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It's cold. At this time of year, Korea never quite finds its way to warming up yet. It's not unbearable, but Mira can feel the chill against her skin, especially when a lazy gust of wind wraps around the tip of HUNTR/X Tower and rustles her clothes, tendrils of chill slipping beneath the fabric.
It's not enough to make her go inside, anyhow.
She's used to being cold this time of the year. Beyond the weather, the cold has always sunk its teeth into every part of March 22nd, ever since she was a little girl.
Birthdays were weird in her family's house, at least they were for her. She supposes her parents never let loose enough to celebrate her own, but they always had reserved a little space in their schedules to do a little something for her brother. Nothing big, nothing like those big parties she's heard other kids were privileged enough to experience. Mira was never privileged with anything at all.
It has always felt weird for Mira to consider someone like herself to be lacking in privilege of something, but what other word was there for it? Her parents never cared about her birthday. Some years it practically slipped her mind that she was born on March 22nd at all.
Apparently, her brother had come easy. The labour process was so fast, that her mother's medical team barely made it to their in-house medical centre in time. He didn't hurt much to come out, relatively speaking, and he somehow barely cried. All things considered, he was her parents' perfect golden child from the moment he was born. They loved him so much, in fact, that they had decided they wanted another one.
But Mira hadn't come easy. She hadn't even gotten the chance to try before she was the designated problem child. Because she forced her mother into countless hours of labour. Contractions for as long as the sun was up, and the actual pushing was a nightmare. After fifteen hours of labour, her mother had pushed out all four kilograms of Mira. And she had just cried and cried and cried.
Mira hates crying.
So, March 22nd has always been cold.
There used to be an ugly, bitter part of her that has long since been snuffed out, wondering why Rumi and Zoey were allowed to have so much more than her.
Rumi had Celine, who had loved her in all sorts of shades of wrong and right at the same time, who always made sure Rumi knew how important it was that her birthday be celebrated. Even if it marked such a painful day for Celine personally, she rarely let it get in the way of how she treated Rumi on her special day.
And Zoey, whose parents were at each other's necks more often than not up until they finally pulled the plug, whose parents agreed to put on a metaphorical get along shirt to try their best to make sure their little girl would have a good day, even when the girls from school that she invited to her party at the bowling alley never showed up, even when they could only just afford it.
It used to make Mira so mad.
Her parents always had everything at their disposal to love their daughter the way they loved their son, but they just never did.
What it was, inevitably, that did snuff that fire within her out was her girls.
By the time Mira had been scouted for the group, she had practically given up on the idea of her birthday being celebrated. She hadn't planned on telling them her birthday, even. Hadn't planned on them being such an integral part of the rest of her life.
The only problem was Rumi, in that she had Celine wrapped around her finger. Rumi, who had it in her head to be the best unnie that K-pop has ever seen, and Celine, who knew everything there was to know about all three of them, who had reportedly relented within minutes of Rumi asking for Mira and Zoey's birthdays.
Looking back at it, Mira considers herself lucky that her first birthday after meeting Rumi had gone undetected, and that Zoey was scouted in the summer. It gave her enough time to warm up to the both of them, otherwise there was no doubt in her mind that she would have been too prickly to respond well to any kind of birthday activities they would have tried to pull on her. Back when they didn't know Mira well enough to let them pick at a scabbed over wound she'd done her best to leave alone to heal.
(Back when she didn't know that she would let them hold her beating heart in the palm of their hands. Back when she'd planned on letting the day slip by silently. Before she knew their souls would intertwine so irrevocably.)
It became clear to Mira soon enough that picking at a scab wasn't the correct metaphor to apply to Rumi and Zoey's desire to celebrate her birthday. The two of them have been schemers since the very beginning—it came naturally to Zoey and she very easily enabled Rumi in ways Mira still doesn't fully understand to this day. Mira should have connected the dots for why they were suddenly so interested in her favourite flavour of cake and type of icing. But she thinks if she had, she wouldn't have felt as much of the rush of emotion when she had dragged herself out of her room in the morning at the compound on Jeju and into the kitchen where a very excited Rumi and Zoey were waiting for her with—well, what do you know—her favourite cake sitting on the island.
As it turns out, those two rascals had roped Celine into putting her work down for once and helping them bake a cake for Mira's birthday.
Which, in her seventeen—and then eighteen—years, had never been done for her before. And she hadn't expected it from Rumi and Zoey, much less Celine.
It took three more years of birthdays for Mira to admit—at the bottom of a yogurt Soju—that her eighteenth birthday was the first birthday that had really ever been celebrated, that word of mouth told her that her birth hadn't even been very celebrated either.
And here, now twenty five—fifteen years after she had given up on her birthday—Mira stands alone on Rumi's balcony as the sun rises over the horizon, knowing that once her girls wake up they're going to spend the whole day making her remember just how important it really is.
It's the first one since they'd fallen into the kind of partnership, the kind of love that Mira never once believed was in the cards for her, no matter how much she secretly yearned for it. Up until they had kissed her, at least.
She knows she's running out of time to brood about the unfortunate facets of her life, because if the sun is up then so is Rumi. And the only time of year where Rumi can shake Zoey awake on a day off before eleven in the morning and Zoey not mope over it is this one.
And so, with all these facts in line, it does not surprise Mira when she hears the glass door slide open behind her, and immediately after the soft giggling of her two scheming girlfriends.
She decides to play along anyway. She isn't sure if she would have all those years ago on her eighteenth birthday if she had known, but she does now. Because there is no better feeling in the world than hearing Zoey shout, "Rumi, get her!" in her raspy morning voice, followed by the mass of muscle that is their leader nearly colliding with Mira's back in a continued fit of giggles as she wraps her strong arms around her middle.
For all her strength, Rumi gently pulls Mira away from the railing and angles her more towards Zoey, who takes her own turn to pounce.
Sandwiched from both sides, Mira has no choice but to surrender to her girlfriends' affections. One of her hands slides overtop Rumi's, and the other's fingers curl around where Zoey's has landed against her very beating heart.
"Good morning, birthday girl." Rumi's voice is particularly low when she says it, her voice just as rough with sleep as Zoey's, and it makes Mira shiver happily.
"Guys," she says, her lips falling into an easy smile as her eyes flutter shut, because Zoey is all over her face, pressing her own lips everywhere she can manage to reach.
And Mira's face is warm, and Rumi's embrace is warm, and Zoey's lips are warm, and Mira is warm, warm warm.
When Zoey takes a moment to pull back and Mira catches the smudged maroon across her mouth, it dawns on her that these two idiots, her favourite schemers, had put lipstick on at the ass-crack of dawn just so they could leave tangible evidence of their love all over her face, and with the way Rumi had brushed her hair aside behind her she knows the nape of her neck likely looks much the same.
So, Rumi and Zoey had never been picking at a scab, but were instead the healing balm that Mira had needed all along. Part of Mira still hates to cry out of her own volition. It had always made her weak, but here in her girls' arms, it doesn't really matter. So if tears prick at the corners of her eyes when she cradles Zoey's face in her hands, thumbing over her uncovered freckles before pulling her in for a proper kiss, she doesn't mind. If those same tears slip out of her eyes, even, when she turns her head and reaches behind herself to catch Rumi in a kiss as well, fingers threading through her loose French braid, she practically welcomes them.
Here, on top of one of the tallest buildings in Seoul when it can't be more than seven degrees out, Rumi and Zoey and all they are to her feel so warm against her body and in her soul that Mira thinks she's starting to forget what it ever felt like to really be cold.