it was Celine’s voice in her head that stopped her. Sometimes, it was her own shame at the marks themselves. Occasionally, it was because of something they said. The first time Mira had told a demon that they had patterns, and so they had to die, Rumi had worn full sleeved turtlenecks for two weeks, despite her patterns not even reaching her elbows at the time.
But Zoey rarely ever made that kind of comments. And when she joked about demons doing nice things or looking good or being polite, Mira never argued with her. Rumi herself was more likely to speak up in disagreement whenever that happened than Mira was.
Maybe Rumi could tell them? Maybe she could tell Zoey, and she could help her figure out how to tell Mira? Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Maybe they’ll understand.
Rumi looks at herself in the mirror and sighs. She just knows she’s going to be thinking this over for a while.
XxX
It’s been over a week since the alley fight, and both Mira and Zoey have noticed Rumi acting weird. She does that sometimes, gets all introspective and quiet, smiling her idol smile at them instead of her quirky normal one.
They’ve seen this before, but that doesn’t mean it doesn't worry them, or that they don’t want to help.
“Heyyyyy Rumi!” says Zoey at breakfast one morning. They have the day off, and she’s decided to make the most of it. “You’ve been kinda tense this week, and I know just how to help with that!”
Both Rumi and Mira look up from their food. They can already guess what she’s going to say.
“The bathhouse?” asks Mira with a grin.
“The bathhouse!” Zoey agrees, jumping off of her seat.
Rumi smiles at them, but they can already read the sad tilt of her smile. She opens her mouth to reply, but Mira jumps in first. “Come on Rumi! The last time we went there, they told us they were getting new oils and perfumes, and they have these lavender and honey candles that smell amazing. You’d love it!”
Rumi’s smile gets a little more real and a little more sad. “Maybe next time? I wanted to call Bobby about our schedule for next week.” That’s probably one of her weakest excuses so far, but they are all aware it IS an entire excuse. A soft no, but one that she won’t be moved from.
Zoey pouts, but drops it. The three of them finish breakfast, and then Zoey and Mira go get their bags for the bathhouse. Zoey runs out the door, already looking forward to the bathhouse, but Mira lingers.
She approaches Rumi's open door, where she can see Rumi sitting with her phone and laptop, and tells her, “hey, I just wanted to check in before we left, you’ve been a little distant this week, is everything okay?”
A bright idol smile answers her, “of course! Thanks for checking, but everything is fine. Sorry if I’ve seemed a little off.”
Mira looks down at Rumi and hesitates for a moment. “Alright. Good luck with your phone call. And feel free to catch up with us later if you want. Literally whenever. Bathhouse or no, we’re there for you, okay?”
Rumi softens. “Okay.” She watches as Mira walks out, and keeps looking at the door after she leaves. “...okay.” She says again, before letting her gaze fall to her covered forearms.
She takes a deep breath and nods to herself. “Okay.” As she thinks about it, she makes up her mind. They’ve been together for two years. They’ve faced highs and lows together. They love each other. Rumi loves them so much. And it doesn’t feel right to keep hiding this from them. And she’s so, so tired.
She walks out, determined to catch them before they leave. This is it, she's going to tell them!
She marches into the living room to see they haven’t left yet. Instead, Mira has her weapon out and is showing Zoey a new move she’s been practicing, one where she slams the butt of the Gokdo on the ground, uses the momentum to deliver a devastating kick where a demon’s chest would be, knocking them to the ground, and then finishes with a spin that lets her slam the bladed end on the demon’s head.
They both look up when Rumi walks in. Without changing her pace she heads past them and into the kitchen, grabs an apple, and turns back around to her room. As she does she call over her shoulder for Mira not to damage the floor, they have a training room for a reason.
She shuts her door, leans back against it, and groans. This is going to be harder than she thought. How is she supposed to tell them anything if she’s going to lose her nerve so easily?
Zoey’s bright laugh through the door breaks through Rumi’s musings, knocking off her train of thought and reminding her of something. Zoey has told her and Mira several times that when she needs to say something important, it helps her to write a script for it, to keep her mind from jumping off the rails mid topic. Maybe she could do something similar?
A script could be a good idea. Rumi starts looking for her notebook, the one where she writes lyric ideas and random thoughts and costume sketches and… and where she keeps a list of ideas for when it’s her turn to tell the girls about something that interests her on powerpoint night. A quick check of her calendar confirms that powerpoint night is coming up in two days. It’s supposed to be Mira’s turn, but Rumi has a feeling Mira won’t mind changing slots with her. They have been trying to get her to open up after all.
With a smile, Rumi opens up her notebook and starts to plan out what might be the most important powerpoint of her life.
XxX
Mira had not minded the switch, so here Rumi was, standing in front of the screen and trying to pretend she wasn’t nervous. From the way Mira and Zoey were looking at her, she wasn’t doing too great at that.
“Alright, so, here it is!” Rumi says as she turns on her presentation, showing that it’s titled “Don’t Be Mad”.
The girls’ eyes widen at that. “I was going to title this ‘Hear Me Out’, but I’m aware that phrase has connotations." Zoey chokes at that but Rumi doesn't acknowledge it. "So all I’m asking is that you do hear me out until I’m done speaking and try to hold your questions until the end?”
“Uh, okay?”
“Yeah, we can do that.”
“Right. So. This presentation is divided into three parts. Context, explanation, and apology.” Rumi sees their eyes widen even more and resolutely ignores it, clicking onto the next slide. It says ‘Context: us’ and has two side by side copies of the same picture of them alongside Celine, and below each is a cartoon outline of a person. The outline below the second picture has patterns drawn on it, and the picture of them above it has angry eyebrows on each of their faces.
“We are Hunters,” starts Rumi, “trained by Celine, and taught to hate and kill anything with patterns.”
She clicks on the next slide, and it’s a picture of the sunlight sisters with angry eyebrows drawn on above another patterned person outline.
“She taught us that way because that’s how she got taught too! All demons are evil, all demons need to die, patterns mean demon, and so on.”
Mira and Zoey look more confused than concerned now. That changes quickly at the next slide. Mira looks more confused, but Zoey looks way more worried. The next slide has the Huntrix and Sunlight Sisters pictures side by side, angry eyebrows on everyone except Zoey and Mi-yeong, who have a question mark above their heads. Rumi, not looking at them, keeps going.
“Now, each of these groups had one person that kept questioning that. I got the idea for this presentation after I’d been thinking about those jokes Zoey made the other day about maybe dating a nice demon-”
“I was joking!” Zoey looks horrified as she interrupts.
“I know! It’s okay, I’m just saying it’s what gave me the push to tell you this.”
Zoey opens her mouth again, but stops at Mira’s hand on her shoulder. Mira had noticed that Rumi had been getting steadily paler and stiffer the more she kept talking, and now she can feel both her and Zoey on the brink of spiraling.
“Go on,” says Mira, “we’re listening. Were you going to say something about your mom?"
“Yes!” says Rumi, steeling herself and going back to the presentation. The way she’s even paler and seems to be going through the slides a bit more mechanically is starting to really concern the other two. “So, just like Zoey, it turns out that my mom used to wonder if there might be nice demons out there. And, turns out,” she clicks on the next slide.
It's a picture of a demon, a Jeoseung saja by the looks of it, and he’s sitting close to the camera and smiling. The picture has been scribbled over to cover the face of another person next to him as well as something he seems to be holding in his arms.
“Meet Kim Ye-Joon. A demon that stuck around after a fight without engaging enough times that he and my mom eventually started talking without believing that one of them was going to try to kill the other one every time they spoke.”
Zoey and Mira’s jaws drop open. Zoey sits up to start firing out questions, but Rumi seems to be on a roll now. She looks stiff as a board, white as a sheet, resolutely looking only at the slides, and has started to speak faster as if she was trying to get it all out before they could interrupt.
“From what I’ve heard it seems like Celine absolutely hated this man. Which I cannot really blame her for. His presence and actions sure messed up a lot of things. Because after a while of talking, he and my mom started dating.”
“Wh-”
Rumi quickly clicks on the next slide. It was the same picture, but without the scribbles on it. It shows Ye-Joon and Mi-yeong hugging, holding a baby with purple hair in their arms. “So!” she says, speaking louder and faster, “the two of them were together, and discovered that apparently a demon and a human can have children together. The problem is, that you don’t get a normal child out of that,”
She clicks on the next slide and pretends not to hear the sharp intakes of breath at the three photos of herself, aged 6, 12, and 21. In the first two she was wearing sleeveless shirts and the scrawl of purple patterns was obvious. In the last one she was at a promo shoot, and her shirt’s sleeve had slipped. Rumi had drawn a red circle around her forearm where a tiny line of purple was barely visible.
“Turns out children can be born with patterns, even if they’ve never made a deal with Gwima”
“Rumi-”
“Presumably that has happened before at some point, but we don’t have any records of it. It may not even have mattered, if I weren’t both a hunter and the child of another hunter.”
“Rumi”
“Obviously Celine had to train the next generation of hunters, but she always planned to keep me away from them so there wouldn’t be a chance of them hurting me.”
“Hurting, Rumi wha-”
“But then! It turned out I was going to be part of this generation of hunters, so Celine figured it would be safer to just hide the patterns”
Rumi slows down a little, like she was expecting another attempted interruption. When it doesn’t come, she swallows hard and continues, still not looking at the couch. “So, she raised me to hide the patterns, and taught all of us to hunt down all demons, and didn’t tell you about either exception because hesitation in battle kills and also probably because she didn’t want another Ye-Joon situation. And she said that if we manage to achieve the golden honmoon the patterns will be cleansed and go away and I’d be able to tell you then.”
She clicks on the next slide, it has a picture of a sign for the bathhouse with a big red X covering it, a picture of Rumi’s bed covered in long sleeve hoodies, a large box of skin concealer, and two more cartoon outlines of people. The first one has patterns and a big X next to it, while the second has no patterns and has a green checkmark next to it. “So I’ve been hiding the patterns this whole time, both for my safety and for yours, and for the good of the world really, but all those jokes the other day got me thinking and we’ve been friends for years and I’m so tired of hiding, and you guys keep inviting me to the bathhouse and you keep being so nice and you keep asking me what’s wrong and being concerned when I wear hoodies to practice in the middle of summer and Zoey keeps talking about demons like they’re people and Mira keeps telling me you want to be there for me and I keep making excuses and pulling back and you keep letting me and we haven’t seen any signs of gold despite being so popular for this long and it could take years to get there if we even can and-”
Rumi’s ramble gets cut off by a hand on her shoulder. She jumps, not having heard them approach, and turns to look at them in alarm. Both Zoey and Mira are right there, looking concerned. Mira’s hand is on her shoulder, Zoey is wringing her hands together and all three of them are just standing there, looking at each other and not saying anything.
They all stand like that for what feels like ages, until Mira takes a deep breath and says “so, you’ve had patterns this whole time?”
Rumi nods, still looking back and forth between both their eyes, “My whole life.”
“And you didn’t tell us, because Celine told you not to?” asks Zoey.
“I mean, at first? Like, I wanted to tell you when we first met but she kept saying no, and I didn’t really know you so I listened to her, but then after we got to know each other and moved away from her and I still didn’t tell you… the longer I went without saying anything the harder it got and I was just-” Rumi trails off, lowering her eyes to the ground.
“Scared” says Mira. Rumi nods.
“Of us?” Zoey asks.
“No. Not really. More like, scared you’d hate me, scared you’d leave.” Rumi looks at Mira’s hand, still on her shoulder, then at Zoey’s fidgeting hands, then at the floor again. “So uh, now you know! What are you going to- uh, what do you- I mean, uh”
And it’s clear she’s still worried they’ll hate her. It’s too much for Zoey. She launches herself at Rumi and hugs her as hard as she can. A moment later, she can feel Mira’s arms over hers joining the hug. “We love you, Rumi.”
“Yeah, we love you, and this is not going to change that. You’re not getting rid of us that easily.” adds Mira.
Rumi lets out a little sob. Then Zoey does. Then Mira. Before they know it, all three of them are in a pile on the floor crying their eyes out and hugging.
It takes them a few minutes for them to stop crying. Once they do, they just stay on the ground for a little longer, still hugging.
“Okay, I have like, so many questions right now, but I guess the first one would be, if this is why you’ve never gone to the bathhouse with us, does that mean you’ll do it now?” Zoey needs to know.
Rumi smiles. “I would really love to. If you’ll have me.”
“If we’ll have you?” Mira sounds offended, “spa day with you is the missing piece of my life! Of course we’ll have you!” Mira untangles herself from the cuddle pile, stands up and pulls Rumi up. Zoey puts her hand on the table to pull herself up. Then, she freezes and starts laughing so hard that she falls back down. Mira and Rumi look at each other in surprise before looking back down at Zoey.
“Uh, you good, Zo?” asks Mira. Zoey keeps laughing, but she manages to point at something behind them. When they turn, Mira starts cackling too, while Rumi blushes bright red and hides her face in her hands.
When Zoey had tried to get up, she’d accidentally nudged Rumi’s laptop. So now the final slide of her powerpoint presentation was up on the screen in high definition. It was a picture of herself Rumi had taken the day before. She was in only a sports bra and leggings, flexing at the camera, patterns in full view, under the caption “In conclusion, I do Not have a license for these guns.”