Work Text:
Rhapsody: A one-movement musical work that is episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour, and tonality. An air of spontaneous inspiration and a sense of improvisation make it freer in form than a set of variations.
A sweat-slicked mother cradles a cherubic baby in her arms, coiling her finger into a tuft of caul-damp lavender hair. “Rumi,” she whispers, voice faint. “You’re perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
“She’s a demon,” another voice spits, later, when the mother’s blood runs red on the floor and the newborn’s screams fill the room.
“She’s Mi-yeong’s.”
Rumi is two of these things.
If children are perfect but demons are monsters, what room does that leave for Rumi? To be born a demon is to be born flawed, the rot already sown in. A smudge of purple on a chubby arm brands her with her sins before she’s even old enough to name them.
Rumi will spend the rest of her life making up for them.
If she is already the aftermath, already the fallout, her path is forged before she even can see it. If she isn’t a continuance, is she anything at all? What is she, if not a repetition of the same mistake?
Rumi tried to call Celine ‘eomma’ once, stumbling off the playground on chubby legs, with flushed cheeks and a face-splitting grin as she toddled back towards her guardian. For the other children, the women who took care of them were their eommas, and Celine was the woman who took care of her, right? Rumi watched intently the way those children belonged to their mothers, and she wanted to belong too. She wanted to be received with adoration, with arms outstretched, to be the sun that rises like the glowing dawn across the expression of the woman she calls Celine.
“Eomma!” Rumi calls breathlessly, the word perfect, round and full on her tongue. She runs to where Celine sits (flipping through papers, brow pinched, gnawing her lip) and throws herself upon Celine joyfully.
Rumi has never once gotten the drop on Celine, never thrown herself to her caretaker and not been caught. But Celine freezes, and the papers on Celine’s lap go flying as Rumi crashes into her.
“Rumi!” Celine splutters. She throws herself after her papers, gathers what she can—the wind teases them out of her grasp in lazy coils, and it’s only for the pity of the mothers on the playground that she’s able to retrieve them all. Rumi watches with big eyes, with shrinking shoulders. When the documents are gathered, Celine stands, hunched and facing away from Rumi, for a long time before she straightens her back and returns.
Celine sits Rumi down on the bench. “Rumi,” she says, pinched and strained, blanched with something unnameable that makes Rumi want to curl up somewhere out of sight. Rumi’s presence is not the sun on her face at all, but a dark, yawning eclipse. “I am not your eomma.”
“But...” Rumi’s face crumbles, features darkened by storm. “Why not?”
Celine doesn’t look quite like herself, stiff and disjointed, a marionette piloted by clumsy hands. “Your eomma died when you were a baby, Rumi. I’m taking care of you for her.”
And this transforms the landscape of Rumi’s tiny world. They are no longer mother and daughter, Madonna and child, no longer Rumi and Cece but instead Rumi and the woman she was put upon, Celine and the child she didn’t ask for. Rumi’s world tilts off its axis and doesn’t right itself.
“... Oh.”
They go home after that. Then, Celine sits her down in front of the TV and shows her tapes of the woman Celine says is her eomma. She’s beautiful, with a high, clear voice and a dancing braid that moves with her playfully twirling body. In interviews, she is all mischief and magnetism, her eyes glinting with a secret joy that makes the world lean in. Rumi looks up at Celine, and she sees Celine staring at the woman on the screen as though she were the rising dawn. Like the sun rose and set on her countenance.
Rumi wants loving her to be easy like loving her mother is easy, so when Celine leaves Rumi with the tapes, she sits alone in a dark room and studies her mother like doctrine. In the years to come, she learns that doctrine well.
Rumi imagines she could know her eomma, imagines she could be like her. She studies fastidiously her mother’s smile, her mother’s lithe movements, her mother’s laugh. She asks Celine to tie her hair back into a braid, and she does her best to pretend the faraway look in Celine’s eyes is pride, not haunted anguish.
The Honmoon chooses Rumi. The burden of another legacy is laid across her narrow shoulders.
(Celine stares at Rumi for a long time when she finds Rumi playing with the dancing strings of light. Then, with that puppeteered inelegance, she sits Rumi down and teaches her what it means.)
Rumi learns that Ryu Mi-yeong was a pop idol. She learns that Ryu Mi-yeong was a hunter. She learns that Ryu Mi-yeong charmed a nation, protected a world, was chosen by the Honmoon long before it placed its mantle upon Rumi.
She learns that she, too, will be an idol, that she will be a hunter. If she doesn’t yet know how to charm a nation or protect a world, she will, because like her mother before her, Rumi was chosen.
(She learns about her other legacy, too. About putrefied, crawling things that lurk in the dark and steal souls, whisper away innocent people, leave behind only ghosts to haunt their families. She learns about herself.)
Her mother’s legacy is something she must live up to. Her father’s is something she must atone for.
Even as a child, Rumi understands that when people look at her, they don’t really see her. Rather, she is who she exists in relation to. Celine’s ward. Mi-yeong’s daughter. The legacy of the Sunlight Sisters. The legacy of the Hunters. In dance classes, other students whisper about her, and one, who was the first to be nice to Rumi, stops talking to her after she gets him an autograph from Celine.
At school, bullies tease Rumi. For being a know-it-all, for being awkward, for being an orphan. One of the students says her mother died giving birth to her, and Rumi is sent to the front office in tears.
“No, Rumi,” Celine refutes, in the car. She drove all the way from work to pick Rumi up, and Rumi can see her eyes, steely and hard in the rearview mirror as Rumi sniffles out her question. “Your mother was killed by demons after you were born. ... It wasn’t your fault.”
Her shoulder itches. Rumi thinks of how Celine comes back from hunts: limping and bleeding, hissing through broken ribs and dislocated shoulders and bloody, clawlike gashes.
“... She tried to fight them off?”
“Yes,” says Celine quickly. “She was trying to protect you.” Celine looks so relieved that Rumi doesn’t ask if there’s a difference between dying to bear her and dying to protect her.
Rumi is homeschooled after that.
Rumi wears her hair in one long braid down her back. She sings Mi-yeong’s part in all the Sunlight Sisters CDs Celine plays for her in the car. She lets Mi-yeong’s ghost inhabit her body, because if Rumi can make Mi-yeong real instead of Rumi, maybe then she can be what everyone wants her to be.
Every week, Celine takes Rumi up to sit under the Dangsan tree and, together, they tend to Mi-yeong’s grave. They light incense and recite prayers and leave offerings to honor her memory, and Celine instructs Rumi in cleaning the headstone while Celine tells Rumi stories of her mother’s life.
“Your mother loved everything and everyone.”
“Your mother lit up every room she was in.”
“Your mother loved you so very much.”
Then, when Rumi’s cleaning is done, Celine cleans the headstone again properly.
If Rumi’s mother loved everything and everyone, would she love Rumi? Rumi, the living monument to her mistakes? Mi-yeong’s own faults and fears made seen? Sometimes Rumi stares at the photo of her mother Celine had left on her desk and searches the portrait’s unseeing eyes for an answer. Others she lays the photo facedown so she can hide from her mother’s unflinching judgement just a moment longer.
Sometimes, when Celine reminds Rumi her mother is always watching over her, Rumi curls up under her covers and hides.
The first time her patterns spread, Rumi’s agonized scream sets the air around her rippling in cords of sickly magenta. Her shoulder ignites like all-fire as the bruising mark on her shoulder spreads, spiderwebbing like prison bars across her arm.
Celine surges into the room, ssang-geum leveled, prepared to strike down the demon threat.
But there is no demon. There is only-
”Rumi?”
The weapons dissipate and Celine cradles a wailing Rumi in her arms and croons a lullaby. But Rumi does not forget the weapon aimed at the demon, nor the way Celine’s eyes bear down on her shackled arm. Celine’s voice is a balm, but fear haunts her eyes.
This will not be the only time a hunter draws their weapon against her. This will not be the only hunter Rumi forces to reckon with their duty.
The Honmoon chooses its hunters in threes, soulbound children paired to lighten the crushing burden of duty. Celine hunts them in turn, and she tells Rumi the girls she’s found are two missing parts of her soul. Carrying her mother and father’s legacies, carrying her fellow chosen, is there any room for Rumi’s soul? Does she even have one? Or is she only a vessel—something shaped to hold the lives of others, a ghost before she ever had the chance to live?
Mira and Zoey, freshly arrived at the Jeju compound and promised to Rumi’s soul, don’t really see her. Zoey, stars in her eyes, sees Mi-yeong’s progeny. Mira does, too, but it’s venom, not awe, that drips from her voice when she hisses a biting ‘nepo baby,’ where Celine can’t hear. Her tone is miles from the starstruck awe when Zoey talks at her, and Rumi feels like a mirror, reflecting back only what the others want to see.
That rotten thing inside her howls, claws at its cage, begs to touch them, begs to be seen by them, and Rumi clamps it down. They are two parts of her soul, and their unseeing eyes make her feel more invisible than anything else, but she cannot afford for them to know her. She holds them at arm’s length even as she aches for the wholeness of her soul, lets them believe what they will because then, maybe they won’t see the rotten truth behind the lie.
After years of severe and unforgiving tutelage, Rumi is ecstatic that Celine lets her help train Mira and Zoey. So rarely does she measure up to Celine’s expectations that when she’s offered up to spar with Mira, Rumi draws herself up, puffs her chest, and beams. She doesn’t even mind the eyeroll from Mira as she selects a wooden replica of her saingeom off the rack.
Rumi slows herself in the fight, creating purposeful openings and moving at Mira’s speed so Mira can practice without being overwhelmed. The whole time she casts her mind onto Celine: will Celine be proud of her effort? Will Celine see that she’s teaching, that she’s helping? Will Celine think that she’s good?
“You must think you’re so special,” Mira mutters between clacks of the training weapons. Her staff twirls, and Rumi thrusts her sword into the opening it leaves, tapping Mira’s ribs and retreating before Mira can react. She schools her face into cool neutrality.
“I just want us to all do our duty.”
When Celine proffers the language of duty, it focuses the girls. In Rumi’s hands, it makes Mira’s expression twist. The force of Mira’s next move strikes hard enough to set Rumi’s arm abuzz.
“You are so full of it.” The staff swings down and Rumi blocks overhead, letting the momentum of the blow slide down her blade. Mira ricochets away but dives back in just as quickly, spinning the staff with an artful flourish before swinging full-force towards Rumi’s ribs. Rumi parries, dances back, knocks the next furious blow askew with the last. “At least act like you haven’t just been handed everything instead of walking around like you’re better than us all the time. Some of us are actually trying to earn our place.”
Anger flashes white hot and Rumi stops caring about Celine’s pride, Mira’s lessons, her own duty. Rumi’s speed doubles as she ducks past Mira’s guard, parries the staff uselessly aside, and slams the hilt of her sword into Mira’s chest. Mira careens back and lands hard in the dirt; Rumi, undeterred by her felled opponent, slams down on top of her, the wood of her blade pressed against Mira’s throat.
“Who hasn’t earned their place?” she snarls.
“Rumi!” It’s Celine, her voice a furious bark as Mira fights to regain her breath.
Despite her breathlessness, Mira smirks. “Mommy’s calling.”
Rumi’s knuckles go white on her sword, but she doesn’t let up. It’s only when Celine yanks her off that Rumi releases, stands, and returns to the fold of her mentor’s disappointment.
“Ooh, they have the stir-fry flavor ramyeon here, it’s my favorite! Did you know Mi-yeong said it was her favorite in a Weverse interview? My cousin brought a copy over for me when he came to visit in Burbank, and he even brought me the ramyeon too, but I could never find it anywhere in the states. It’s so good, though! Do you two want to try it?”
“Nah, the stir-fry flavor gives me the shits.”
“Mira!” Rumi chastises habitually.
“Or what, unnie? You’ll tattle on me to Celine? Tell her I said a bad word?” Mira rounds on her, spits the honorific such that Rumi knows it to be an insult.
Rumi’s shoulders square, and her hands ball into fists as a retort rises in her throat. Mira seems ready for it, rising up to her full height, and it’s how ready Mira is to have a go at her that makes Rumi swallow her retaliation.
She must be better than this.
Rumi beats back the tension in her posture, bites her tongue, and smiles saccharine sweet at Mira. “No, you’re right,” she says, and she does not understand why Mira flares with a dark flush and a twisted grimace on her lips. “Sorry, I was being uptight.”
Rumi pivots down the aisle before Mira can retort. She shoves her hands in her pockets and stares at the linoleum floor beneath them, the stark fluorescent lights casting her face in inscrutable shadow.
It’s not that Zoey exclusively talks about Rumi’s mom. She’ll ramble about anything that’s ever caught her passion, and, apparently for Zoey, that includes quite a lot of things. Being in such proximity to Celine and Rumi seems to bring out her passion for K-Pop, even when she’s holding herself back. Rumi can already spot the gleam that flashes in Zoey’s eyes when she’s struck by “fun” facts that will have Rumi grinding her teeth and forcing a grin.
It’s not even that Rumi hates hearing Zoey ramble, which she’s noticed Zoey is sensitive about. The way Zoey bursts with unbridled joy when she thinks of something she wants to share is infectious, it’s just... she doesn’t care to be told about the kind of ramyeon her mother liked. Nor does she care to know her mother’s western zodiac sign, what her blood type says about her, which idol groups she choreographed for, or whether she preferred cats or dogs.
Celine is secretive about Rumi’s mother, hoarding scraps of memories as if sharing them will dilute their potency. Zoey shares her knowledge freely, and Rumi’s mother, so discreetly veiled Rumi’s entire life, becomes voyeuristically nude. Rumi always thought she would drink down any truths about her mother, but the hollow talk of trashy tabloid lists paints an empty shell Rumi does not recognize.
“Did you know she actually said if she had time for pets, she’d get a hamster or a guinea pig?”
Finally, Rumi has had enough. She rounds on Zoey and blurts, “Who cares what kind of pet she’d want? It’s not like she wants one now.”
As soon as the words are out, Rumi regrets them. She’s meant to be the leader, meant to be the one who keeps the peace and brings the team together. Instead, she’s picking fights and snapping and saying all the wrong things.
Zoey’s face scrunches like she wishes she could shutter it into neutrality, if not for the intensity of the hurt refusing to be masked away. Her cheeks flush red, and her throat bobs once, then twice. Stomach churning, Rumi looks back and forth between Mira and Zoey; she braces for the protective strike she deserves from Mira for having hurt Zoey, but when it doesn’t come, she looks tensely over at the other girl. Mira is studying her like she’s never seen Rumi before, and Rumi realizes with a sinking feeling that Mira has spotted a crack in her walls.
”Sorry,” Rumi mumbles, and she casts about for mortar to seal the faultline before it can become a fissure. “I- sorry. I just-...” Words fail her, and even despite all her coached speaking skills, Rumi cannot find the miracle that will make this right. She tries, meekly, “It won’t happen again.”
Again, she braces for the impact. Mira’s sharp eyes linger on her, and Rumi withers to know what she must think of Rumi now. Instead Mira says, unbecomingly kind, “It’s okay, Rumi. We’ll back off.”
“Yeah,” Zoey chimes in. “I should’ve- I’m the one who should apologize. I should have asked if you were okay with talking about your mom like that.”
Their expressions are sincere and concerned, and Rumi writhes under it, painfully and nakedly seen. Mira and Zoey look at her—really look at her—and Rumi doesn’t understand why she wants to hide.
As a trainee, Rumi is the perfect student. She can sing, dance, speak four languages, and charm any shareholder or interviewer interested in what Rumi can do for them. She’s attentive in meetings and responsive to feedback, and she collaborates well with the other students. As a hunter, she studies countless weapons, perfects her use of the saingeom, and masters seeing and manipulating the Honmoon in combat. In her duty, she is devout.
Celine never lets her forget the duty, nor the deficiency that demands it be honed to perfection. Rumi knows her flaws down to each creeping centimeter crawling beneath her sleeve, her body a battleground where the ghosts of the past wage war: gold or black, auria or rot.
Celine tells Rumi her faults and fears must never be seen, and Rumi is grateful Mira and Zoey won’t bear witness. She’s come to love them, and she thinks maybe they even have too, and at night she stays up and stares at the ceiling and tries not to imagine what will happen if they ever learn her fetid truths.
Celine promises Rumi the Golden Honmoon will fix her patterns. Celine promises Rumi if she hides her faults and fears long enough, she can absolve herself of her father’s sins, of the rot that mars her.
She would have to be stalwart. She would have to be above reproach. She would have to be devout in her pursuits and unassailable in her presentation, to only ever be the best of what the world had to offer. She would have to reach towards the gold of the sun like a sunflower unfurling its leaves, and pray no one instead sees the reaching arms of a shriveled weed.
Rumi is what she has inherited. Her mother’s secrets. Her father’s chains.
Her back grows strong, her shoulders broad, all the better to shoulder the burden placed upon them. She stands tall against the bowing weight of her duty. The Honmoon sings when she fights and surges when she sings, and her eyes strain for even the faintest ripple of gold across its gauzy strands.
What would it be like, Rumi wonders, to be loved unconditionally? Mothers are meant to, but she has no mother, and what it takes to love Rumi crisscross across her arms, her chest, her throat, branding her with clear markers of the price.
Celine looks at Rumi and only sees the cost of her existence. Mira and Zoey look at her and Rumi knows she can never afford for them to do the same. She spins lies paid with the currency of goodwill, borrows against time, and prays she can make herself what she ought to be before the bill comes due.
Their debut is the success of a generation, but with it comes a tidal wave of attention they only thought they’d been prepared for. Thinkpieces, opinion columns, live interviews, subtweets that drown their notifications—fame whips around them with the mania of a hurricane, and with it comes the press of public opinion.
“These reporters are so fucking full of it,” Mira growls, smacking the magazine in her hand. On it is a photo of the Sunlight Sisters paired next to one of Rumi. Rumi frowns, first at the absence of Mira and Zoey, then at the headline: Ryu Rumi, Breakout Star or Industry Plant?
She reaches for the magazine, but Mira whisks it out of her reach. What results is a scuffle that has the two of them pouncing at each other all across the penthouse in a frantic game of cat and mouse that lands on the couch, with both wrestling for the magazine.
“It’s a load of bull, Rumi! You don’t need to read it to know they’re talking shit about you.”
“Yes I do! We need to know what people are saying before it can damage our reputation!” Rumi’s knee finds Mira’s kidney, and the resulting wheeze makes Mira double over just long enough for Rumi to snatch the magazine from her and dart off. Mira sprawls in defeat, but Rumi can feel the weight of Mira’s eyes as Rumi pours through the article. Her hands tighten around the paper.
“Rumi,” Mira says. Rumi can hear her sitting up, and she listens for Mira’s footfalls across the tile without turning her head. “You’re a great dancer, and a phenomenal singer. Nobody works harder than you. This guy’s an idiot; you’ve more than earned your place here.”
Rumi traces the picture of Celine and her mother with one finger, feeling keenly the weight of her handed-down duty. “... He’s not the only one who thinks I’m a nepotism hire.”
Mira is quiet a moment, but she shuffles up behind Rumi and gives her a tentative bump against the shoulder. “... Rumi, I... know I was kind of a dick to you back on Jeju. Just... I was wrong. You proved me wrong, okay?”
“No,” Rumi says firmly, schooling an old wound from her voice. “If one person is saying it, then others are thinking it. At least now we can address it. We can’t have people thinking we didn’t earn our place; I have to show that I wasn’t handed this, or we won’t be successful as hunters.”
Mira reaches out and touches her elbow. “We all need to.”
It’s a kind lie, Rumi thinks.
People tell Rumi she looks like her mother, sometimes. Shareholders, reporters, teachers, no one exempts themselves. Fans post side-by-sides of her and Mi-yeong and gush over all the ways Rumi echoes her mother, and a dance cover Huntr/x performs to the Sunlight Sisters’ top song explodes across Twitter when someone superimposes Rumi dancing alongside them.
Rumi doesn’t see it, but to think about who she might look like instead makes her arms burn, so she politely thanks them for their compliments and tunes out whatever that person thought they could get by evoking her mother.
Later, though, Rumi looks in the mirror and counts the ways she fails to measure up. Her eyes too large, her jaw too square, her frame too broad. Mi-yeong is lithe, long, nimble; when Rumi looks at pictures of her, she’s put in mind of Mira’s angular face and doelike grace. When she watches old interviews and home videos and sees the way her mother’s exuberance lights up a room, she thinks of Zoey’s unbridled joy and enthusiasm.
If what she feels around Mira and Zoey is what being around Rumi’s mother was like, Rumi understands why Celine is so haunted by Rumi’s inadequacies.
Rumi is not like her mother.
It is perhaps her second-greatest flaw.
“Maybe they’ll understand,” Rumi suggests, not for the first time.
Celine looks up from the paperwork at her desk, stern, but not unsympathetic. “No, Rumi. You know nothing can change until your patterns are gone.”
“Why?”
“You know why.” This was a road well worn by now, an event horizon they circled again and again without ever crossing over.
“Well- maybe I don’t. Maybe I think they’ll understand.”
“Rumi.” Celine sets her pen down and looks at Rumi, and Rumi feels the whole world stop and look at her too. “We can’t know how they’ll react. They could hurt you, and we can’t risk what could happen if one of them hesitated or reacted in battle.”
“I’ll still cover up,” Rumi protests. It isn’t as though she wants to see the patterns either, she just... wants them to know. To carry it with her. The barriers she’d built around herself were thick, but she had discovered they were not impregnable. Zoey and Mira had wormed their way in, and Rumi was tired of pushing away the better parts of her soul, of building new defenses before they could truly see what was inside. “Maybe if we’d told them before, there wouldn’t be a risk. Maybe- maybe if they knew from the start, they could accept me.”
“Rumi-” Celine tries again.
“It’s not fair!”
“Rumi, control yourself.” Celine pinches her brow, and the tone of her voice carries all the weight of a disappointed mother. “Spirits help me, would you stop acting like Mi-”
Celine’s voice cuts off. Her expression shutters.
“Acting like who?” Rumi demands.
The clock ticks loudly in the chasm of silence before Celine answers. “This is not up for debate, Rumi: you know the risks. You are a hunter; you must do your duty.”
No matter how well she performs, Rumi is compared to her mother in everything she does. Every award Huntr/x wins, every record they smash, every crowning accomplishment they win with their own stalwart effort, there is never an interviewer who doesn’t lean in, soften their eyes just so at Rumi, and tenderly ask her about Mi-yeong.
”Huntr/x has more platinum singles than the Sunlight Sisters. Tell us how that feels, Rumi.”
”You three really have taken the world by storm! Your new album is officially the top grossing album in the world. Rumi, how does it feel to officially dethrone your mother’s ‘Daybreak’ album after it’s had so many years on top?”
”Huntr/x officially has more awards than any other idol group in Korean history. Tell us Rumi, do you think your mother would be proud?”
Rumi knows what they’re really asking is: “Do you think you measure up?”
When Rumi pitches the idea for Golden, Zoey teases her for how on-the-nose it is. Half an hour later, though, Zoey sprawls on the floor with her yellowest notebook and begins furiously scribbling lyrics and chords and melodies across the page.
What Rumi doesn’t expect, slumped in the studio half an hour later with her guitar, is how hard it would be to write. Zoey has the idea for them to include a glimpse at their personal journeys in the song, something to connect them to the fans. It’s a great idea, a perfect one, even—Rumi knows better than most how perfection gleams all the brighter when you know you’re anything but.
Zoey’s verse comes out of her pen fully formed, needing only a few small tweaks to improve its flow. Mira and Zoey bounce ideas around while Mira thinks through hers, but once they land on ‘problem child,’ the rest galvanizes quickly.
It just leaves Rumi. Rumi stares at the lyrics and scours her mind for a stone she isn’t afraid to turn over, for a secret that won’t expose her vulnerable underbelly. But no fault nor fear is too small to keep from holding up to the light, and Rumi’s patterns crawl with the shame of her secrecy. Zoey and Mira do what they can, alternating between prompting Rumi with ideas and coaxing her with positive reinforcement, but still the words don’t come. Rumi’s throat constricts tightly, her frustration choking back her voice.
“Maybe don’t try to say everything at once,” Zoey suggests eventually, softer this time even though Rumi knows her groans and huffs and sulky asides are grating on their nerves. Zoey taps her pen against her notebook in idle movement. “Just start somewhere small. We can build it out once we have an idea.”
Rumi huffs, looking down at her guitar. “I don’t have a ‘small,’” she mutters. “It’s either nothing, or…” Rumi’s legs tingle with the desire to run. She’s already saying too much.
Mira’s eyes are studying Rumi in that way Rumi hates (loves), the one that makes her feel exposed and naked (seen). “Hey. Remember, it’s just us in here. It doesn’t have to be something you’re ready to tell a million fans; just do it for us. Okay?”
Zoey perks up. “Yeah, totally. If it’s too much, we just do something else, and if you think it’s dumb or stupid, we workshop it!” She grins. “We can make it sound deep after.”
The tightness in Rumi’s throat eases.
Rumi has never lived a life not in the spotlight. Her every action was scrutinized from the moment she walked out on her first red carpet, hand enveloped in Celine’s and shoulder caked in itching makeup. She never got the chance to learn to be vulnerable, not when she bore the weight of her mother’s legacy, her father’s transgressions with every step.
Rumi has only ever had two choices: Be Rumi, or be perfect. Better to be all perfect than to risk letting any of the rot seep in.
But she looks between Mira’s discerning eyes and Zoey’s welcoming ones, and the need to choose feels less stark. Fingers pluck the steel of her guitar strings, and Rumi lets her eyes unfocus. Her friends fade into a spectral haze, and Rumi channels her thoughts into the idle strum of a perfect chord.
“I was a ghost, I was alone,” she murmurs, only half in-time with the melody. Distantly, she hears Zoey scramble for her pen, but Rumi’s inspiration is a trance, a séance for which Rumi is the medium. “... Given the throne... I... didn’t know how...”
Her voice trails off. Her inspiration wavers. But Zoey, shining with ideas, snaps up and meets her like a rising star. “To be the queen I was meant to be!”
Mira whoops. Zoey collapses in a fit of giggles, and she scrawls down the line even as a flushed Rumi protests.
The long shadow of her mother casts down across her vision until Rumi can no longer see blue, see gold, see any color at all. Has she done well enough? Has she performed enough? Has she excelled enough as a hunter?
Rumi searches the edges of the horizon for the edge of her mother’s silhouette, for how far she will need to trace her mother’s footsteps to be found worthy, but the darkness stretches into the sky beyond where Rumi can see its end.
Gold.
It ripples across the Honmoon to the thrum of a crowd and Rumi nearly loses herself in it.
It feels like standing at the lip of something vast and final, the long road narrowing to a single shining thread. Every hour spent honing herself into something sharper, cleaner, someone more than the sum of her own faulty parts gathers here, drawn tight as a bowstring. This is what it was all for: to arrive at the edge of becoming, to feel generations of legacy settle into her bones not as a burden but as a promise. For one breathless moment, she can almost believe she has outrun it—the rot, the inheritance, the quiet, creeping wrongness of what she is. Can almost believe that she stands on the cusp of making herself into something new, something worthy of the perfect figures dancing alongside on the stage.
The Honmoon shimmers, its aureate strands so close that Rumi can nearly touch them.
But perfection is a binary state. True-false. Pass-Fail. She either is that golden gleaming thing, or she’s the grasping, clawing creature destined to be judged and found wanting. For one sweet, exhilarating moment, Rumi thinks she knows which side she’s crossed to.
Her voice cracks before the Golden performance.
Nothing can hold back Rumi’s imperfections after that.
A demon sees her patterns, and Rumi’s rotten core spews out, subsuming everything else. She yells at Mira. She insults Zoey. The Honmoon sickens into purple and pulses in time with the burn of her patterns, and Rumi knows all of it is her fault alone.
Rumi is not like her mother in any of the ways that matter. In all the ways she shouldn’t be, though, she excels.
“How… do you have patterns?”
Rumi stands across from Mira and Zoey, hot magenta searing into the tender flesh of her body. The scant meters between them may as well be a gaping canyon, carved by Rumi’s every lie and deception.
Like her mother, she has kept secrets.
Like her mother, she has torn apart a generation of Hunters.
In this, Rumi is more like her mother than she has ever been before.
Standing with Celine before her mother’s grave as the gossamer of the Honmoon tears around them, Rumi knows one thing: The best way to be perfect is to be dead.
Death is a fixed state. When you die, all your flaws are wiped clean, and your most aureate qualities are held to the light and placed on display. Every week, your merits are brought off the shelf and taken to your gravesite, lovingly polished and honored with incense and flowers and prayer. With each visit, your virtues shine brighter and brighter, and your failures are wiped away with the moss that creeps up your gravestone.
When she falls to Celine’s feet and begs, she wonders if Celine will polish her memory until it shines gold, or if her flaws are so fundamental they surmount everything she strove for and that, uncared for, her reputation will tarnish to black. Celine was always so masterful in scrubbing away Rumi’s flaws in life, but even the dead can only be perfect if someone alive is there to remember them perfectly. Disfigured and disgusting, trailed by the unraveling remnants of her salvation, Rumi is anything but worthy of it.
She begs Celine to make her perfect, like her mother.
Celine denies her. Rumi is all rot, now.
The Honmoon bursts into iridescence, a rainbow of colors Rumi has never even dreamed of.
Rumi suddenly understands how narrow her scope of perfection is. Tarnished is the gold she’s strived for her entire life; instead the breadth of color and possibility envelops her soul and she feels whole, whole, so deeply and profoundly whole.
There is no rot. There is no perfection. There is only Rumi.
After the Idol Awards, after the rot settles into compost settles into new growth, Rumi sits down across a table from Celine and clutches at a cup of tea. The silence stews between them, laden with things unspoken.
“You-” Celine starts, just as Rumi stammers out, “I-”
They both cut off. Celine’s shoulders round.
“You first,” Rumi says selfishly. Celine’s lips thin into a line, and she sets her tea down, seemingly searching its rippling surface for answers.
“I told you I... that I swore to protect you after your mother died. ... I failed her, Rumi, and I failed you, too. You deserved to have a mother who could care for you properly, not…”
She trails off, and in the space of her silence is a burden in the shape of Rumi’s own, a failure to measure up to someone unimaginably larger than life. She sees Celine, her body a battleground between her love and her duty, haunted by every ghost Rumi is.
“When you came to me,” Celine tries again. “When you... when I... Mi-yeong would have done it so much better. ... I’m sorry. Rumi, I failed you in every way imaginable.”
When they finish their tea, they walk to the hunter graveyard to pay their respects to Mi-yeong, and Rumi waves Celine’s hands away before Celine can attend to her shrine. She lays out the photo of her mother, lights the incense, and meticulously cleans the headstone until it shines. Celine relaxes beside her and lets Rumi work without interference.
“What was she like?” Rumi asks eventually, when the work is done. The waft of sweet incense smoke fills her nose, and she breathes it in deeply. “Really like, I mean.”
Celine huffs a fond, exasperated laugh, but a long silence follows. Rumi watches her as she wrestles to untangle Mi-yeong from the spools of golden thread Celine has tied around her. “... Trying. She always needed to have her way in everything, and she was horribly petulant when she didn’t. But she- had a way of drawing people in. She felt everything very deeply. She had a horrible temper, but she... loved with her entire heart.”
“She didn’t like to be caged in, and sometimes she chafed against idol life, but she loved to perform, and she loved being a hunter. She would have been proud of everything you accomplished. She thought you were perfect, Rumi.”
Rumi’s throat tightens. Perfection is an aching, embittered thing to her now. But she looks down at the pale iridescence of her patterns, watching one give a lazy shimmer of nacre, and somehow she knows it isn’t gold her mother saw when she beheld her newborn daughter. Rumi runs her fingers along the rainbow threads of the Honmoon, which warble mirthfully as she plucks them.
“... I always felt like I was supposed to be like her. She was always so big, and you love her so much.” Rumi’s words come with the same stilted clumsiness as Celine’s but Celine listens quietly as Rumi grapples for them. “... But I- I never really knew her. I think I- I just wanted you to love me like you love her.”
Celine pulls her lips into a thin line. Then she sighs, and the tension in her body bends under the weight of shame. “I- I do, Rumi. I know... you must not believe me, after everything, but... I do. I’m so- so sorry, Rumi. I thought I could protect you. I thought I could make your burden easier to carry. ... But I did anything but. I do love you, Rumi. All of you. ... If you’ll let me, I want- I want to prove it.”
Rumi looks at Celine, framed by wisps of smoke and lit by the afternoon sun. As Mi-yeong had seemed larger than life, so too did Celine. But here, Rumi sees only a small, world-weary woman, shoulders bent under the weight of a duty that should not have been hers alone to carry. A faint, watery smile creeps across Rumi's lips.
“... I’d like that.”
The year she outlives her mother, a tautness so old as to be invisible eases within Rumi’s chest. Ahead is an unforged path, a route all Rumi’s own.
She tries to imagine her mother at her age. It’s hard—in her mind’s eye, her mother is an ageless being who towers over her. She and Celine occupy the same space in Rumi’s mind, standing together as giants, but in truth, they were untethered when Rumi was just a baby.
Rumi looks into a mirror. She sees sharp brown eyes, a square jaw, and broad shoulders. Across her skin, pale iridescent patterns settle as might wrinkles or stretch marks. Her mother lived long enough to have one, but not the other. Rumi is struck by how young Mi-yeong was.
Almost habitually, she searches for traces of Mi-yeong. It’s strange, how Rumi can see so little of her mother when she’s carried her this far, borne her mother’s sins on her back and paid reparations for them on her knees every step of the way. Now, she looks in the mirror and sees only one person: Rumi.
“Thank you for seeing me all this way, Eomma,” Rumi whispers to the mirror. “I don't need... You can rest now.”
The silence that follows is not empty: it's open.
Rumi exhales, slow and steady, before she turns away—not from something she’s leaving behind, but toward something beginning anew. The rest of her life is waiting for her, a budding blossom on a dewy morning. Rumi reaches for the sun, and she blooms.
“I will soar, then, beyond this power of my nature, and rise by degrees towards [she] who made me.” –Saint Augustine