Chapter Text
Rumi put her cup of honey lemon tea to her lips. Still too hot. The tea was supposed to soothe her throat so she could sing again — giving herself third-degree burns would just make everything worse. She blew on it again, watching the steam circle in the air as she stirred.
She’d already failed her friends once at the previous night’s rehearsal. Failed Celine. Failed the world. She had no right to fail them again. They didn’t deserve it.
Zoey burst out of her bedroom with a bundle of papers in her hands, skidding to a stop in front of the couch where Rumi and Mira were sitting. “OK, so I know I said that Rumi going to the doctor I found should be the first thing we do, but it just occurred to me that since his office won’t be open until morning anyway, we might as well at least talk about the other 56 ideas ourselves first, just to get started on narrowing them down a bit. Doctors love it when patients come to them with independent research about potential treatment plans.”
That couldn’t possibly be right. “Are you sure about—”
Mira shushed Rumi from over her shoulder. “Just let her have this a minute, OK?” she whispered. “Sounds like it’s gonna be funny.”
“SO! First explanation: You’ve been overworking your throat muscles. You need to take a break, and you need to have warm, soft, soothing meals.”
Sensible enough — all three of them had lost their voices at some point or another in their careers. The timing had been so much worse last night than ever before, but that didn’t mean it was fundamentally different. She just needed to do the same thing they’d always done. “Working on that one right now,” Rumi said, holding up the cup of tea in her hand.
“Next up: You’re a workaholic, but you know that if we finally turn the Honmoon golden, then you’ll never need to work again for the rest of your life, and you’re panicking at being worthless. We need to convince you that accomplishment itself is a good thing and that you deserve to take credit for doing good things.”
Rumi shook her head. “Nope, definitely not that. The completion of the Golden Honmoon is all I care about, not the act of doing it or the effort we spend getting there.”
“Not sure that’s healthier,” Mira added, “but whatever. Next?”
“Next! You’re allergic to the new costumes. We should double check what kind of materials were used, where they came from, who we got them from —”
“I’ll have Bobby get right on that,” Mira said, holding her phone up facing away from Zoey to show Rumi that she was in fact playing Birds With Friends, not texting Bobby. “There.”
“Rumi might also have contracted vocal cord parasites,” Zoey continued. “We’ll need the doctor to test for that in the morning.”
“Where would I have —” Rumi shut her mouth when she realized what a long list of answers she was probably about to get. “Never mind. Next?”
“You’ve been poisoned by a rival company, possibly even cursed by demon shamans. We are the single greatest, most beloved, most brilliant artists in the world, and anybody who wants to be on top knows they have to go through us to get there. Especially if they’re demons trying to sabotage the Honmoon.”
Not technically impossible, Rumi supposed, but still staggeringly unlikely. “Have demons even tried doing that to sabotage other teams of hunters? Like, ever? Let alone gotten it to work?”
“Unfortunately, there’s a first time for everything. Speaking of which —” Zoey’s innocent grin twisted into a hungry leer. “— perhaps you’ve fallen in love with a special someone, and now you’re going to choke to death on flowers unless you confess your feelings to your dearly beloved?”
Rumi couldn’t stop herself from laughing. “I will pay you 10 million won if you can tell me the last new person we met that you think I could’ve fallen in love with.” Wait, was that its own problem? Was Zoey, Mira, Celine, and Bobby being the only people she had regular conversations with a sign that her life was too empty and lonely to be healthy?
No, of course it wasn’t. Rumi’s social life was completely 100% perfect exactly the way it was.
Zoey shrugged, keeping her conspiratorial grin. “Bobby’s cute. Have you been pining for your professional friendship with him to turn into something more?”
“No, I am not in love with Bobby.”
Zoey’s hand covered her smile as she gasped. “Is it — one of us?” She wagged her finger between herself and Mira.
“I AM NOT IN LOVE WITH YOU OR MIRA.”
“Whew,” Mira said with a snort. “Glad I dodged that bullet, at least. Now, can we just take a step back to: Where the hell did ‘choking on flowers’ come from?”
How had Mira managed to escape a Zoey info dump about Hanahaki Disease for this long? “It’s a fake urban legend invented by the Japanese internet,” Rumi answered over her shoulder.
“Ah, yes, of course. Anyway, while we’re kind of on the subject, would this be a good time to talk about Zoey learning Japanese when she was growing up in America so she could enjoy anime and manga ‘authentically,’ but not learning Korean since moving to Korea?”
“I can hold a conversation!” Zoey paused to think. “Mostly!”
If nothing else, Rumi’s tea had finally cooled off enough to drink. “Well, I think we have enough to work with for now, so let’s just take a breather and start from the beginning. The first thing you said was that I’ve been working my muscles too hard, right?”
“Possibly!” Zoey’s bright, cheerful face suddenly puckered up in seriousness. “Wait, that was ambiguous. ‘Possibly’ as in ‘I said it’s possibly that,’ not ‘I possibly said it’s that.’ I definitely said it’s possibly that.”
“Then let’s just start with me taking it easy for the rest of the night, then get back to it tomorrow. If that doesn’t work, we can visit your doctor in the morning.”
“I mean,” Mira said, “if overworking your muscles is the problem, you’re gonna need more than just one night to —”
“LET’S START WITH ME TAKING IT EASY, THEN GET BACK TO IT TOMORROW.” Rumi took a sip of her sweet, perfectly warm tea.
Zoey waved her pages in the air. “Can we just finish this first page at least? I only have like, 3 things left! Though I should warn you, this is the point where things start to get kind of weird.”
Mira turned her face away from Zoey and mouthed “START TO?”
Rumi nodded, focusing on the wonderful warmth in her cup. Her throat was feeling better already, and she was certain she’d be back to 100% by morning.
“You’re a demon —”
Rumi’s lungs collapsed.
She forced herself to breathe. This didn’t mean anything — Zoey had literally put it on the same list as Hanahaki Disease. Rumi should just laugh it off, and then all would be forgotten when Zoey got to whatever even weirder thing she’d listed next.
“— and the Honmoon turning golden is starting to hurt you in a way it never used to.”
No.
No, that couldn’t be possible. Celine would’ve told her. Celine had promised Rumi her entire life that the Golden Honmoon was going to stop Rumi's demonic infection, not the other way around. She couldn’t have been wrong about that, could she? Rumi losing her voice right after the Honmoon started turning golden was just a terrible coincidence. Right?
Rumi tried to force herself to breathe. She didn’t need to worry about the idea that the single most important goal of her entire life had been doomed from the start. That it was all her fault for being a shameful, broken mistake. Did she?
The floor raced out from under her feet. She’d been holding a cup of tea in her hands a second ago. Where’d the cup go?
Zoey and Mira were both in front of her. Yelling something.
Rumi pushed them aside. Ran for her room.
Slammed the door behind her. Tried to lock it. Couldn’t keep her fingers steady.
Tried again. Locked it.
Shambled towards her bed.
Collapsed on the floor.